Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights

Yochai Benkler: From leaks and Fisa court papers, it's clear the NSA is a bloated spying bureaucracy out of control.

The spate of new NSA disclosures substantially raises the stakes of this debate. We now know that the intelligence establishment systematically undermines oversight by lying to both Congress and the courts. We know that the NSA infiltrates internet standard-setting processes to security protocols that make surveillance harder. We know that the NSA uses persuasion, subterfuge, and legal coercion to distort software and hardware product design by commercial companies.
We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.
First, the lying. The National Intelligence University, based in Washington, DC, offers a certificate program called the denial and deception advanced studies program. That's not a farcical sci-fi dystopia; it's a real program about countering denial and deception by other countries. The repeated misrepresentations suggest that the intelligence establishment has come to see its civilian bosses as adversaries to be managed through denial and deception.
We learned months ago that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress. Now, we know that General Keith Alexander filed a "declaration" (which is like testifying in writing), asserting an interpretation of violations that the court said "strains credulity". The newly-disclosed 2009 opinion includes a whole section entitled "Misrepresentations to the Court", which begins with the sentence:

The government has compounded its noncompliance with the court's orders by repeatedly submitting inaccurate descriptions of the alert list process to the FISC.

General Alexander's claim that the NSA's vast numbers of violations were the consequences of error and incompetence receive derisive attention. But this claim itself was in a court submission intended to exculpate the agency from what would otherwise have been an intentional violation of the court's order. There is absolutely no reason to believe the claims of incompetence and honest error; there is more reason to assume that these are intended to cover up a worse truth: intentional violations.
Second, the subversion. Last week, we learned that the NSA's strategy to enhance its surveillance capabilities was to weaken internet security in general. The NSA infiltrated the social-professional standard-setting organizations on which the whole internet relies, from National Institute of Standards and Technology to the Internet Engineering Task Force itself, the very institutional foundation of the internet, to weaken the security standards. Moreover, the NSA combined persuasion and legal coercion to compromise the commercial systems and standards that offer the most basic security systems on which the entire internet runs. The NSA undermined the security of the SSL standard critical to online banking and shopping, VPN products central to secure corporate, research, and healthcare provider networks, and basic email utilities.
Serious people with grave expressions will argue that if we do not ruthlessly expand our intelligence capabilities, we will suffer terrorism and defeat. Whatever minor tweaks may be necessary, the argument goes, the core of the operation is absolutely necessary and people will die if we falter. But the question remains: how much of what we have is really necessary and effective, and how much is bureaucratic bloat resulting in the all-to-familiar dynamics of organizational self-aggrandizement and expansionism?
The "serious people" are appealing to our faith that national security is critical, in order to demand that we accept the particular organization of the Intelligence Church. Demand for blind faith adherence is unacceptable.
What did we actually know about what we got in exchange for undermining internet security, technology markets, internet social capital, and the American constitutional order? The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive. And we the people? Not so much. Court documents released this week show that after its first three years of operation, the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant".
If this was the best the intelligence community could put on the table when it faced the risk of judicial sanction, we can assume that all the hand-waving without hard, observable, testable facts is magician's patter, aimed to protect the fruits of a decade's worth of bureaucratic expansionism. Claims that secrecy prevents the priesthood from presenting such testable proof appeal to a doctrine of occult infallibility that we cannot afford to accept.
In August, 205 members of the House voted in favor of the Amash-Conyers Amendment that would have rewritten Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the section used to justify bulk collection of domestic phone call metadata. At the time, this was a critically important move that was highly targeted at a narrow and specific abuse. But the breadth and depth of organizational deception and subversion force us to recognize that we need reconstruction that goes much deeper than any specific legislative fix.
We need a fundamental organizational reform. The so-called "outside independent experts" committee which the president has appointed, with insiders' insiders like Michael Morell and Richard Clarke, will not come close to doing the trick. Nor is it likely to allay anyone's fears who is not already an Intelligence Church adherent.
Given the persistent lying and strategic errors of judgment that this week's revelations disclosed, the NSA needs to be put into receivership. Insiders, beginning at the very top, need to be removed and excluded from the restructuring process. Their expertise led to this mess, and would be a hindrance, not a help, in cleaning it up. We need a forceful, truly independent outsider, with strong, direct congressional support, who would recruit former insider-dissenters like Thomas Drake or William Binney to reveal where the bodies are buried.
Anything short of root-and-branch reconstruction will be serving weak tea to a patient with a debilitating auto-immune disease.

The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back

The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it




'Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. But whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.' Photograph: Bob Sacha/Corbis

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.
By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-t...

Wild Bill for America"Defeating the Snoops"



Government spying on citizens is illegal and outrageous. Bill reveals one way to defeat them.

http://patriotaction.net/video/video...sg_share_video

NSA subversion of internet security: bad for the US, good for criminals

The deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems makes the US government and its technology industry look untrustworthy

• theguardian.com, Friday 20 September 2013 09.32 EDT

The NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. 'Having once spied on a small number of specific targets, it now conducts online surveillance on a vast scale. It has spied on drug dealers, tax evaders and foreign firms, none of which pose a threat to national security.' Photograph: Handout/Getty Images

"Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," declared Edward Snowden, the former computer technician at America's National Security Agency (NSA) responsible for leaking a trove of documents about his erstwhile employer's activities, in an online question-and-answer session in June.
The revelations published on 5 September by the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica, explain his careful choice of words. Many cryptographic systems in use on the internet, it seems, are not "properly implemented", but have been weakened by flaws deliberately introduced by the NSA as part of a decade-long programme to ensure it can read encrypted traffic.
The extent and nature of the programme is still unclear, but it appears to involve getting software companies and internet service providers to insert secret vulnerabilities, or backdoors, into apparently secure systems. This can be done by introducing deliberate errors into software or hardware designs, many of which are developed in collaboration with the NSA; or by recommending the use of security protocols that the NSA knows to be insecure, in its dual role as cryptographic standards-setter and codebreaker.
It is naive to think that signals-intelligence agencies, whose job is to intercept and decrypt messages, are not going to try to do everything to ensure that they can read as much encoded traffic as possible. And there are good reasons why governments should be able to snoop, in the interests of national security and within agreed legal limits. But the latest allegations are worrying for three reasons.
First, the NSA's actions may have weakened overall internet security, on which billions of people rely for banking and payments, with backdoors that can be exploited by criminals, not just intelligence agencies. Second, this undermines confidence in American technology companies, none of which can now be trusted when they say their products are secure, and makes it very difficult for America to criticise authoritarian regimes for interfering with the internet, or to claim (as it does) that it is the best guardian of the internet's addressing system. Third, the NSA seems to have done by stealth what it could not do openly. During the 1990s the agency unsuccessfully lobbied for backdoors to be added to all communications systems. Having lost the argument, it has apparently gone ahead and implemented them on the sly.
All this adds to the impression that oversight of the NSA has not kept pace with the rapid expansion of its activities. Having once spied on a small number of specific targets, it now conducts online surveillance on a vast scale. It has spied on drug dealers, tax evaders and foreign firms, none of which pose a threat to national security. NSA employees have used its systems to spy on their former lovers. Snowden's ability to walk off with a stash of NSA documents is grave evidence of a woeful lack of internal controls. He has gone public, but could just as easily have put his stolen documents to criminal use – as others in his position may already have done.
Barack Obama says he welcomes debate about the activities of Americ.... There are indeed arguments to be had about the appropriate levels of snooping and degrees of oversight. But any deliberate subversion of cryptographic systems by the NSA is simply a bad idea, and should stop. That would make life harder for the spooks, true, but there are plenty of other more targeted techniques they can use that do not reduce the security of the internet for all of its users, damage the reputation of America's technology industry and leave its government looking untrustworthy and hypocritical.
• This article first appeared as a leader column in The Economist and is republished here with permission
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/20/nsa-subversion...

Major US security company warns over NSA link to encryption formula

RSA, the security arm of EMC, sends email to customers over default random number generator which uses weak formula
^Beta


NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: EPA

A major American computer security company has told thousands of customers to stop using an encryption system that relies on a mathematical formula developed by the National Security Agency (NSA).
RSA, the security arm of the storage company EMC, sent an email to customers telling them that the default random number generator in a toolkit for developers used a weak formula, and they should switch to one of the other formulas in the product.
The abrupt warning is the latest fallout from the huge intelligence disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of surveillance and the debasement of encryption by the NSA.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Snowden's cache of documents from his time working for an NSA contractor showed that the agency used its public participation in the process for setting voluntary cryptography standards, run by the government's National Institute of Standards (NIST) and ..., to push for a formula it knew it could break. Soon after that revelation, the NIST began advising against the use of one of its cryptographic standards and, having accepted the NSA proposal in 2006 as one of four systems acceptable for government use, said it would reconsider that inclusion in the wake of questions about its security.
RSA's warning underscores how the slow-moving standards process and industry practices could leave many users exposed to hacking by the NSA or others who could exploit the same flaw for years to come.
Rik Ferguson, of the security company Trend Micro, told the Guardian: "That particular standard, the Pseudo Random Number Generator [PRNG] standard, has long been thought to have at best a weakness, and at worst a back door, pretty much since its publication in 2006."
Encryption systems use pseudo-random number generators as part of a complex mathematical process of creating theoretically uncrackable codes. If the number sequences generated can be predicted, that makes the code crackable, given sufficient computing power.
Ferguson pointed to a 2007 presentation by two researchers from Microsoft, Dan Shumow a...: "What we are not saying: NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG. What we are saying: the prediction resistance of this PRNG … is dependent on solving one instance of the elliptic curve discrete log problem. (And we do not know if the algorithm designer knew this beforehand.)"
A person familiar with the process by which NIST would have accepted the PRNG told Reuters that it accepted the code in part because many government agencies were already using it.
RSA had no immediate comment when quizzed by Reuters about the email. It was unclear how the company could reach all the former customers of its development tools, let alone how those programmers could in turn reach all of their customers. That could mean that the weakened PRNG has been used in products spread around the world over the past seven years.

Developers who used RSA's "BSAFE" kit wrote code for web browsers, other software and hardware components to increase their security.
Rik Ferguson said: "The advantage of [the flaw] being so public for so long is that its use has been limited. Typically, cryptographers tend to avoid algorithms that have been shown to be weak. Nonetheless, it's not so much the weakness of the standard that counts, but 'security' services' willingness to subvert the very building blocks that so many of their own citizens and enterprises may later come to rely on for confidentiality and security."
He added: "Now that the ruse of covertly influencing standards has become public knowledge, it will be difficult to maintain trust in that system. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the adversary."
After the Times report, NIST said it was inviting public comments as it re-evaluated the formula.
On 10 September, NIST said: "If vulnerabilities are found in these or any other NIST standards, we will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as possible."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/21/rsa-emc-warning-encryp...

Phone companies remain silent over legality of NSA data collection

Leading phone firms refuse to say why they have not challenged Fisa court orders that compel them to hand over customers' data
Verizon was one of the companies that declined to answer Guardian questions over the legality of the NSA data collection. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

America's top telecommunications companies are refusing to say whether they accept that the bulk collection of their customers' phone records by the National Security Agency is lawful.
The phone companies are continuing to guard their silence over the controversial gathering of metadata by the NSA, despite the increasingly open approach by those at the center of the bulk surveillance programme. On Tuesday the secretive foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court declassified its legal reasoning for approving the NSA telephone metadata program periodically over the past six years.
Verizon, the telecoms giant that was revealed in June to be under a secret Fisa court order to hand over details of the phone records of millions of its US customers, was one of the firms that declined to answer Guardian questions relating to the legality of the scheme. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile US also declined to comment.
CenturyLink, a multinational company based in Monroe, Louisiana said: "At CenturyLink, we respect and protect the privacy of our customers and only provide information to the government when required or permitted by law. We do not comment on matters of national security or specific government requests for information."
In its declassified opinion, the Fisa court revealed that no telecoms company has ever challenged the court's order for the bulk collection of phone records. The opinion, written by Judge Claire V Eagan, implied that by failing to challenge the legality of the programme, the phone companies were passively accepting it its constitutional status.
Seeking clarification, the Guardian asked five of the top US telecoms firms whether their lack of resistance to the collection of their phone records was indeed an implicit acceptance of its legality.
The Guardian also asked how the phone companies could justify to their own customers the decision not to challenge the court orders, in stark contrast to some internet companies such as Yahoo, which have contested the legality of NSA collection of their customers' data.
The phone companies were asked by the Guardian to make clear whether they felt their compliance with Fisa court orders relating to NSA data collection was voluntary, or whether they felt pressured by any party into conceding without legal protest.
The companies' decision not to comment on any aspect of the NSA dragnet puts them in a increasingly peculiar position. By withholding their internal views from the public, they are setting themselves apart from equivalent internet firms that are taking a more bullish stance, and are shrouding themselves in more secrecy than even the Fisa court, one of the most tight-lipped institutions in the country.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/phone-companies-silent...

Spy Agencies Are Doing WHAT?

Submitted by George Washington on 09/23/2013 10:32 -0400


Revelations about the breathtaking scope of government spying are coming so fast that it's time for an updated roundup:

• The government is spying on essentially everything we do. It is not just "metadata" ... although that is enough to destroy your privacy

• The government has adopted a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows it to pretend that "everything" is relevant ... so it spies on everyone. For example, the NSA "oversight" court believes the mere claim that terrorists use the phone system is enough to show that all phone records are relevant

• NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA collects all of our conversations word-for-word

• It's not just the NSA ... Many other agencies, like the FBI and IRS – concerned only with domestic issues - spy on Americans as well. The Drug Enforcement Administration has had direct access to AT&T phone records for 25 years

• The information gained through spying is shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes. The agencies are instructed to intentionally "launder" the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way ... and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges

• The Department of Health and Human Services will also have access to vast quantities of sensitive federal data on Americans as part of Obamacare (here's the underlying Government Accountability Office report)

• The NSA not only shares our information with other American agencies, it also gives personal, sensitive unfiltered information on Americans to Israel and other foreign nations

• And it's not only governments. Private contractors can also view all of your data (and the government isn’t keeping track of which contractors see your data and which don’t). And because background checks regarding some contractors are falsified, it is hard to know the types of people that might have your information. Indeed, private contractors are involved in spying on behalf of governments world-wide

• It's not just your computer and your phone. It is well-documented that the government may be spying on us through cars and buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our smart meters, and in many other ways

• Top counter-terror experts say that the government’s mass spying doesn't keep us safe

• Indeed, they say that mass spying actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts (more here and here)

• They say we can, instead, keep everyone safe without violating the Constitution ... more cheaply and efficiently than the current system

• There is no real oversight by Congress, the courts, or the executive branch of government. And see this and this.

• Indeed, most Congress members had no idea what the NSA is doing. Even staunch defenders of the NSA - and congress members on the intelligence oversight committees - now say they've been kept in the dark

• A Federal judge who was on the secret spying court for 3 years says that it's a kangaroo court

• Even the current judges on the secret spying court now admit that they're out of the loop and powerless to exercise real oversight.

• When these judges raised concerns about NSA spying, the Justice Department completely ignored them

• A former U.S. president says that the spying program shows that we no longer have a functioning democracy

• The chairs of the 9/11 Commission say that NSA spying has gone way too far

• Top constitutional experts say that Obama and Bush are worse than Nixon ... and the Stasi East Germans

• While the government initially claimed that mass surveillance on Americans prevented more than 50 terror attacks, the NSA’s deputy director John Inglis walked that position back all the way to saying that – at the most – one (1) plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone. In other words, the NSA can't prove that stopped any terror attacks. The government greatly exaggerated an alleged recent terror plot for political purposes (and promoted the fearmongering of serial liars). The argument that recent terror warnings show that NSA spying is necessary is so weak that American counter-terrorism experts have slammed it as "crazy pants"

• You're much more likely to be killed by brain-eating amoeba, lightning or a toddler than by terrorism. Even President Obama admits that you're much less likely to be killed by terrorists than a car accident. So the government has resorted to lamer and lamer excuses to try to justify mass surveillance

• Experts say that the spying program is illegal, and is exactly the kind of thing which King George imposed on the American colonists ... which led to the Revolutionary War

• A Harvard law school professor - and director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University - says:

"The NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body".

• The top counter-terrorism Czar under Clinton and Bush says that revealing NSA spying programs does not harm national security

• The feds are considering prosecuting the owner of a private email company - who shut down his business rather than turning over records to the NSA - for refusing to fork over the information and keep quiet. This is a little like trying to throw someone in jail because he's died and is no longer paying taxes

• Whistleblowers on illegal spying have no "legal" way to get the information out

• Spying started before 9/11 ... and various excuses have been used to spy on Americans over the years

• Governments and big corporations are doing everything they can to destroy anonymity

• Mass spying creates an easy mark for hackers. Indeed, the Pentagon now sees the collection of "big data" as a "national security threat" ... but the NSA is the biggest data collector on the planet, and thus provides a tempting mother lode of information for foreign hackers

• Mass surveillance by the NSA directly harms internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire U.S. economy. For example, Facebook lost 11 millions users as of April mainly due to privacy concerns (and that was before the Snowden revelations). And see these reports from Boingboing and the Guardian

• IT and security professionals are quite concerned about government spying

• Some people make a lot of money off of mass spying. But the government isn't using the spying program to stop the worst types of lawlessness

• The NSA spying program is unambiguously being used for industrial espionage, by spying on large foreign corporations, and the biggest financial payments systems such as VISA and Swift. Indeed, in a slide leaked by Edward Snowden, "economic" was one of the main justifications for spying

• The top U.S. spy's justifications for such financial spying is not very reassuring:

"We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."

• Top financial experts say that the NSA and other intelligence agencies are using the information to profit from this inside information

• The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA spies on Americans’ credit card transactions. Many other agencies are doing the same. In fact, virtually all U.S. intelligence agencies – including the CIA and NSA – are going to spy on Americans’ finances. The IRS will also be spying on Americans’ shopping records, travel, social interactions, health records and files from other government investigators

• Polls show that the public doesn’t believe the NSA … and thinks that the government has gone way too far in the name of terrorism

• While leaker Edward Snowden is treated as a traitor by the fatcats and elites, he is considered a hero by the American public. Members of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government have all praised the debate on spying which Snowden's leaks started

• The heads of the intelligence services have repeatedly been caught lying about spying. And even liberal publications are starting to say that Obama has been intentionally lying about spying. The government claimed that most spying programs ended in 2011, when - in fact - they were expanded that year

• Obama says he'll rein in spying ... but his words and deeds indicate that he won't. Indeed, Obama appointed the fox to guard the chicken coop. No wonder only 11% of Americans trust Obama to actually do anything to rein in spying

• A huge majority of Americans wants the director of intelligence - Clapper - prosecuted for perjury. One of the chairs of the 9/11 Commission agrees

• While the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country – it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background). That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the most transparent administration ever

• The NSA treats the American people with contempt. For example, Spiegel notes:

"The authors of the [NSA slides] draw a comparison with "1984," ... revealing the agency's current view of smartphones and their users. "Who knew in 1984 that this would be Big Brother …" the authors ask, in reference to a photo of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. And commenting on photos of enthusiastic Apple customers and iPhone users, the NSA writes: "… and the zombies would be paying customers?

• Worse, the intelligence agencies often view normal, true-blue Americans as potential terrorists (and see this)

• A Congressman noted that - even if a mass surveillance program is started for good purposes - it will inevitably turn into a witch hunt

• There are indications that the spy agencies aren't just passively gathering information, but are actively using it in mischievous ways

• Surveillance can be used to frame you if someone in government happens to take a dislike to you

• Government spying has always focused on crushing dissent … not on keeping us safe

• An NSA whistleblower says that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers (and see this)

• High-level US government officials have warned for 40 years that mass surveillance would lead to tyranny in America

• A top NSA whistleblower says that the only way to fix things is to fire all of the corrupt government officials who let it happen. As the polls above show, the American public is starting to wake up to that fact

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed...are-doing-what

NSA Chief Defends Phone Record Collection

September 25, 2013 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.

WASHINGTON (UPI) — The head of the U.S. National Security Agency said his department used Americans’ phone records while investigating the Boston Marathon bombing.
NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander offered a forceful defense of the agency’s practice of collecting metadata phone records in a speech at a security conference Wednesday, saying the ability to analyze calls from foreigners to Americans is a valuable tool in fighting terrorism,The Washington Post reported.
The NSA collects information on all domestic calls — the location, duration and numbers but not their content — and sometimes uses the information in the course of a terrorist investigation. He said the data was used in the wake of the Boston bombing not to identify the suspects but to help rule out fear of a second strike elsewhere, particularly in New York City.
“We did use [Section] 215,” after the Boston bombing, he said, referring to the Patriot Act provision NSA officials say gives them the authority to track virtually all calls made in the country. “We used it to support the FBI in their investigation.”
Alexander said the phone records were also used in investigating threats against U.S. embassies in Africa and the Mideast over the summer.
The NSA’s phone tracking and email hacking has come under intense scrutiny since former security contractor Edward Snowden went public with details of the NSA’s domestic spying programs.
Alexander pushed back Wednesday, saying lawmakers who are considering curtailing the NSA’s ability are buying into a “hyped” version of events portrayed by the media.

Filed Under: Breaking Now, From The Wire, Liberty News


http://personalliberty.com/2013/09/2...rd-collection/