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

NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts

• Agency given more than 200 numbers by government official
• NSA encourages departments to share their 'Rolodexes'
• Surveillance produced 'little intelligence', memo acknowledges

Follow James Ball by email BETA
James Ball

theguardian.com, Thursday 24 October 2013 14.14 EDT

Jump to comments (619)

The NSA memo suggests that such surveillance was not isolated as the agency routinely monitors world leaders. Photograph: Guardian

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.
The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.
The revelation is set to add to mounting diplomatic tensions between the US and its allies, after the German chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday accused the US of tapping her mobile phone.
After Merkel's allegations became public, White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement that said the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" the German chancellor's communications. But that failed to quell the row, as officials in Berlin quickly pointed out that the US did not deny monitoring the phone in the past.
The NSA memo obtained by the Guardian suggests that such surveillance was not isolated, as the agency routinely monitors the phone numbers of world leaders – and even asks for the assistance of other US officials to do so.
The memo, dated October 2006 and which was issued to staff in the agency's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), was titled "Customers Can Help SID Obtain Targetable Phone Numbers".
It begins by setting out an example of how US officials who mixed with world leaders and politicians could help agency surveillance.
"In one recent case," the memo notes, "a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders … Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked."
The document continues by saying the new phone numbers had helped the agency discover still more new contact details to add to their monitoring: "These numbers have provided lead information to other numbers that have subsequently been tasked."
But the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced "little reportable intelligence". In the wake of the Merkel row, the US is facing growing international criticism that any intelligence benefit from spying on friendly governments is far outweighed by the potential diplomatic damage.
The memo then asks analysts to think about any customers they currently serve who might similarly be happy to turn over details of their contacts.
"This success leads S2 [signals intelligence] to wonder if there are NSAliaisons whose supported customers may be willing to share their 'Rolodexes' or phone lists with NSA as potential sources of intelligence," it states. "S2 welcomes such information!"
The document suggests that sometimes these offers come unsolicited, with US "customers" spontaneously offering the agency access to their overseas networks.
"From time to time, SID is offered access to the personal contact databases of US officials," it states. "Such 'Rolodexes' may contain contact information for foreign political or military leaders, to include direct line, fax, residence and cellular numbers."
The Guardian approached the Obama administration for comment on the latest document. Officials declined to respond directly to the new material, instead referring to comments delivered by Carney at Thursday's daily briefing.
Carney told reporters: "The [NSA] revelations have clearly caused tension in our relationships with some countries, and we are dealing with that through diplomatic channels.
"These are very important relations both economically and for our security, and we will work to maintain the closest possible ties."
The public accusation of spying on Merkel adds to mounting political tensions in Europe about the scope of US surveillance on the governments of its allies, after a cascade of backlashes and apologetic phone calls with leaders across the continent over the course of the week.
Asked on Wednesday evening if the NSA had in the past tracked the German chancellor's communications, Caitlin Hayden, the White House's National Security Council spokeswoman, said: "The United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel. Beyond that, I'm not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity."
At the daily briefing on Thursday, Carney again refused to answer repeated questions about whether the US had spied on Merkel's calls in the past.
The NSA memo seen by the Guardian was written halfway through George W Bush's second term, when Condoleezza Rice was secretary of state and Donald Rumsfeld was in his final months as defence secretary.
Merkel, who, according to Reuters, suspected the surveillance after finding her mobile phone number written on a US document, is said to have called for US surveillance to be placed on a new legal footing during a phone call to President Obama.
"The [German] federal government, as a close ally and partner of the US, expects in the future a clear contractual basis for the activity of the services and their co-operation," she told the president.
The leader of Germany's Green party, Katrin Goring-Eckhart, called the alleged spying an "unprecedented breach of trust" between the two countries.
Earlier in the week, Obama called the French president François Hollande in response to reports in Le Monde that the NSA accessed more than 70m phone records of French citizens in a single 30-day period, while earlier reports in Der Spiegel uncovered NSA activity against the offices and communications of senior officials of the European Union.
The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, this week backed proposals that could require US tech companies to seek permission before handing over EU citizens' data to US intelligence agencies, while the European parliament voted in favour of suspending a transatlantic bank data sharing agreement after Der Spiegel revealed the agency was monitoring the international bank transfer system Swift.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-leaders-calls

Report: NSA Spied on 124 Billion Phone Calls in One Month

Tallies of top-secret documents show widespread data collection

P

BY: Adam Kredo
October 23, 2013 3:10 pm

The National Security Agency recorded information about more than 124 billion phone calls during a 30-day period earlier this year, including around 3 billion calls from U.S. sources, according to a tally from top-secret documents released by multiple news outlets.
Documents revealing details about the NSA’s Boundless Informant program show that information regarding billions of phone calls and computer communications was collected by the agency from across the world.
Boundless Informant “allows users to select a country on a map and view the meta data volume and select details about the collections against that country,” according to the Guardian, which first reported on the top secret program earlier this year.
Multiple leaked screenshots of the Boundless Informant program show that information on around 124.8 billion phone calls were collected in just 30-days this year, according to documents released by the Guardian and other news sites.
The documents provide a window into the sheer volume of data being collected by the NSA as late as March of this year, according to the Guardian.
Critics of the NSA’s multiple data collection programs, which include PRISM, argue that innocent Americans run the risk of having their personal communications monitored. Its defenders maintain that the program has been a key tool in the fight against terrorism.
It is unlikely that the NSA examined the content of all of these calls, though it seems possible that the security organization could single out any of the snatched calls and other communications.
The sheer extend of the NSA’s data collection effort were compiled from the multiple sources and organized on Wednesday by members of intelligence website Cryptome, which regularly publishes government documents and other information.
Much of the information recorded by the NSA appears to have originated in the greater Middle East.
The majority of the calls monitored by the NSA appeared to have emanated from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where 13.76 billion and 21.98 billion calls were respectively collected over the time period, according to the Boundless Informant “heat map”revealed by the Guardian.
About 1.73 billion calls, or “DNRs” (Dialed numbers recorded), were collected from Iran, while 1.64 billion were traced back to Jordan. Additionally, some 6.28 billion calls from India were collected.
Perhaps the most controversial element of the program is its efforts to collect both phone and computer data from Western nations that have friendly relations with the United States.
Boundless Informant appears to have collected information from hundreds of million calls traced back to Germany in a single 30-day-period, according to documentspublished by Der Spiegel Online.
Spain accounted for another 61 million and Italy for 46 million, according to the published screenshots and tallies posted to Cryptome.
France’s Le Monde newspaper alleged this week that the NSA recorded more than 70 million phone calls through January of this year. However, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper immediately rejected the claim.
Another 97 billion bits of information were pulled by the NSA from global computer networks, according to the map and original story by the Guardian.
This entry was posted in National Security and tagged France, Germany, India, Iran, Jordan, NSA,Pakistan, terrorism. Bookmark the permalink.


http://freebeacon.com/report-nsa-spi...-in-one-month/

A Government of Secrecy and Fear

Will we get our lost liberties back?

Andrew Napolitano | October 24, 2013

Every American who values the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every American who enjoys the right to be different and the right to be left alone, and every American who believes that the government works for us and we don't work for the government should thank Edward Snowden for his courageous and heroic revelations of the National Security Agency's gargantuan spying operations. Without Snowden's revelations, we would be ignorant children to a paternalistic government and completely in the dark about what the government sees of us and knows about us. And we would not know that it has stolen our freedoms.
When I saw Snowden's initial revelation -- a two-page order signed by a federal judge on the FISA court -- I knew immediately that Snowden had a copy of a genuine top-secret document that even the judge who signed it did not have. The NSA reluctantly acknowledged that the document was genuine and claimed that all its snooping on the 113,000,000 Verizon customers covered by that order was lawful because it had been authorized by that federal judge. The NSA also claims that as a result of its spying, it has kept us safe.
I reject the argument that the government is empowered to take our liberties -- here, the right to privacy -- by majority vote or by secret fiat as part of an involuntary collective bargain that it needs to monitor us in private in order to protect us in public. The government's job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it is not doing its job.
Since the revelations about Verizon, we have learned that the NSA has captured and stored in its Utah computers the emails, texts, telephone conversations, utility bills, bank statements, credit card statements and digital phone books of everyone in America for the past two and a half years. It also has captured hundreds of millions of phone records in Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico -- all U.S. allies -- and it has shared much of the seized raw American data with intelligence agencies in Great Britain and Israel. Its agents have spied on their girlfriends and boyfriends literally thousands of times, and they have combed the collected raw data and selectively revealed some of it to law enforcement. All of this directly contradicts the Constitution.
And, if all of this is not enough to induce one to realize that the Orwellian future is here thanks to the secret governments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Snowden also revealed that the NSA can hack into anyone's mobile phone, even when it is turned off, and use each phone as a listening device and as a GPS to track whoever possesses it.
When Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, was confronted with this litany of unlawful and unconstitutional behavior, he replied by claiming that his spies have saved the U.S. from 54 terrorist plots. He pleaded with lawmakers not to strip him of the power to spy or of the billions they have given him to spend on spying, lest another 9/11 plot befall us.
Many Americans were willing to make this trade: spy on 330,000,000 Americans in order to stop 54 plots. But the government lacks the moral and constitutional power to compel this trade, because the right to privacy is a personal, individual and inalienable right, and so it cannot lawfully be taken away by majority vote (which never happened) or by secret fiat (which did happen). The government also lacks the authority to spy without legal constraint on anyone it wishes, because that violates the Constitution and fundamentally changes our open and free society. All-hearing ears and all-seeing eyes and unconstrained power exercised in secret are a toxic mix destined to destroy personal freedom.
Now we know that Alexander has lied yet again to a congressional committee. He recently acknowledged that the number of plots foiled is not the stated-under-oath 54, but is either two or three. He won't say which two or three or how spying on every American was the only lawful or constitutional way to uncover these plots. He also won't say why he originally said 54, instead of two or three; but he did say last week that he will retire next spring.
This is maddening. The government breaks the law it has been hired to enforce and violates the Constitution its agents have sworn to uphold; it gets caught and lies about it; and no one in government is punished or changes his behavior.
Then we realize that the so-called court that authorized all of this is not a court at all. Federal judges may only exercise the judicial function when they are addressing cases or controversies; and their opinions only have the force of law when they emanate from that context. But when federal judges serve an essentially clerical function, they are not serving as judges, their opinions are self-serving and legally useless, and their apparent imprimatur upon spying gives it no moral or legal legitimacy.
All of this -- which is essentially undisputed -- leads me to the question: Where is the outrage? I think the government has succeeded in so terrifying us at the prospect of another 9/11 that we are afraid to be outraged at the government when it claims to be protecting us, no matter what it does. C.S. Lewis once remarked that the greatest trick the devil has pulled off is convincing us that he does not exist. The government's greatest trick has been persuading us to surrender our freedoms.
Will we ever get them back? The answer to that depends upon the fidelity to freedom of those in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping. At present, those hands are soiled with the filth of totalitarianism and preoccupied with the grasp of power. And they seem to be getting dirtier and their grip tighter every day.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/10/2...crecy-and-fear

http://www.alipac.us/f9/feinstein-to...4/#post1376209


Is Feinstein Too Old To Understand That The NSA Is Spying On Americans, Or Is She Just A Liar?

The issues

4.1. Corporate cooperation

The extent to which private companies are cooperating with intelligence agencies has been a major source of concern for internet users across the world. The technology companies in the PRISM slides were keen to stress they do not go beyond what they are forced to do under law in handing over user data, but other documents suggest some internet and telecoms companies on occasion go beyond what is mandatory.
Such relationships create issues of customer trust for US and UK technology giants, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged, as well as raising questions as to whether what the law allows represents the limits of surveillance, or merely a starting point.
Documents suggest some payments to Prism, cryptography and cable-intercept providers, but the scope of such transactions, and the recipients, are to date unknown.
In October, the Electronic Frontier Foundation withdrew from the Global Network Initiative, the biggest multi-stakeholder group on human rights online, over concerns that corporate members were unable or unwilling to speak out on surveillance.
4.2. The law

Revelations on GCHQ and NSA activities to date have led to lawmakers, particularly in the USA, raising concerns that the interpretations of the law used by agencies were not the intent of lawmakers when the rules were set.
NSA mass-surveillance is authorized under a law known as the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, which was renewed in 2012. It allows for the collection of communications, without a warrant, where at least one end of the communication is a non-US person. Collection of Americans' phone data comes under a different law, section 215 of the Patriot Act. A congressional motion to defund such collection was defeated by just 12 votes in the wake of the program's revelation.
Previously secret court-imposed rules published by the Guardian showed a wide range of circumstances where the data of US people collected without a warrant could be stored, used, and viewed. Later documents showed the agency is even allowed tosearch for US people within such data.
GCHQ mass-surveillance is authorized under Section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which allows for bulk surveillance provided the Secretary of State signs certificates authorising it for particular purposes every six months.
The agency is also required, however, to be compliant with the right to privacy within the European Convention of Human Rights. Three UK privacy groups are currently mounting a legal challenge to GCHQ surveillance in the European courts.
4.3. Oversight

Oversight for the NSA comes from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in secret. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, there has been widespread public and congressional pushback against the court’s efficacy, leading Obama to consider reforms to its operations and to declassify hundreds of pages of rulings from the court.
Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, which also oversees NSA operations, have repeatedly stated concerns about the scope of NSA surveillance, even accusing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA head General Alexander of misleading the committee in the wake of the first NSA revelations.
In the UK, GCHQ oversight comes from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which is chaired by Sir Malcom Rifkind, who said it was part of his role to “defend” the UK’s intelligence agencies.
In public statements, GCHQ says it works within "the strongest systems of checks and balances for secret intelligence anywhere in the world". Internal legal briefings, however, acknowledge the agency has “a light oversight regime compared with the US", adding that the parliamentary committee responsible for GCHQ has “always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret”.
GCHQ documents further note the UK’s investigatory powers tribunal has "so far always found in our favour".
4.4. Trust in technology

NSA and GCHQ efforts to undermine global encryption garnered a strong reaction from the world’s internet security community. Experts warned systems were more open to hacking by foreign governments or criminal gangs, and accused the agency of “subverting” the internet.
Several organisations have begun redesigning their products so as not to use standards approved by the US government, for fear they are insecure, while others have suggested that surveillance overreach could damage US technology companies’ standing and sales in the world, as well as undermining the USA’s moral authority as custodian of the internet.
Phillip Zimmerman, the architect of the PGP email security software, has said in the wake of the NSA revelations that secure email is largely impossible, and a new product would need building from scratch.
4.5. Privacy and mass surveillance

Revelations from the Snowden cache show that even the NSA’s own internal auditors found its agents broke privacy rules thousands of times each year, but some governments and advocates alike have warned mass-surveillance itself, even if not abused, can be a major problem.
Freedom of expression advocates have warned routine surveillance of communications can stifle free speech, while Germany’s justice minister described GCHQ’s Tempora programme as like something from “a Hollywood nightmare”.
In the USA, a coalition of academics has formally submitted a 15-page document to Obama’s intelligence review panel warning of the serious threat mass surveillance poses to journalism in the USA and across the world.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

The issues

4.1. Corporate cooperation

The extent to which private companies are cooperating with intelligence agencies has been a major source of concern for internet users across the world. The technology companies in the PRISM slides were keen to stress they do not go beyond what they are forced to do under law in handing over user data, but other documents suggest some internet and telecoms companies on occasion go beyond what is mandatory.
Such relationships create issues of customer trust for US and UK technology giants, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged, as well as raising questions as to whether what the law allows represents the limits of surveillance, or merely a starting point.
Documents suggest some payments to Prism, cryptography and cable-intercept providers, but the scope of such transactions, and the recipients, are to date unknown.
In October, the Electronic Frontier Foundation withdrew from the Global Network Initiative, the biggest multi-stakeholder group on human rights online, over concerns that corporate members were unable or unwilling to speak out on surveillance.
4.2. The law

Revelations on GCHQ and NSA activities to date have led to lawmakers, particularly in the USA, raising concerns that the interpretations of the law used by agencies were not the intent of lawmakers when the rules were set.
NSA mass-surveillance is authorized under a law known as the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, which was renewed in 2012. It allows for the collection of communications, without a warrant, where at least one end of the communication is a non-US person. Collection of Americans' phone data comes under a different law, section 215 of the Patriot Act. A congressional motion to defund such collection was defeated by just 12 votes in the wake of the program's revelation.
Previously secret court-imposed rules published by the Guardian showed a wide range of circumstances where the data of US people collected without a warrant could be stored, used, and viewed. Later documents showed the agency is even allowed tosearch for US people within such data.
GCHQ mass-surveillance is authorized under Section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which allows for bulk surveillance provided the Secretary of State signs certificates authorising it for particular purposes every six months.
The agency is also required, however, to be compliant with the right to privacy within the European Convention of Human Rights. Three UK privacy groups are currently mounting a legal challenge to GCHQ surveillance in the European courts.
4.3. Oversight

Oversight for the NSA comes from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in secret. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, there has been widespread public and congressional pushback against the court’s efficacy, leading Obama to consider reforms to its operations and to declassify hundreds of pages of rulings from the court.
Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, which also oversees NSA operations, have repeatedly stated concerns about the scope of NSA surveillance, even accusing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA head General Alexander of misleading the committee in the wake of the first NSA revelations.
In the UK, GCHQ oversight comes from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which is chaired by Sir Malcom Rifkind, who said it was part of his role to “defend” the UK’s intelligence agencies.
In public statements, GCHQ says it works within "the strongest systems of checks and balances for secret intelligence anywhere in the world". Internal legal briefings, however, acknowledge the agency has “a light oversight regime compared with the US", adding that the parliamentary committee responsible for GCHQ has “always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret”.
GCHQ documents further note the UK’s investigatory powers tribunal has "so far always found in our favour".
4.4. Trust in technology

NSA and GCHQ efforts to undermine global encryption garnered a strong reaction from the world’s internet security community. Experts warned systems were more open to hacking by foreign governments or criminal gangs, and accused the agency of “subverting” the internet.
Several organisations have begun redesigning their products so as not to use standards approved by the US government, for fear they are insecure, while others have suggested that surveillance overreach could damage US technology companies’ standing and sales in the world, as well as undermining the USA’s moral authority as custodian of the internet.
Phillip Zimmerman, the architect of the PGP email security software, has said in the wake of the NSA revelations that secure email is largely impossible, and a new product would need building from scratch.
4.5. Privacy and mass surveillance

Revelations from the Snowden cache show that even the NSA’s own internal auditors found its agents broke privacy rules thousands of times each year, but some governments and advocates alike have warned mass-surveillance itself, even if not abused, can be a major problem.
Freedom of expression advocates have warned routine surveillance of communications can stifle free speech, while Germany’s justice minister described GCHQ’s Tempora programme as like something from “a Hollywood nightmare”.
In the USA, a coalition of academics has formally submitted a 15-page document to Obama’s intelligence review panel warning of the serious threat mass surveillance poses to journalism in the USA and across the world.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

Obama Regime Busted Spying On World Leaders… Kerry Says Government Shutdown Is Responsible For Damaging U.S. Image Abroad…

Posted on 25 October, 2013 by Dylan



via weasel zippers

Secretary of State John Kerry used an address to a liberal think-tank Thursday to cite ways in which the recent government shutdown hurt America’s image abroad, but his speech contained no reference to the diplomatic harm being caused by the escalating surveillance scandal.
Kerry’s appearance at a Center for American Progress conference came on the same day that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle summoned the U.S.

ambassador to warn friendship was at stake over the alleged bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
Westerwelle’s comments to reporters afterwards strongly implied Merkel had not been satisfied by assurances given her by President Obama in a phone conversation on Wednesday.

Also on Thursday, European Union leaders meeting in Brussels discussed allegations of widespread National Security Agency spying, and said afterwards that “a lack of trust [between the U.S. and E.U.] would prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering.”

Keep reading…



http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/10/2...-image-abroad/

NSA Director Interviewed By Defense Department: NSA Not Spying, Americans Overreacting, Journalists Should Be Silenced

October 28, 2013 by Sam Rolley

In a spin-heavy interview with the Department of Defense’s “Armed With Science” blog last week, embattled National Security Agency head Gen. Keith Alexander said that Americans concerned about the NSA’s tactics are exaggerating, he denied that the NSA is involved in “spying” and he accused journalists reporting on the NSA of “selling” NSA secrets.



Alexander, in defending his agency’s practices, parroted many of the refrains officials have used repeatedly to justify the government’s actions following whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s data collection programs.
“When you look at the 9/11 commission, it faulted the intelligence community for not connecting the dots. We didn’t have the tools,” he said. “These [programs we have now] are tools that help us connect the dots. We have learned that lesson once. We all vowed this would never happen again. We should commit to that course of action.”

Later in the interview, Alexander and his government paid interviewer both conceded that the NSA is not involved in “spying” at any level.

Via “Armed With Science”:

So let’s take a look at some of the recent foreign intelligence programs that have been getting a lot of attention lately. You know the ones. You may have seen them in the news, often mislabeled as “spying programs”. Gen. Alexander is quick to correct this misnomer.

“They aren’t spying programs,” he says directly. “One is called the Business Records FISA Program, or Section 215, and the other is called the FISA Amendment Act 702 or PRISM.”

The business records program, or Section 215, is probably the most misunderstood of the two programs. The metadata program takes information and puts it in a data repository. Metadata is the phone number, the date, time, group, and duration of the call.

“That’s all we have,” Gen. Alexander explains. “We don’t have any names or any content.”
…
The second program is the PRISM program or FISA Amendment Act 702. PRISM is a little bit different. PRISM is a content program. The program legally compels service providers to supply information to the government if there is an appropriate and documented foreign intelligence reason and the subject of interest is believed to be outside the U.S.

It also has to be one end foreign, not on U.S. persons, Gen. Alexander explains. This, of course, requires a lot of management and review. A lot.

While Alexander contended that the public has no reason to be outraged because the NSA is simply protecting the Nation from another 9/11, he certainly is not interested in Americans learning anything more about how the NSA operates. In fact, he said that he wants “courts and policymakers” to come up with a way to keep journalists from reporting on the NSA.

“I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 — whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these — you know it just doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said, referring to the trove of NSA data made public by Snowden.

“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” the NSA director continued.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/10/2...d-be-silenced/

An excerpt from our upcoming project NSA Files: Decoded

Three degrees of separation: breaking down the NSA's 'hops' surveillance method

You don’t need to be talking to a terror suspect to have your communications data analysed by the NSA. The agency is allowed to travel “three hops” from its targets – who could be people who talk to people who talk to people who talk to you. Facebook, where the typical user has 190 friends, shows how three degrees of separation gets you to a network bigger than the population of Colorado. How many people are three “hops” from you?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/int...s-decoded-hops

Feinstein Continues Crusade To Defend NSA, Even As Senate Democrats And The Author Of The Patriot Act Say The Spy Agency Is Out Of Control

October 29, 2013 by Sam Rolley

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has set aside her crusade to take away Americans’ 2^ndAmendment rights in recent months to devote the bulk of her energy to ensuring that the Federal government retains its ability to abrogate the 4^th Amendment with impunity by conducting unchecked mass surveillance.

Credit: UPI

Two weeks ago, Feinstein took to The Wall Street Journal to pen an op-ed in shameless defense of the National Security Agency’s spying efforts titled “The NSA’s Watchfulness Protects America.” Her argument hinged on remembering the 9/11 terror attacks, repeatedly noting that terror attacks remain a possibility and promoting the idea that Americans should accept that the NSA is keeping the Nation safe because the NSA says it is doing so.
She wrote: “The program—which collects phone numbers and the duration and times of calls, but not the content of any conversations, names or locations—is necessary and must be preserved if we are to prevent terrorist attacks.”
The following Sunday, the Senator penned another piece for USA Today, insisting that the NSA isn’t doing anything that could be considered spying and that “the NSA call-records program is legal and subject to extensive congressional and judicial oversight.”
“The call-records program is not surveillance. It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations,” she insisted. “The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration. The Supreme Court has held this ‘metadata’ is not protected under the Fourth Amendment.”
Feinstein’s arguments follow what seems to be the government’s official narrative on the NSA’s “non-spying.”
Last week, NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander parroted a similar message talking about Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“They aren’t spying programs,” he said. “One is called the Business Records FISA Program, or Section 215, and the other is called the FISA Amendment Act 702 or PRISM.”
What Feinstein and Alexander both ignore is not what Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) say on paper, but rather the Federal government’s perverse application of those sections—the result of which is wholly illegal and unConstitutional mass data collection.
While some lawmakers—Democrat and Republican—have acknowledged the NSA’s misdeed in interpreting the Acts and have sought to reform the FISA court to provide additional oversight, Feinstein’s latest moves indicate that she is willing to go to war, even with members of her own party, to codify the NSA’s spying powers.
“I do not want to leave the United States in a position where we are open to another major attack because we can’t ferret out who terrorists might be calling in this country to put it together,” Feinstein said in an interview over the weekend.
In her capacity as the head of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Feinstein is working to create legislation that would do little more than restate the NSA’s authority to gather records listing the numbers, duration and time of all U.S. telephone calls. The Senator claims that the legislation would increase privacy protections and Congressional oversight— but she has given no indication that her bill would rein in current abuses of surveillance authority. Many of Feinstein’s critics say that she is simply attempting to create legislation stating that the NSA activities which have recently elicited public outrage are the norm.
“It seems as though the Intelligence committees are working on bills designed to allow them to say they are advancing reforms without fundamentally changing much of anything,” Julian Sanchez, a research fellow with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, told National Review.
The Feinstein bill will face competing and more privacy-friendly legislation offered by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which seeks to stop mass spying, increase transparency about the spying and publicly disclose some of the secret FISA opinions supposedly justifying the programs.
Both of the Senate Democrats have access to classified information pertaining to the NSA’s activities, yet they have managed to come to starkly contrasting conclusions: Feinstein calls the surveillance agency’s programs “data collection.” Leahy refers to the NSA’s actions as outright domestic spying.
Feinstein’s undying dedication to keeping the surveillance status quo intact has led some people to question whether her efforts are truly the result of a belief that “it’s the only way we prevent an attack” or if she simply has become too close to the Nation’s intelligence agencies.
One legislator who has questioned Feinstein’s motives is Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who is expected to introduce a House version of the Leahy bill as soon as today. The Representative, who was an author of the original 2001 Patriot Act that made the NSA programs possible, contends that Feinstein is simply offering surveillance critics a “fig leaf” to quiet displeasure about an out-of-control surveillance state.
“The National Security Agency has gone overboard in grabbing everyone’s phone records. They have never been specific as to how many terrorist plots they stopped and it’s time this gets straightened around,” he said. “The original intention of these laws is to find out who is a foreigner who is involved in terrorist activities and then find out who that person is talking to rather than taking everyone’s records and sifting through them.”

Filed Under: Liberty News, Privacy, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/10/2...ut-of-control/