NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

[AdamSmith]

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

• Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
• The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.05 EDT

A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.

The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies.

Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US".

The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the Fisa Amendments Act in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces.

When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.

A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy.

The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.

"Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all."

The new measures introduced in the FAA redefines "electronic surveillance" to exclude anyone "reasonably believed" to be outside the USA – a technical change which reduces the bar to initiating surveillance.

The act also gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general power to permit obtaining intelligence information, and indemnifies internet companies against any actions arising as a result of co-operating with authorities' requests.

In short, where previously the NSA needed individual authorisations, and confirmation that all parties were outside the USA, they now need only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA.

The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming "access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning".

In the document, the NSA hails the PRISM program as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA".

It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.

The NSA document indicates that it is planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider. The agency also seeks, in its words, to "expand collection services from existing providers".

The revelations echo fears raised on the Senate floor last year during the expedited debate on the renewal of the FAA powers which underpin the PRISM program, which occurred just days before the act expired.

Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware specifically warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs meant there was no way to know if safeguards within the act were working.

"The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don't know how well any of these safeguards actually work," he said.

"The law doesn't forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can't say and average Americans can't know."

Other senators also raised concerns. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon attempted, without success, to find out any information on how many phone calls or emails had been intercepted under the program.

When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.

When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a "report". According to the NSA, "over 2,000 PRISM-based reports" are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year.

In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data.

"It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.

"This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."

Additional reporting by James Ball and Dominic Rushe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-2%20Special%20trail:Network%20front%20-%20special%20trail:Position1

[AdamSmith]

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history

• Dominic Rushe and James Ball in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 19.48 EDT

Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian

Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers.

The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US."

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.

The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".

Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge.

An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said.

Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said: "We do not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

A Google spokesman said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."

Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007.

Executives said they were "confused" by the NSA claims. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it.

The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

[RA1]

There isn't much to say at this point other than I am appalled but not surprised. Otherwise I think we have to wait upon further disclosures/developments.

Do you get your Guardian delivered by US Air directly from LHR?

Best regards,

RA1

That is Heathrow, London, UK.

[AdamSmith]

Do you get your Guardian delivered by US Air directly from LHR?

Faster than a speeding electron. Actually, at about exactly that speed.

About this and your other remarks on this UK paper providing better US coverage than our own press, The Guardian did publish something recently on its deliberate expansion of US coverage over the past couple of years, and this being one of its biggest, maybe THE biggest, growth areas in its readership. If I find it, I'll post it.

Clearly as you said the dearth of serious journalism this side of the pond gives them and others such as say The Economist an opening. I don't know anything about the business model of The Guardian, how their ad revenues are doing print vs. online, etc. But they do offer their full content online with no pay wall such as at WSJ has for most of its content now, nor a limited number of free article views/month and then pay wall as NYT and others do.

They do have, and have long been known for, a stoutly liberal editorial stance. (One crack goes, They are The Guardian of Manchester, but have anointed themselves guardian of the free world.) They are of course forthright about this and, I find, consistently conscientious to keep the reporting evidence-based, well and explicitly sourced and documented.

In all, a welcome relief from the formless mush that we increasingly get in lieu of real journalism here.

[AdamSmith]

An update that does not clarify too much: http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22809541

[TampaYankee]

Faster than a speeding electron. Actually, at about exactly that speed.

About this and your other remarks on this UK paper providing better US coverage than our own press, The Guardian did publish something recently on its deliberate expansion of US coverage over the past couple of years, and this being one of its biggest, maybe THE biggest, growth areas in its readership. If I find it, I'll post it.

Clearly as you said the dearth of serious journalism this side of the pond gives them and others such as say The Economist an opening. I don't know anything about the business model of The Guardian, how their ad revenues are doing print vs. online, etc. But they do offer their full content online with no pay wall such as at WSJ has for most of its content now, nor a limited number of free article views/month and then pay wall as NYT and others do.

They do have, and have long been known for, a stoutly liberal editorial stance. (One crack goes, They are The Guardian of Manchester, but have anointed themselves guardian of the free world.) They are of course forthright about this and, I find, consistently conscientious to keep the reporting evidence-based, well and explicitly sourced and documented.

In all, a welcome relief from the formless mush that we increasingly get in lieu of real journalism here.

You guys can't be serious that you just discovered The American Press sucks? On so many levels does it suck.

I have been long disappointed in our press and rail against it constantly for following ratings and circulation numbers or courting on-air guests with soft ball interviews, all of it ginned up by controversy more than hard news. It infects all of our press including the big boys. That doesn't mean they are entirely asleep at the wheel but they follow distractions more than they should, which has to dilute their product.

Most, if not all, of our press is fixated on domestic politics minutia, chasing controversies real or manufactured, he said/she said exchanges, conducting meaningless polls, etc. Being in the weeds so much of the time, our guys lack the view to see possible blemishes in the landscape that bear a little prospecting. Sort of like ants at a picnic scurrying around to find any source of sugar or starch they can carry off... to establish their 'rep' (everybody wants to be Woodward or Bernstein) or to please the bean counters at their organizations with ratings/circulation fodder. Some hope to turn a sad occurrence like Benghazi into a brazen Watergate with lives lost or seeking to inflate some other minor scandal into a bloody train wreck, if not high crimes and misdemeanors. I'm thinking more about ambitious reporters trying to polish their resume for the Pulitzer rather than authentic news organizations for which they report. Any organization pushing that type of story is more a political organ of one party or the other, and yes, the left does it too (it was prevalent in the Bush years.)

If you have followed the UK domestic press then you know it has been a basket case of clowns and snakes. Their tabloids and Murdoch have stained the domestic product beyond imagination. But there are a few gems.

For some time I've have respected the UK Press that covers this side of the Pond and world wide: Reuters, The Financial Times, The Economist, now the Guardian. They report real and substantial news in contrast to the crap passed off as real news over here. They have been covering us more in the last decade due, I believe, to the War on Terror which the UK has played a big role in and also due to the financial meltdown initiated over here that did even more damage there. Thus some of what we do here has consequence to them.

I believe their success covering us compared with the domestic product lies in their distance to the landscape here. They are not mired in our silly fixations on Palin, or on votes repealing Obama Care for the 38th time or the hundreds of other breaking-news items of similar ilk over the last 6 years. They report many fewer stories and generally of some real importance. Because of their limited foot print over here they have to be big game hunters and make their shots count. Nobody needs the UK covering the House repealing Obama Care again! They understand that in the UK and here too.

I'm thankful their reporting skills have been focused on this side of the pond.

[AdamSmith]

From NYT:U.S. Confirms That It Gathers Online Data Overseas

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss spoke to reporters Thursday about the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Verizon phone records.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, EDWARD WYATT and PETER BAKER Published: June 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.

The N.S.A. and other government agencies declined to comment about the disclosures.

The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.

Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.

The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified documents obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday afternoon.

In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful requests for information.

“It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

The Prism program grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with the matter.

The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.

Before the disclosure of the Internet company surveillance program on Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the kind of surveillance at issue “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.” He added: “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.”

The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program.

The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying. Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America’s own vast surveillance operations.

But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it.

“A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr. Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.”

Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective.

Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the N.S.A. “on an ongoing daily basis” until July logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported.

“As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act.”

“Therefore, it is lawful,” she said. “It has been briefed to Congress.”

While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of calling information to the N.S.A. Randy Milch, an executive vice president and general counsel, wrote that “the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.”

Sprint and AT&T have also received demands for data from national security officials, according to people familiar with the requests. Those companies as well as T-Mobile and CenturyLink declined to say Thursday whether they were or had been under a similar court order.

Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program defended it in part by noting that it was only for “metadata” — like logs of calls sent and received — and did not involve listening in on people’s conversations.

The Internet company program appeared to involve eavesdropping on the contents of communications of foreigners. The senior administration official said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to obtain an order from a national security court to conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without individualized warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil.

The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is controversial in part because Americans’ e-mails and phone calls can be swept into the database without an individualized court order when they communicate with people overseas. While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies’ servers, several of the companies — including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements.

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” the company said in a statement. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”

While murky questions remained about the Internet company program, the confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks.

Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national security investigation.

Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon — have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was classified.

On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted — or is even effective.

But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of broad, bipartisan support for the program.

“If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.”

And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He gave no details.

It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications metadata and mining the database to identify associates — called a “community of interest” — of a suspected terrorist.

In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule of law. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority.

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Confirms Gathering of Web Data Overseas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[lookin]

It sure seems there would be a market opening for foreign companies to begin replicating at least some of the services offered by U. S. communications and social media companies, and then adding a privacy guarantee that U. S. companies can't match. Not that foreign companies could yet replicate all of the communications infrastructure of U. S. companies, and not that they would remain forever free of NSA's tentacles, but they could certainly take some business from the U. S. companies whose brands are now being tarnished by their cozy relationship with the NSA.

Even a modest flight of customers from the information sieve of U. S. companies to more secure communications through foreign companies with a stronger privacy story should get the attention of CEO's and stockholders in U. S. companies. Once these big-bucks campaign donors start seeing their bonuses and fortunes dwindle, maybe the politicians would start to get the message that U. S. voters have so far been unable to deliver.

As for me, I've had to hold my nose the last few times I voted for Senator Feinstein. I'm not planning to vote for her again. In fact, I may not vote for any politician in the future who does not have a strong privacy element in her or his campaign platform.

I'm also planning to cut back, just a little but whenever practical, in my phone use and to make a modest donation to the ACLU. Tiny steps, no doubt, but hopefully matched by others who are getting equally fed up with government intrusion into their personal lives.

I'm willing to rethink my position if strong evidence is presented that these runaway surveillance tactics have borne substantial fruit, but I'm certainly not moved by mealy-mouthed statements that some unnamed 'terrorist' somewhere, somehow, was defused just as he was fixin' to stuff a cherry bomb up his ass and climb on a bus.

Any politician or government official who thinks we are 'winning the war on terror' by dismantling the civil liberties of U. S. citizens might do well to look up the definition of 'winning'.

[RA1]

Some think we have already lost or to quote Walt Kelly and Pogo, "We have met the enemy and they are us".

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

One way the Internet companies' denials of "direct access" might be technically true, while still giving the Feds huge chunks of data:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/direct-access-is-the-defining-phrase-of-the-nsa-scandal

[RA1]

"I know nothing", Sgt. Schultz.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Any politician or government official who thinks we are 'winning the war on terror' by dismantling the civil liberties of U. S. citizens might do well to look up the definition of 'winning'.

This editorial expounds just that point, in suitably blistering terms:

NSA surveillance revelations: Osama bin Laden would love this

http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/nsa-surveillance-osama-bin-laden

[lookin]

This editorial expounds just that point, in suitably blistering terms:

NSA surveillance revelations: Osama bin Laden would love this

Perhaps he stumbled across my February post.

Could Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri have imagined, in their wildest dreams, that the destruction of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the rule of law could all have occurred within a single generation?

[Guest hitoallusa]

Lookin I don't think people lying isn't a new thing it has happened and it will happen again. The defying of three things you talk about also occurred numerously before and it is not a new thing either. It's not Osama who caused it, he just made it more conspicuous.

I tend to believe surveillance programs will develop into something that respects one's privacy in the end. In order to achieve that purpose I think government should be given some freedom to do this kind of things. Sometimes giving survelliance researchers freedom to do anything they want will help them develop programs that can benefit everybody.

As we can't use superstitions to make people fear and subdue them anymore, this kind of government activity will not be able to hurt us. If government tries to frame someone with survelliance programs then there are counter parts and individuals who are capable of going against it. I support government research in this area. Just as thr nuclear technology helped us eventually, I think this survelliance programs will evolve into something that can benefit us. Maybe something like what we see in The Minority Report could be possible- a murder being stopped right befor it's execution.

Now if someone takes away my shoes, I'm not kidding so he or she better be ready.

[AdamSmith]

hitoall:

[AdamSmith]

Lawmakers rebut Obama's data defense

By REID J. EPSTEIN | 6/7/13 9:40 PM EDT

politico.com

President Barack Obama’s chief defense of his administration’s wide-ranging data-gathering programs Friday: Congress authorized them, with “every member” well aware of the details.

Not so, say many members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike.

Typically, members of Congress “don’t receive this kind of briefing,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told POLITICO Friday. They wouldn’t have known about the programs unless they were on an intelligence committee, attended special sessions last held in 2011 or specifically asked to be briefed – something they would only know to do if they were clued in by an colleague who was already aware.

Durbin said he learned about the two programs himself only after requesting a briefing under “classified circumstances” after being urged to do so by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Congressional leadership and intelligence committees had access to information about the programs, he said — but the “average member” of Congress likely wouldn’t have been aware of the breadth of the telephone and Internet surveillance.

There’s no public record of who has attended any of these sessions — and even the Obama administration couldn’t confirm the president’s claim that “every member of Congress” had been briefed.

The White House declined to comment for this story.

And Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) told POLITICO that the classified intelligence briefing sessions he’s attended haven’t disclosed details on the two data-gathering programs as were unveiled this week.

Schock, in Congress since 2009, said he had “no idea” about the phone data gathering, or any briefings for House members to discuss it, until news reports this week.

Like other members who said they learned of the data-gathering efforts when they were revealed in the Guardian and the Washington Post, Schock said the administration classified briefings he’s attended have revealed very little information.

“I can assure you the phone number tracking of non-criminal, non-terrorist suspects was not discussed,” he said. “Most members have stopped going to their classified briefings because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know in the news. It really has become a charade.”

President Obama’s explanation allows him to sound a nothing-to-see-here note that paints the programs as both prosaic and innocuous. After all, if all 535 members of Congress knew about them, how bad could they really be?

“These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they’re being fully briefed on these programs,” said Obama. “And if, in fact … there were abuses taking place, presumably those members of Congress could raise those issues very aggressively. They’re empowered to do so.”

But as Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) complained to Attorney General Eric Holder during a Thursday hearing, the idea that Congress has been “fully briefed” on these programs is coming as news to many of the lawmakers themselves.

“This ‘fully briefed’ is something that drives us up the wall, because often ‘fully briefed’ means a group of eight leadership; it does not necessarily mean relevant committees,” Mikulski said.

In theory, briefings on the electronic surveillance programs were available — and offered — to every member of Congress. In practice, they were regularly given to those on the House and Senate Intelligence committees — and haven’t been offered all members of Congress for the past two years, except by request.

Justice and intelligence officials conducted a dozen briefings for congressional committees and leadership between May 2009 and October 2011, and FBI Director Robert Mueller briefed the House GOP conference and House Democratic caucus in May 2011 ahead of the last the Patriot Act reauthorization. The administration also asked that classified white papers be made available to all members of the House and Senate in 2011, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was last re-authorized.

So senators not on the intelligence committee would only have learned of the program had they attended one of those classified briefings in 2010 or 2011. Then, the committee invited all 100 senators to read a classified report on “roving authority for electronic surveillance” in a secure location in the Hart Senate Office Building.

Asked Thursday if she knew how many senators had taken the time to read the report, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) responded: “I do not, certainly the Intelligence Committee should have.”

Congress last reauthorized the FISA provision of the Patriot Act in in May 2011, with the Senate voting 72-23 in favor, and the House approving the measure by a 250-153 count.

It is not known how many members reviewed the intelligence papers prior to those votes. And it’s not clear how many members of Congress have pursued classified briefings on their own. But it’s not hard to find members of Congress this week who say the latest reports are the first they’ve heard of these programs.

There are now nine senators and 61 congressmen who were not in office during the 2010 and 2011 briefing sessions — new members of Congress like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who have never been personally informed of either program unless they asked about it.

“Americans trusted President Obama when he came to office promising the most transparent administration in history,” Cruz said Friday. “But that trust has been broken and the only way to earn it back is to tell the truth.”

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) wrote “not quite” on Twitter in response to a reporter’s tweet about Obama’s remark that “every member” was aware of the data-gathering programs. Long wasn’t made available to explain his tweet Friday.

And Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) told MSNBC Friday that he received a briefing only because he “sought it out,” not because the Obama administration had offered it to him.

“I had to get special permission to find out about the program,” Merkley said. “It raised concerns for me. … When I saw what was being done, I felt it was so out of sync with the plain language of the law and that it merited full public examination, and that’s why I called for the declassification.”

- Burgess Everett and Jake Sherman contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/congress-nsa-prism-intelligence-briefing-92438.html#ixzz2VdUN0qAX

[AdamSmith]

President Obama's let's-have-a-debate defense

Obama could have chosen at any time to disclose the data-sifting program. | AP Photo

By JOSH GERSTEIN | 6/7/13 5:04 AM EDT Updated: 6/7/13 1:27 PM EDT

politico.com

The Obama administration has a familiar refrain on the surveillance of Americans’ telephone records: the president and his team are eager to have the debate.

Eager, that is, only after others have brought the tactics to light and the administration has spent years employing them.

On Guantanamo and drone strikes, as well as his administration’s aggressive use of leak investigations into the telephone records and e-mails of journalists, President Barack Obama and his aides often seem to cast him as a detached analyst or law professor watching policies carried out, rather than the one actually directing or responsible for them.

When it comes to surveillance, Obama has as president shown no sign of really wanting to have a robust debate. For years, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) have been pleading with the administration to disclose more information about call-tracking tactics that they suggested would shock many Americans.

The administration largely rebuffed those calls. Only after the leak Wednesday of a four-page “top secret” court order indicating that millions of Americans’ phone calls were tracked on a daily basis did officials begin to confirm the program’s details.

But Obama could have chosen at any time to disclose the data-sifting program, or even its rough outlines. That fact leaves critics unimpressed with his latest round of let’s-talk-it-over.

“Every time he gets into trouble, he wants to have a debate, he wants to have a discussion….I think it’s his way — a distortion field created by his own moral rectitude,” said Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “It’s the same thing with the reporters [and leaks], he wants to have a guy who violated their civil liberties to have a discussion with the media.”

“This is [Obama’s] characteristic mode of discourse,” said Steven Aftergood, a classified information policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “The public should have been notified and consulted and involved and it was not. That should have taken place years ago.”

In explaining the administration’s reticence to offer details on surveillance, drones and similar issues, officials have often argued that disclosing details about such programs or in some cases even their existence, would endanger Americans by making the programs easier for terrorists to thwart.

Even as he declassified some information about the phone call-tracking program Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned that revelations about the program could have grave consequences.

”The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Clapper said. “Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest struck a somewhat different tone earlier in the day, declaring that Obama and his aides were pleased to join in a vigorous public debate on the issue.

“The president welcomes a discussion of the tradeoffs between security and civil liberties,” he told reporters. “There are people who have a genuine interest in protecting the United States and protecting constitutional liberties, constitutional rights and civil liberties, that may disagree about how to strike this balance. We welcome that debate.”

The response perplexed analysts with varying perspectives on the government’s surveillance efforts.

“If [Obama] welcomed the discussion, he would have disclosed the program,” Aftergood said. “There is going to be a discussion not because the president’s welcomed it, but because the information was leaked … The discussion is only taking place because his own policies were violated.” ...

Cont. at http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/barack-obama-debate-defense-nsa-surveillance-92389.html?hp=r20

[RA1]

I was waiting for hito to respond to this thread as in AS's latest post for him.

I, too, welcome the so called debate. We shall see, shall we not?

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

. . . Clapper said. “Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.”

Then perhaps it's time for him to step aside and let someone more capable have a crack at it. If he thinks that setting aside the Fourth Amendment is appropriate in order to make his job easier, he's been in the position way too long.

In fact, I think it's time for the Administration to come at this from a different direction and start thinking about how much security it can provide in the absence of the unfortunately-named Patriot Act, and in the presence of full respect for the Fourth Amendment.

We should not be asked to decide between our civil rights and some undefined level of security. I think we need, and deserve, a better definition of the issue than that.

It will require some heavy lifting, no doubt, and those who are not up to the task should think about making room for those who are.