Thread: NSA is More Than Just a Spy Network, it’s Global Fascism

NSA is More Than Just a Spy Network, it’s Global Fascism

By Patrick Henningsen
Russia Today
July 18, 2013



Despite the size and scope of Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, there’s little sign of Washington DC changing its practices, and even less of an indication that any of its European allies will actually hold it to account.

Germany Flip-Flops
Germany’s change of direction on this issue reveals a lot about the scale of the problem. Angela Merkel’s initial public response seemed to be that of outrage. “We are no longer in the cold war,” said Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert. “If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable”(Guardian July 1, 2013).
Merkel’s public façade didn’t hold up for long after Snowden revealed in Der Spiegel magazine only days later that the US and Germany were in fact partnering in the global spy network. “They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states”, the German magazine quotes Snowden as saying, adding that the NSA has a Foreign Affairs Directorate which is responsible for cooperation with other countries (RT July 8, 2013). The Der Spiegel report also indicated how German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and NSA work together.
The embarrassment of this Snowden bombshell seemed to force Germany down a notch, with Merkel opting for a new policy of appeasement instead. So was the initial rift between the US and Germany mere political theatre?
Merkel told Die Zeit that there was “a need to discuss the balance between privacy and security, but protection against terrorism was not possible without the option of electronic surveillance”. She then added, “(I want) the necessary discussions with the United States to be conducted in the spirit which, despite the many justified questions, never forgets that America has been our most loyal ally over the decades and still is” (Reuters July 10, 2013).
But it’s Merkel’s last statement which indicates that she may be just as out of touch with public opinion as the culture of denial which still dominates Washington DC. “For me, there is no comparison at all between the state security (Stasi) of the GDR and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,”Merkel told Die Zeit (Reuters July 10, 2013). Incredible.
No real accountability
Putting the overall theme of government abuse of power into perspective, this week provided a solid example of what should happen in an advanced civilized democracy. Luxembourg’s long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his resignation this week over a spying scandal involving illegal phone-taps, alongside a number other highly corrupt activities.
In normal times, what happened in Luxembourg should also happen in other countries like the US, or Great Britain – but these are far from normal times. What passes for normal in this bizarre epoch is anyone’s guess, and the same goes for what is deemed to be ‘legal’, especially in the United States.
Snowden’s revelations should have been a watershed moment, but instead in 2013, there appears to be no parliamentary controls to regulate the practice of warrantless digital surveillance and data theft on the part of government agencies, and even less chance of justice in the courts, where adjudicators have been rendered impotent to enforce the law which have been buried under an avalanche of emergency war-time edicts and executive orders.
Well before the Snowden affair this year, Germany effectively cleared the legal path for one of the corporations within the NSA collective. Through the use of administrative courts and the EU, the Administrative Court of Schleswig, Germany upheld two decisions on February 14th, 2013 which ruled that German data protection laws do not apply to data processing by Facebook (file numbers 8 B 60/12 and 8 B 61/1).These controversial judicial procedure were initiated by Facebook Inc. (USA) and by Facebook Ltd. (Ireland, EU), and reversed a previous order by the Independent State Center for Data Protection of Schleswig-Holstein (ULD) which had ruled to allow users to sign in on Facebook using a pseudonym and to unblock those user-accounts that had been blocked due to the users not using their real name and personal data. At the time this was seen as a victory for Facebook the corporation – when in fact it was really a victory for the NSA – who harvests its data from Facebook.
NSA and GCHQ: A Joint Venture
Based on these latest Snowden leaks, we’ve learned more about the true nature of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ partnership in this international spy network, sharing their data and communications. Through the UK Government’s Communications Headquarters known as TEMPORA, the British agency is able to tap over 200 fiber optic cables landing in the UK, saving everything – up to 27 petabytes a day, which are then parsed out to 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA colleagues who then sift through it.
Over a decade of Patriot Acts, FISA laws and Wikileaks cables has left Americans and Europeans alike in a precarious state akin to Stockholm Syndrome, where their love of digital communications almost trumps their concerns for privacy. This same ambiguity has been echoed by Obama and Merkel, who both claim that protection against terrorism is not possible without the option of electronic surveillance. But the narrative which was originally framed around Washington’s invasion of its citizens’ privacy has since gone international. It’s now about governments partnering with each other – and with corporations, in the largest global digital dragnet imaginable.
The extent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) overseas spying in Europe has stunned the European public for sure, and appears to have rattled the political classes in Germany and Brussels – but only for now.
According to Edward Snowden’s revelations in the German magazine Der Spiegel last week, the NSA snoops through approximately 20-60 million German phone connections, and 10 million internet data sets a day. According to the Snowden report, all in all, the NSA combs through around half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages on a monthly basis.
To add insult to injury, it’s been said the US intelligence regards Germany as a “third class partner”, on par with the likes of China and Iraq, making them fair game for NSA targeting. It’s not just Berlin, as the NSA are also said to have bugged EU diplomatic offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks.
So where is the crisis of international diplomacy between the US and Europe? Under normal circumstances, this might morph into a major diplomatic crisis pitting the EU members on one side and the US on the other – but alas, these are not really normal times. Germany and the EU came out swinging, well, sort of.
President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz hit out immediately stating:
“If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations”.
Brussels immediately passed a non-binding resolution, which said that unless the US provided full disclosure about its email and communications data, then two EU-US transatlantic information-sharing deals could be revoked. Those deals are the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) and Passenger Name Records (PNR). Both were rammed through the EU Parliament during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It gives the US Treasury carte blanche on all European stored data on international financial transfers, and gives US Homeland Security carte blanche on all passenger check-ins and ticket bookings on flights.
Few believe that the EU will actually make good on their threats, seeing the initial reaction as a mere face-saving exercise, leading to no real action by MEPs in Brussels.
Global Data Industry: A Digital Cartel
The corporate aspect should not be underrated in terms of its central role in the international digital data trade. Edward Snowden’s PRISM revelations of government controlled NSA wiretapping and data theft are nothing new, as former CIA analyst Russell Tice prove almost a decade ago in 2005 by showing that the NSA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens. But the NSA cannot operate without the partnership of these companies – all of whom have offices and operational hubs in most foreign markets.
Herein resides the key aspect in all of this – that in order for agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to get easy access to all of our digital communications and data, they still need the cooperation of corporations to do it. In the US, it’s now known what role major ISPs and mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T play in this equation within US borders, including the existence of NSA-controlled SG3 collection rooms embedded within the companies facilities. Shocking enough, but not nearly as shocking if you consider the role of transnational corporations in enabling the NSA access to your digital threads.
Internationally, citizens have already signed over most of their privacy simply by using the digital services of US multinationals like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo and others. All of these corporation operate within a ‘profit-first’ ethical vacuum where, in many cases, they are actually charging the NSA for the privilege of consuming their customers’ communications and data. According to the recent Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft Corp and the NSA is astonishing, where Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption protocols on Outlook, Skype video and cloud services, and where data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA (Guardian July 12, 2013).
The horrible irony here is too obvious to ignore: the US government, through its NSA, is giving away taxpayer dollars so these corporations can profit from handing over all of your personal communications and data.
Such an unholy alliance between partnering governments and transnational corporations could be defined as fascism, but the global nature of this operation might require a new term to define what means as a global phenomenon.
Amidst the international Snowden media circus, it’s important not to forget that what has enabled agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to act with impunity, is the fact that both these governments have excelled in capitalising on a post-September 11th paranoia that has hijacked the national consciousness in both the US and the UK. The entire basis upon which their relentless war-time remit has been erected can be described in three words: “War on Terror”.
It’s already clear to the global citizenry that the US federal government and its NSA are out of control, and should be reined in as soon as possible in order to preserve any remaining moral standing for a country which has exhausted nearly all of its goodwill internationally – as well as domestically.
Judging by Washington’s stoic and unapologetic stance thus far, goodwill doesn’t seem to be a high priority yet. Until the problem is properly addressed, there will remain a gaping hole of moral leadership in the international community.
What political leaders are slow the realize is that when the goodwill has been exhausted, so has the trust, and that’s a very slippery slope indeed.
Reprinted with permission from Russia Today.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/p...a-spy-network/

5 things to know about lawsuit against NSA

By Eric Boehm / July 17, 2013




NSA photo

ALL YOUR PHONE CALLS ARE BELONG TO US: The NSA collects “meta-data” including call duration and location, for all Americans at all times. That violates at least three amendments to the Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed in California on Wednesday.


By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org
It seems government spying is one of the few things that can unite disparate groups on the left and the right.
Led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit law firm, more than 20 groups from across the political spectrum filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the National Security Agency, FBI and the U.S. government challenging the constitutionality of widespread collection of telephone data.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It will be months before the case goes anywhere, but here’s five questions you’re probably asking about the complicated legal maneuver.
1. Who is suing the NSA?
Everyone. Well, not quite. But the list of plaintiffs in the lawsuit is pretty long – it includes churches, nonprofits and political organizations.
The amazing thing about the lawsuit is the bipartisanship of it all. One of the plaintiffs is GreenPeace. There are three pro-gun groups on the list. And two groups advocating for drug legalization.
How often do you see environmental groups teaming up with gun rights activists? When it comes to the government surveillance, all politically active groups have reason to fear government surveillance, said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, one of the plaintiffs in the case.
“I think there is probably nothing that our groups agree on except for this,” Buttar said during a Wednesday interview with Watchdog.org. “It is offensive to Americans from all walks of life.”
2. Why are they filing a lawsuit?
The plaintiffs argue the NSA and other agencies (they are also suing the FBI, the heads of the NSA and FBI, and the United States as an entity, which brings Attorney General Eric Holder into the mix as well) has violated the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution “as well as statutory prohibitions and limitations on electronic surveillance.”
The groups argue that they have standing on their own, but they also argue that all members of their staff and any person they have had contact with could be a party to the lawsuit because of the breadth of the NSA’s “dragnet electronic surveillance” collection of phone data.
Aside from privacy rights concerns, the groups bringing the lawsuit say the NSA tracking threatens the right of free association guaranteed by the First Amendment.
“People who hold controversial views — whether it’s about gun ownership policies, drug legalization, or immigration — often must express views as a group in order to act and advocate effectively,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ”But fear of individual exposure when participating in political debates over high-stakes issues can dissuade people from taking part.”
3. So they are upset about the government collecting phone records?
Yes, but that’s not all. The plaintiffs make it clear that the collection of the so-called telephone meta-data (information about the location and duration of calls, along with numbers dialed) is unconstitutional in their view. But after the NSA and other security agencies gather than data, they have to sift through it somehow, ostensibly to find patterns of calls that might indicate someone is involved in terrorist activity.
NOT SO SECRET ANYMORE: The plaintiffs in the case say the government's admission that the NSA is running a massive domestic spying program will force judges to consider the merits of the program - previous efforts were derailed because the program was not proven to exist.

NOT SO SECRET ANYMORE: The plaintiffs in the case say the government’s admission that the NSA is running a massive domestic spying program will force judges to consider the merits of the program – previous efforts were derailed because the program was not proven to exist.


Any searches of that collected data is equally unconstitutional, the plaintiffs argue, because it is “neither relevant to an existing authorized criminal investigation nor to an existing authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism.”
The government maintains that any search of that database is only done with the permission of a court — a June memo from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said “surveillance programs like this one … are designed to strike the appropriate balance between national security interests and civil liberties and privacy concerns” — but it’s a court that is top secret and issues warrants that are equally top secret, so it’s hard to tell.
4. What does this have to do with that Edward Snowden guy the media keeps talking about?
Nothing directly, but everything, indirectly. While much of media continues to be fascinated with NSA-leaker Edward Snowden’s international search for asylum beyond the reach of the U.S. government, this is far more serious than a reality show-type coverage the cable networks are giving it.
The lawsuit cuts to the heart of the questionably legal activity exposed by Snowden, a former contractor who worked for the NSA before leaking information about the federal government’s electronic dragnet and going on the run.
As part of their court filing, the plaintiffs included some of the classified documents leaked by Snowden. So even though he is not involved in this case at all, the lawsuit would not exist without him.
5. What do the plaintiffs want out of this?
The plaintiffs are asking a federal judge to impose an immediate injunction to shut down the federal government’s electronic surveillance program, which the plaintiffs say started all the way back in 2001 and was expanded in 2006 and again in 2011.
They also want the judge to rule the program unconstitutional because they say it violates the First Amendment protection on free speech and free association, the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fifth Amendment protection for privacy rights.
They also want all data collected by the program destroyed.
Buttar said it will be months, or even years, before there is a definitive ruling in the case. But now that the government has admitted the existence of the electronic surveillance programs, judges will have to consider the merits of the programs.
“That admission gives us the opportunity to hurdle one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced in previous cases challenging the government’s spying programs,” he said.
Eric Boehm is a national reporter for Watchdog.org. Contact him at Eric@PAIndependent.com and on Twitter @EricBoehm87

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News Link • Military Industrial Complex



America’s “Intelligence-industrial Complex”

By Joseph Kishore
Global Research, July 15, 2013
World Socialist Web Site


An important aspect of the spying operations that have been exposed over the past month by National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden is the collusion of giant telecommunications and technology companies with the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies in the systematic violation of democratic rights.

A major element in this corporate-intelligence nexus was revealed late last week in articles detailing software giant Microsoft’s intimate relations with the NSA and the FBI.
According to Snowden, Microsoft worked with the NSA to develop procedures to get around the company’s own encryption mechanisms, allowing unfettered access to its Outlook.com service, which includes Hotmail, Messenger and other widely used programs. It also collaborated with the FBI and NSA to ensure access to SkyDrive, a file-hosting service used by some 250 million people.
In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype, a chat, voice and video communications system that currently has 800 million users. While Skype had already begun collaborating with US spy agencies, the NSA boasted that nine months after Microsoft took over the company, the number of video calls accessed by the agency had tripled.
The US government’s relations with Microsoft are critical to its efforts to accumulate databases containing vast stores of information. Microsoft is the world’s largest software maker, run by the world’s second-wealthiest individual, Bill Gates. The company’s Windows operating system is used on nearly 90 percent of web-connected computers. Given the latest revelations, it should be assumed that most actions performed on Microsoft computers are susceptible to government monitoring.
Microsoft is by no means the only company working secretly, behind the backs of its customers, to provide massive amounts of information to the state.
The first revelation by Snowden concerned an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring telecommunications giant Verizon to turn over the phone records of its millions of customers. This is part of a program, begun in 2006 and continued under Obama, to collect “metadata” from all the major phone companies, including AT&T and Sprint. With detailed information on who called whom, when, and from where, the state is able to determine the social and political relations of virtually every resident of the United States.
The spying on Skype users is part of the broader PRISM program, begun in 2007, through which the NSA has gained direct access to the servers of US Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, YouTube and Apple.
PRISM itself is only part of an even more expansive program, in which the NSA taps directly into the “Internet backbone”—the system of fiber optic cables through which most telecommunications and Internet communications pass. These cables are run and controlled by large corporations, including the same telecommunications giants that hand over data on phone records, as well as companies such as 3 Communications and CenturyLink. In this way, the NSA can monitor in real time much of the world’s Internet traffic and reroute it for permanent storage.
Bloomberg News reported last month that “thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with US national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified information.” In exchange for their secret collaboration with the government, the companies often receive documents guaranteeing immunity for their actions.
The programs cited by Bloomberg are diverse and far-reaching. They include an agreement with Microsoft to inform the NSA of bugs in its operating systems before they are publicly released—giving the agency an opportunity to exploit the information to infiltrate computers in the US and abroad. McAfee, which makes Internet security software and is a subsidiary of Intel, also partners with intelligence agencies on a regular basis.
The corporate-intelligence collaboration is global. Over the weekend, newspapers in Australia reported on a partnership between US spy agencies and Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, to hand over data to the US government. Telstra controls the bulk of the Internet backbone in Australia and routes much of the communications traffic from Asia.
Earlier this month, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has worked with Snowden, reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo of a program, dubbed FAIRVIEW, that has collected billions of communications of ordinary Brazilians. Again, telecommunications companies have been directly involved. According to Greenwald, “the NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company… and that US company then partners with telecoms in foreign countries.” The foreign telecoms provide data to the US company, which delivers it to the NSA.
In some cases, the intimate connection between intelligence agencies and telecommunications companies involves the passage of individuals directly from one to the other. For example, the current chief of security for Verizon, Michael Mason, is the former chief of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. The same position at AT&T is held by Edward Amoroso, a member of President Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” in the 1980s—the project to build a missile defense shield over the US.
In 1961, in his farewell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex,” which he described as “the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” This growing nexus posed the threat of the “disastrous rise of misplaced power,” which, he declared, “endangers our liberties and democratic processes.”
Fifty years later, the integration of the military-intelligence apparatus and giant corporations is far more advanced than anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Not only does the military have the closest relations with private contractors for the production of weapons, but the state, acting on behalf of the ruling class as a whole, has developed a network of relations with gigantic corporations to spy on the population.
The American ruling class is carrying out a global policy of war and social counter-revolution. The construction of a police state apparatus is aimed above all at the working class and will be used against social and political opposition to this policy.



Articles by: Joseph Kishore

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Issue 188
Jul 16 - Aug 6, 2013
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Graphic by Mikael Tarkela


National

As the NSA Follows You, We Follow the Money



By
Emily Masters
July 16, 2013


Issue #
188
Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has witnessed the rapid growth of an intelligence-industrial complex that fuses government and corporate power. According to the Project on Government Oversight, $300 billion a year is now spent on a “shadow government of private contractors.” At the center of this arrangement is an interlocking web of current and former high-level government officials, major corporations, D.C. think tanks and other inside-the-Beltway operators who have benefitted from the rise of the surveillance state. Here are a few of the most notable:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Richard C. Blum: The Intelligence Power Couple
Life must be good when you are deciding on government cyber-intelligence spending. But it must be even better if your husband is profiting handsomely off those decisions.
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is married to Richard C. Blum, who was substantially invested in URS Corp, which owns EG&G, a leading government technical provider that has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in security-related contracts. Feinstein never abstained from voting when it affected her husband’s wallet and Blum made $100 million when he sold his shares, as investigative reporter Peter Byrne exposed in his 2007 series the “Feinstein Files.”
Rep. Mike Rogers: Taking Care of His Backers
“These narrowly targeted programs are legal, do not invade Americans’ privacy, and are essential to detecting and disrupting future terrorist attacks,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R. - Mich.) wrote in a USA Today editorial. As chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he was asked to respond to the NSA leaks.
What did his editorial leave out? That, of his top 20 contributors, Rogers received campaign financing from eight of the major private intelligence contractors along with over $100,000 from defense industry Political Action Committees (PACs) in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Rogers recently introduced legislation for the “improvement and reauthorization” of the USA PATRIOT Act, the post-9/11 law that has been used to greatly expand the surveillance state.
John M. “Mike” McConnell: Making the Revolving Door Spin
Mike McConnell’s résumé reads like an advertisement for Washington’s revolving door. In 1996, after four years as the NSA Director, he moved to Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading private intelligence contractor. McConnell was the Senior Vice President at Booz until 2006, when President George W. Bush added him to the cabinet as Director of National Intelligence. McConnell returned to Booz in 2009, becoming vice chairman and earning between $2 to $4 million a year, according to The New York Times. In a 2012 interview with the Times, he dismissed groups calling for greater privacy protections as “special interests.”
Michael Chertoff: In Search of Opportunity
Michael Chertoff certainly gets around. In 2001, he helped craft the PATRIOT Act while serving as Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Justice Department. After a stint as Secretary of Homeland Security (2005-2009), Chertoff co-founded the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “helps our clients identify new opportunities around the world to grow and invest in the security industry.” One of those “new opportunities” turned out to be a multi-million dollar government contract for the controversial full-body airport scanners which were produced by OSI Systems, a client of the Chertoff Group.
The Intelligence and National Security Alliance: Trade Association for Spooks
Washington, D.C. is rife with trade associations lobbying the government to shower favors on their member companies. For the intelligence industry, INSA is the go-to group that has played a key role in facilitating the outsourcing of government intelligence work to private companies. Past chairs of INSA’s Board of Directors include Mike McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence (2006–2009) and CIA Director John Brennan, a key architect of the Obama administration’s expanded use of drones.
Northrop Grumman: Investing in Its Future
Northrop Grumman has made a pretty penny for its work focused on homeland security, as well as drones and naval vessels. According to Business Insider, the company made a total profit of $2 billion in 2012.
The United States’ third largest military contractor, Northrop Grumman spent $17.5 million on lobbying in 2012. It also dished out an additional $4 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, bestowing donations of $10,000 or more on 98 members of Congress, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who received a $20,800 contribution.
Booz Allen Hamilton: Connections Pay Off
As the privatization of U.S. intelligence advances, industry leaders like Booz Allen Hamilton are engaged directly in information gathering and providing analysis and advice to government officials, according to The New York Times. A-list names with ties to Booz Allen include James Clapper, the current Director of National Intelligence and a former Booz executive, and Mike McConnell, a former Director of National Intelligence and the company’s current vice-chairman. It’s quite a business model. In June, the Times reported, “Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.”
The Heritage Foundation: Champion of Privatization
“Efficiently tapping the private sector for national security can be an enormous competitive advantage for the U.S.,” James Carafano, Heritage VP, said on the foundation’s blog.
That’s hardly shocking since this leading conservative foundation receives funding from five major military contractors, including Northrop Grumman, according to Heritage’s 2011 annual report.
Think tanks, often cited in the media, have the ear of both politicians and the public, which is why their funders take such a keen interest in their work.
Brookings Institute: Promoting Bipartisan Consensus
“There is little reason for all but a handful of Americans to lose sleep over [PRISM], and those most likely to lose sleep are also most likely to pose security threats.” No, that wasn’t the Heritage Foundation. That was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, a venerable D.C. think tank with deep ties to the Democratic Party and extensive corporate funding. Major donors to Brookings include Booz Allen Hamilton, which donated more than $1 million, according to the 2012 Brookings Annual Report. Brookings received $250,000 from Richard C. Blum and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Contributions of $25,000 to $100,000 each rolled in from Northrop Grumman and four other defense contractors. Blum also serves on the Board of Trustees with Vice Chair David M. Rubenstein, the Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, which owns Booz Allen.

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For more surveillance state coverage, see:
New Poster Series: Edward Snowden, by Indy Staff
Glenn Greenwald Reflects on Meeting Snowden, by Glenn Greenwald
Under the Gaze, by Nicholas Powers
Avoiding Online Surveillance: Tips & Tricks, by Tactical Tech Team
For a PDF of this issue, click here.

- See more at: http://www.indypendent.org/2013/07/1....5zgmYBoF.dpuf

Thursday, 18 July 2013 09:55 Safety or Statism: The Goal of the Surveillance State

Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

• 
  

If you have nothing to hide, why should you worry about the government’s goal of “collecting it all?”
Although nearly every law, regulation, or order issued by the federal government is almost indecipherable because of the amount of vague language, when it says it is collecting all information, it really means all information.
That three-word incriminating phrase first appeared in a Washington Post op-ed featured in a story published earlier this week by The New American. On July 16, Thomas R. Eddlem wrote:
The Washington Post ran a lengthy profile of NSA Director Keith B. Alexander on July 14, summarizing Alexander's philosophy with the phrase, “Collect it all.” A July 15 op-ed by Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane suggested that “the United States needs to engage in data collection on a wide scale, both at home and abroad.”
The original NSA profile piece explained the origins of Alexander's unconstitutional surveillance state during the Iraq War, explaining that it began as an attempt to gather war-related intelligence from foreigners: “The NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”
In the original Washington Post piece, General Alexander trots out one of the surveillance state’s favorite tropes: Our snooping keeps you safe. Then, he points out that were it not for the powers granted to the government (unconstitutionally) by the slate of post-9/11 “laws,” Iraq wouldn’t be as safe as it is today.
It’s one thing to explain away his department’s disregard for the Constitution and the civil liberties it protects, but it is another degree of daring altogether to hold up Iraq as the epitome as safety.
In his defense, maybe General Alexander is too busy listening to private phone calls or snooping into Skype sessions to read this recent report fromthe Economist:
After a lull of nearly five years during which it seemed as if Iraq might be emerging from the legacy of its civil war, the country has been drawn back into a nightmare of spiralling attacks on a widening range of targets. The past four months have been among the bloodiest since 2008; nearly 3,000 people have been killed and over 7,000 injured. But the Islamic State of Iraq, the latest incarnation of al-Qaeda, now appears to have broadened its scope from its trademark attacks on security forces and Shia mosques and markets, to suicide-bombings of cafés and funeral gatherings.
Perhaps that’s what Alexander meant when he said, “If we give up a capability that is critical to the defense of this nation, people will die”: Thanks to the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of the electronic communications of millions of Americans who aren’t suspected of even the slightest criminal intent, the United States will soon be a venue of violence on par with Iraq.
Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless of the government’s guarantees of safety, the unavoidable fact is, as Ron Paul wrote, “If we give up our Constitution and its protections against a power-hungry government, the United States as we know it will die.”
Death by a thousand paper cuts seems to be the fate of this union. The “parchment barrier” is being shredded and the constitutional confetti that remains of the fundamental freedoms it was written to safeguard are tossed onto the heads of the heroes of the surveillance state.
What is the purpose of the wholesale collection of every electronic fingerprint left by Americans? Again, safety is the shield, but statism is the sword.
To understand the depth of the dilemma, one must begin with the threshold understanding that all the data collected by the NSA and its surveillance sisters will be stored indefinitely, so that the data can be analyzed by federal agents for signs of potential criminal behavior.
These sweeping powers resulted from a debate among Obama administration intelligence officials.
“The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency — how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored — and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens,” the Wall Street Journal reported, claiming that the newspaper received this insight into the process through Freedom of Information requests and interviews with representatives at several agencies familiar with the events.
In a historic and unconstitutional way, the new directives grant the NSA the power to place every American under the constant surveillance of the federal government, not because these people have ever merited the attention, but because someday they might.
Granting an agency of the federal government the power to place innocent citizens under surveillance is not only an unconscionable diminution of due process rights, but a complete regulatory nullification of the Bill of Rights.
Another equally intrusive aspect of the new regulations allows agents of the U.S. government to exchange the information gathered on citizens to be shared with their counterparts in other countries so that they can conduct their own analyses. Should any agent — foreign or domestic — find any hint of potential threats in these files, the individual will be marked for future surveillance so as to prevent commission of future crimes.
Beyond the Minority Report angle to this story, there are the possible violations on the prohibition of the enactment of ex post facto law. Article I Section 9 is the source of this constitutional restriction on congressional power. The Constitution mandates that no “ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
Turned on its head, the government now insists that that section does not mean that if monitored behavior is legal when the record of it is made, then the person committing the act may not thereafter be subject to prosecution if the act is subsequently outlawed.
The revised interpretation of ex post facto was explained by Robert Litt, general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He complained to the Washington Post that the former (read: constitutional) framework was “very limiting.” “On Day One, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Then six months later, all of a sudden, it becomes relevant,” Litt said.
Alexander Hamilton warned against this type of mercurial legislating: "The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."
In a response to the Post piece on Alexander and the “collecting it all” caption, Ron Paul echoed Hamilton’s warning of the approach of tyranny presaged by the appearance of an all-seeing, all-powerful federal government. In a post published by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the former congressman and constitutionalist icon wrote:
What “collecting it all” does mean is that our every electronic human interaction is stored indefinitely by the federal government for possible future use against us should we ever fall out of government favor by, for example, joining a pro-peace organization, joining a pro-gun organization, posting statements critical of government spying on our Facebook pages or elsewhere. This massive database will be used — and perhaps has already been used — to keep us in line. The absence of meaningful Congressional oversight — unless cheerleading counts as oversight — means that no one will put the brakes on people like Keith Alexander, whose “passion” to “protect” us is leading us into totalitarianism.
The key phrase in Paul’s commentary is “leading us into totalitarianism.” Although the hour is late, Americans zealous of liberty and committed to its preservation need not be led into that abyss.

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at jwolverton@thenewamerican.com

http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/con...eillance-state

Congressman: Did You Think This Program Could be Indefinitely Kept Secret from the American People? Government Attorney: “Well we Tried”

Posted on July 18, 2013


Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the committee, said he was surprised that the programs had been kept secret for so long.
“Do you think a program of this magnitude gathering information involving a large number of people involved with telephone companies could be indefinitely kept secret from the American people?” Goodlatte asked.
“Well,” ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said with a slight smile, “we tried.”
- From a Washington Post article yesterday
The backlash in Congress against the government’s monstrous spy program and the ridiculous notion that a secret court (the FISA court) grants any sort of oversight is growing, and it is a bipartisan effort. More from the Washington Post:
Lawmakers of both parties expressed deep skepticism Wednesday about the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records and threatened not to renew the legislative authority that has been used to sanction a program described as “off the tracks legally.”
“This is unsustainable, it’s outrageous and must be stopped immediately,” said Rep. John Con*yers Jr. (Mich.), the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) — who sponsored the USA Patriot Act, which ostensibly authorized the collection — warned that the House might not renew Section 215 of the act, a key provision that gives the government its authority.
“You’ve got to change how you operate 215. . . or you’re not going to have it anymore,” Sensenbrenner said.
When the sponsor of the Patriot Act says it’s gone too far, you know you are in totalitarian territory.

Cole said the programs are legal and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He also said the programs “achieved the right balance” between protecting Americans’ safety and their privacy.
Remember this is a secret court, the ruling of which are never made public.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the committee, said he was surprised that the programs had been kept secret for so long.
“Do you think a program of this magnitude gathering information involving a large number of people involved with telephone companies could be indefinitely kept secret from the American people?” Goodlatte asked.
“Well,” ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said with a slight smile, “we tried.”
Yeah, you sure did.
In Liberty,
Mike


http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/07...well-we-tried/