Verizon required to give ALL call data to NSA (2 Viewers)

[Ilov80s]

Here's my problem with all of you who call Feinstein clueless on THIS issue:

1. She is privy to everything you guys know about what the NSA is doing.

2. She is privy to a lot of stuff you guys don't know about what the NSA is doing.

Based on these two points, isn't it ironic for anyone here to call her clueless? It's one thing to disagree with her stance on this issue or her conclusions, but shouldn't the term clueless be reserved for someone who knows less, not more, about a topic than you do?

The big difference is that it is her job to monitor US Intelligence for the Senate, she should know more. However, it is clear that she got caught with her pants down with us spying in Germany, on the Pope, etc.

 

[The Commish]

Diane Feinstein is such a fool. She really just said on TV that all Snowden had to do was tell her about the problems he saw and she would have taken care of it. Yeah, ok. She is opposed to is spying on our allies, now that she knows that they know.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one that saw this little gem.This woman is clueless on so many levels and must really think people believe what she says(Tim does of course).

She would have taken care of it

I like Diane Feinstein. I won't attempt to defend her on this issue, because I have discovered that I don't know enough to do so (though I continue to firmly believe this applies to the rest of you as well.)But Senator Feinstein is a sharp, honest public servant and I have a great deal of respect for her. She is the exact opposite of clueless.

Well she is in charge of the Intelligence Committee and she says she had no idea about much of the spying we have been doing. Isn't that kind of the definition of clueless?

Did she say she had "no idea"?

I don't know the direct quote from her, but it was widely reported that she was unaware of spying on foreign allies.

keep reading....it really doesn't matter.

 

[wazoo11]

Tim, for the love of god quit copy and pasting what you wrote or read on other message boards.

 

[Slapdash]

Tim, for the love of god quit copy and pasting what you wrote or read on other message boards.

?

 

[wazoo11]

Tim, for the love of god quit copy and pasting what you wrote or read on other message boards.

?

He regurgitates talking points from /r/politics on Reddit. Or it seems like it.

 

[timschochet]

Tim, for the love of god quit copy and pasting what you wrote or read on other message boards.

?

He regurgitates talking points from /r/politics on Reddit. Or it seems like it.

No, sorry. All the credit (or blame) is mine. If somebody agrees with me on any certain point, I can't help that. And I copy and paste articles all the time. But I have never copied or pasted any arguments. Please refer to my sig.

 

[drummer]

Sobriety checkpoints and mandatory drug testing of student athletes and railroad workers are among the legal precedents justifying the U.S. government’s now-defunct and court-approved secret email metadata dragnet surveillance program, according to documents the authorities released late Monday.

The thousands of pages of records the President Barack Obama administration unveiled include the nation’s first opinion from a secret tribunal authorizing the government to obtain data from the “to,” “from,” “cc,” and “bcc” fields of all emails “to thwart terrorist attacks.”

“This concern clearly involves national security interests beyond the normal need for law enforcement and is at least as compelling as other governmental interests that have been held to justify searches in the absence of individualized suspicion,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, then the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in an opinion (.pdf) believed dated in 2004.

(The 87-page opinion is heavily redacted, including its date. But parsed with other documents in the data dump, experts believe the opinion is dated July 2004. Because the opinion is repeatedly blacked out, it is unclear whether the order authorizes broader internet data collection.)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/nsa-web-metadata/

 

[tom22406]

Fisa court documents reveal extent of NSA disregard for privacy restrictions

Incensed Fisa court judges questioned NSA's truthfulness after repeated breaches of rules meant to protect Americans' privacy





Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy.

The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism.

While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations.

“NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted.



“Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.”

In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well.

Privacy experts have long noted that email metadata is inherently content-rich, as it will show interactions with businesses; or political affiliations such as listserv membership.

The court had required the NSA to comply with a longstanding internal procedure for protecting Americans’ sensitive information prior to sharing the data internally within NSA, known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) and also declassified on Monday night; and additionally required a senior NSA official to determine that any material shared outside the powerful surveillance agency was related to counter-terrorism.

Yet in a separate Fisa court document, the current presiding judge, Reggie Walton, blasted the government’s secret declaration that it followed USSID 18 “rather than specifically requiring that the narrower dissemination provision set forth in the Court’s orders in this matter be strictly adhered to”.

Walton wrote: “The court understands this to mean that the NSA likely has disseminated US person information derived from the [email and internet bulk] metadata outside NSA without a prior determination from the NSA official designated in the court’s orders that the information is related to counter-terrorism information and is necessary to understand the counter-terrorism information or assess its importance.”

In an opinion apparently written in June 2009, Walton said the court was “gravely concerned” that “NSA analysts, cleared and otherwise, have generally not adhered to the dissemination restrictions proposed by the government, repeatedly relied on by the court in authorizing the [email and internet bulk] metadata, and incorporated into the court’s orders in this matter [redacted] as binding on NSA.”

Walton said the NSA’s legal team had failed to satisfy the training requirements that NSA frequently points to in congressional testimony as demonstrating its scrupulousness. Walton added that he was “seriously concerned” by the placement of Americans’ email and internet metadata into “databases accessible by outside agencies, which, as the government has acknowledged, violates not only the court’s orders, but also NSA’s minimization and dissemination procedures as set forth in USSID 18.”

Bates’ heavily redacted opinion suggests that the collection of the internet and email metadata from Americans in bulk provided only minimal relevant information to FBI for generating terrorism investigation leads, the entire purpose of the program. Bates questioned, as a “threshold concern”, the government’s willingness to represent its activities to the Fisa court it cites as the principal check on its surveillance powers.

“The government’s poor track record with bulk [internet and email] acquisition … presents threshold concerns about whether implementation will conform with, or exceed, what the government represents and what the court may approve,” Bates wrote.

Previously disclosed documents show that Bates and Walton wrestled with NSA’s veracity and its overcollection repeatedly, in 2009 and 2011, over different bulk surveillance programs. For much of 2009, Walton prevented NSA analysts from querying its bulk American phone records database until he was satisfied the government complied with court-ordered restrictions.

In 2011, Bates wrote that the “volume and nature” of the NSA’s bulk collection on foreign internet content was “fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”.

Yet the documents disclosed Monday night, thanks to a transparency lawsuit, show that Bates and Walton permitted the surveillance of Americans’ bulk email and internet metadata to continue under additional restrictions, out of concern for the ongoing terrorism threat.

Unlike the bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone data and foreigners’ internet communications, the NSA and the Obama administration decided in 2011 to cease collecting email and internet content from Americans in bulk, a development first reported by the Guardian.

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Guardian at the time that the decision was reached for “operational and resource reasons”. He did not mention the overcollection, nor the dissemination of the information within and beyond NSA in violation of court orders, nor the discomfort with the program by at least two Fisa court judges.

Elizabeth Goitien of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that the declassified opinions raise disturbing questions about the NSA’s truthfulness.

“Either the NSA is really trying to comply with the court’s orders and is absolutely incapable of doing so, in which case it’s terrifying that they’re performing this surveillance, or they’re not really trying to comply,” Goitien said.

“Neither of those explanations is particularly comforting.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/19/fisa-court-documents-nsa-violations-privacy

 

[tom22406]

Senators: 'No evidence' NSA phone sweeps are usefulBy Brendan Sasso




Three Democratic senators filed a brief in federal court on Tuesday supporting a lawsuit to end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records.

Sens. Mark Udall (Colo.), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.), who all have access to classified information as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued that the controversial program does little to combat terrorism.

"[The senators] have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through less intrusive means," lawyers for the lawmakers wrote.

They argued that more targeted surveillance programs could have been used to gather the same information that the NSA obtained through the phone data collection.

"Because the government’s call-records program needlessly intrudes upon the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of Americans, [the senators] believe the bulk collection of these phone records should be ended," they wrote.

The controversial program collects phone numbers, call times and call durations on virtually all U.S. phone calls, but not the contents of communications.

The lawmakers filed their brief to support a lawsuit from a coalition of civil liberties groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The lawsuit claims that the bulk collection violates constitutional rights to privacy, free speech and free association. Public Knowledge, TechFreedom, a Unitarian church and a California gun rights group also signed on to the suit, which was filed in California.

The senators are also pushing legislation to end the bulk phone data collection.

Defenders of the program argue it is critical for "connecting the dots" and thwarting terrorist

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/190787-senators-no-evidence-nsa-phone-sweeps-are-useful

 

[SacramentoBob]

Tim must have the strongest legs in the planet because I've never seen someone dig their heels in as well as he has.

 

[tom22406]

Gen. Keith Alexander, the Director of the National Security Agency, offered to resign after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source of leaked agency documents, according to a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration declined the offer. One former defense official told the newspaper that officials were concerned that Alexander's resignation would give Snowden a win.

The heretofore unreported revelation comes about a month after the announcement that Alexander would leave the agency early next year. Reuters reported Oct. 16 that Alexander was expected to leave by March or April, citing anonymous officials. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed a day later that Alexander, who has led the agency for eight years, would leave his post in March.

Snowden leaked classified documents to The Washington Post and The Guardian in June detailing the agency's telephone and Internet spying programs. He fled to Hong Kong and then Moscow, where he is currently residing.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment on the report, pointing instead to Carney's Oct. 28 statement that President Barack Obama has "full confidence" in Alexander.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/25/keith-alexander-resign-edward-snowden_n_4337114.html

 

[drummer]

Tim must have the strongest legs in the planet because I've never seen someone dig their heels in as well as he has.

It has been beyond the time to take tim out of this discussion.

 

[Slapdash]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'

"Nobody cares about what kind of porn you're watching"

 

[Slapdash]

Big Brother’s liesPublic trust in the federal government is at a record low. All the polls and surveys show it, but we're still expected to take it on faith that everything is done for our own good. The National Security Agency, for example, has been keeping tabs on where we go and when, listens to our telephone calls and reads our emails. If it wants, it could listen to a conversation with Granny, and let us know when we need to stop at the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk. Such all-knowing surveillance is supposed to thwart terrorism. Everyone wants to stop terrorism, so what's wrong with a little surveillance?

Except that it's simply not true that the NSA programs thwart crime. Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico on Tuesday filed a friend of the court brief to support a coalition of two-dozen groups suing the National Security Agency to stop the eavesdropping. All of these senators are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and have access to a great deal of privileged information.

"The evidence shows," wrote the senators, "that the executive branch's claims about the effectiveness of the bulk phone-records program have been vastly overstated and are, in some cases, utterly misleading." When Edward J. Snowden, a former NSA contractor and celebrated leaker, released the top-secret court order authorizing the collection of the telephone records of millions of Americans, the administration's spinners claimed that 54 deadly terrorist plots were thwarted by the snooping. They wrote an imaginative story line to persuade the public that so many lives had been saved that surrendering privacy was worth it.

Now we learn that the administration exaggerated the success story by counting every case in which a captured terrorist might have used a cellphone. "Of the original 54 that the government pointed to," the senators said, "officials have only been able to describe two that involved materially useful information obtained through the bulk call-records program." The senators think those two remaining cases could have been solved without blanket surveillance. It's not possible to say what's true and what's not as long as the relevant information remains locked in the top-secret vaults at the various intelligence agencies.

The known facts do suggest that the effectiveness of dragnet surveillance is greatly exaggerated. Bulk records were being collected from telephone companies in April, yet this breathtaking invasion of privacy did nothing to thwart the Islamist extremists who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon. Instead of trust, the National Security Agency deserves closer scrutiny. The judges of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, charged with oversight of the intelligence community, are clearly not providing that scrutiny.

Newly released rulings of the court show that the judges rubber-stamped the administration's spy requests even though they expressed misgivings about the scope of the snooping and the agency's failure to follow the rules. Of more than 20,000 requests made since Sept. 11, 2001, only a handful have been rejected.

The Founding Fathers, who understood the nature of man, never put a lot of faith in government. They set up a system of checks and balances to prevent one branch of government from accumulating too much power. The National Security Agency now runs amok in the lives of everyone. This cannot stand.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/20/editorial-big-brothers-lies/print/

"These programs, while flawed in implementation, do save lives"

 

[tom22406]

Big Brother’s lies

Public trust in the federal government is at a record low. All the polls and surveys show it, but we're still expected to take it on faith that everything is done for our own good. The National Security Agency, for example, has been keeping tabs on where we go and when, listens to our telephone calls and reads our emails. If it wants, it could listen to a conversation with Granny, and let us know when we need to stop at the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk. Such all-knowing surveillance is supposed to thwart terrorism. Everyone wants to stop terrorism, so what's wrong with a little surveillance?

Except that it's simply not true that the NSA programs thwart crime. Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico on Tuesday filed a friend of the court brief to support a coalition of two-dozen groups suing the National Security Agency to stop the eavesdropping. All of these senators are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and have access to a great deal of privileged information.

"The evidence shows," wrote the senators, "that the executive branch's claims about the effectiveness of the bulk phone-records program have been vastly overstated and are, in some cases, utterly misleading." When Edward J. Snowden, a former NSA contractor and celebrated leaker, released the top-secret court order authorizing the collection of the telephone records of millions of Americans, the administration's spinners claimed that 54 deadly terrorist plots were thwarted by the snooping. They wrote an imaginative story line to persuade the public that so many lives had been saved that surrendering privacy was worth it.

Now we learn that the administration exaggerated the success story by counting every case in which a captured terrorist might have used a cellphone. "Of the original 54 that the government pointed to," the senators said, "officials have only been able to describe two that involved materially useful information obtained through the bulk call-records program." The senators think those two remaining cases could have been solved without blanket surveillance. It's not possible to say what's true and what's not as long as the relevant information remains locked in the top-secret vaults at the various intelligence agencies.

The known facts do suggest that the effectiveness of dragnet surveillance is greatly exaggerated. Bulk records were being collected from telephone companies in April, yet this breathtaking invasion of privacy did nothing to thwart the Islamist extremists who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon. Instead of trust, the National Security Agency deserves closer scrutiny. The judges of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, charged with oversight of the intelligence community, are clearly not providing that scrutiny.

Newly released rulings of the court show that the judges rubber-stamped the administration's spy requests even though they expressed misgivings about the scope of the snooping and the agency's failure to follow the rules. Of more than 20,000 requests made since Sept. 11, 2001, only a handful have been rejected.

The Founding Fathers, who understood the nature of man, never put a lot of faith in government. They set up a system of checks and balances to prevent one branch of government from accumulating too much power. The National Security Agency now runs amok in the lives of everyone. This cannot stand.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/20/editorial-big-brothers-lies/print/

"These programs, while flawed in implementation, do save lives"

So I guess the real question now is what type of reform will we see to this program because I don't see any chance in hell this is done away with?

Based upon everything I've seen in the past I doubt very much will change and this will continue on no matter what.

 

[Statorama]

Finally, some good news

NSA collecting porn activity to discredit individuals the government targets as "radicalizers"

 

[SacramentoBob]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'

"Nobody cares about what kind of porn you're watching"

I'm sure this is another one of those things tim told me would never happen.

 

[tom22406]

This was written about a month ago but does tell the tale of why they won't be doing much change to this program.

Top Obama Lawyers: Reforming the NSA Could Hurt Americans’ Privacy
As Congress considers legislation to reform the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, senior intelligence officials have said publicly that they'd be willing to modify key aspects of how one of the most controversial programs is run. But now, the top lawyers for the NSA and other intelligence agencies are pushing back on that idea, arguing that they should be allowed to continue building a massive database of phone records on every American. It'd be better for American's privacy rights, they claim.

Under one proposal now pending before Congress, telecommunications providers, rather than the NSA, would hold onto the phone call records of hundreds of millions of people that the agency queries to find connections between suspected terrorists and people in the United States. And a bill with bipartisan backing would further limit the NSA's ability to collect that information in bulk. Agency officials have said the database is essential for stopping terrorist attacks. But some lawmakers want to restrict the agency's access to it, in part because the records can reveal private contacts and associations that may have nothing to do with a criminal act.

"I think it's no secret that the sponsors of this bill want to eliminate the bulk collection program," Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, speaking of the bill sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

Litt was joined by lawyers from the NSA, the FBI, and the Justice Department, who likewise tried to shoot down reform ideas, along with other proposals that have attracted bipartisan support in Congress. The board that heard their views was established in the wake of revelations about the bulk collection program and other NSA activities that some members of Congress believe have gone on for too long without restriction

The NSA has previously argued that it was allowed by section 215 of the Patriot Act to store millions of phone records of Americans in order to find potential terrorists and their connections inside the United States. A court found that NSA could hold onto the data on the grounds that it was relevant to terrorism inquiries. In theory, storing the data with the companies, instead of at the NSA, would allow the telcos to serve as a kind of privacy watchdog. They'd be in a position to examine the government's requests for information about their customers and possibly to object to them in court.

But the intelligence lawyers warned that Americans' would be subject to even greater privacy incursions if their personal information were stripped from NSA's control.

Patrick Kelley, the acting general counsel of the FBI, said the phone company data could be made available to "other levels of law enforcement enforcement from local, state and federal who want it for whatever law enforcement purposes they're authorized to obtain it." He also raised a frightening prospect: "Civil litigation could also seek to obtain it for such things as relatively mundane as divorce actions," he said. "Who's calling who with your spouse ... So if the data is kept only by the companies than I think the privacy considerations certainly warrants scrutiny."

There was some irony in that idea. In September, the NSA's inspector general revealed several cases in which NSA employees illegally spied on partners or spouses in an incident known internally as "LOVEINT" (love intelligence).

Any act of Congress modifying the phone records database could include provisions prohibiting the use of telephone metadata for purposes not related to national security. And if lawmakers wanted to keep the information out of the hands of local police or civil attorneys, they could write a provision preserving its exclusive use by the NSA and the intelligence agencies.

Still, the lawyers painted dire scenarios of what would happen if section 215 was fully scrapped rather than modified. "We wouldn't be able to see the patterns that the NSA's programs provide us," Kelley said. "We'd be less agile, we'd be less informed, we'd be less focused, and as a result we'd be a lot less effective in preventing the attacks."

The lawyers also pushed back against a proposal being debated in Congress to appoint a "special advocate" to argue against the government's position in certain matters before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes NSA surveillance. Currently, only lawyers representing the government appear.

"There's a precedential issue that we're very concerned about," said Litt. "Are you going to set up a process that provides more protection for foreign terrorists than for Americans who are subject to criminal search warrants?"

The idea of a special advocate is included in the reform bill sponsored by Leahy and Sensenbrenner that already has more than 80 co-sponsors in the House and Senate. The advocate would not be present every time the government wants to get court approval for surveillance. Rather, he or she would weigh in on matters that affected interpretation of law. A less ambitious reform effort by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) authorizes the FISA court to designate an outside "Amicus Curiae" or "Friends of the Court" to offer an independent perspective.

Privacy advocates speaking to The Cable objected to Litt's reluctance regarding a special advocate. "There should of course be two sides arguing major cases in front of the FISA court," said the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Trevor Timm. "The adversarial process is a bedrock of our judicial system (and democracy), and one of the reasons we've seen such a secret warping of public laws in the past few years is because the [surveillance] court has never heard from anyone but the government."

In other cases, Litt opened the door to more modest reforms, such as retaining copies of Americans' records for a period of less than five years and reducing the kinds of information that the NSA is allowed to query. The other lawyers did not explicitly support those reforms.

The independent board, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is expected to deliver its recommendations to President Obama and Congress by the end of 2013. It's five members report to Congress but were appointed by the president.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/04/top_obama_lawyers_reforming_the_nsa_could_hurt_americans_privacy_rights

 

[tom22406]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'

"Nobody cares about what kind of porn you're watching"

I'm sure this is another one of those things tim told me would never happen.

So basically what we are learning is they will use this to gather any type of information on you if they feel the need to do so.Porn habits???

Can't say I'm surprised but I guess they feel any edge they can get they will use if they are coming after you.

 

[Slapdash]

This was written about a month ago but does tell the tale of why they won't be doing much change to this program.

Top Obama Lawyers: Reforming the NSA Could Hurt Americans’ Privacy

As Congress considers legislation to reform the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, senior intelligence officials have said publicly that they'd be willing to modify key aspects of how one of the most controversial programs is run. But now, the top lawyers for the NSA and other intelligence agencies are pushing back on that idea, arguing that they should be allowed to continue building a massive database of phone records on every American. It'd be better for American's privacy rights, they claim.

Under one proposal now pending before Congress, telecommunications providers, rather than the NSA, would hold onto the phone call records of hundreds of millions of people that the agency queries to find connections between suspected terrorists and people in the United States. And a bill with bipartisan backing would further limit the NSA's ability to collect that information in bulk. Agency officials have said the database is essential for stopping terrorist attacks. But some lawmakers want to restrict the agency's access to it, in part because the records can reveal private contacts and associations that may have nothing to do with a criminal act.

"I think it's no secret that the sponsors of this bill want to eliminate the bulk collection program," Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, speaking of the bill sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

Litt was joined by lawyers from the NSA, the FBI, and the Justice Department, who likewise tried to shoot down reform ideas, along with other proposals that have attracted bipartisan support in Congress. The board that heard their views was established in the wake of revelations about the bulk collection program and other NSA activities that some members of Congress believe have gone on for too long without restriction

The NSA has previously argued that it was allowed by section 215 of the Patriot Act to store millions of phone records of Americans in order to find potential terrorists and their connections inside the United States. A court found that NSA could hold onto the data on the grounds that it was relevant to terrorism inquiries. In theory, storing the data with the companies, instead of at the NSA, would allow the telcos to serve as a kind of privacy watchdog. They'd be in a position to examine the government's requests for information about their customers and possibly to object to them in court.

But the intelligence lawyers warned that Americans' would be subject to even greater privacy incursions if their personal information were stripped from NSA's control.

Patrick Kelley, the acting general counsel of the FBI, said the phone company data could be made available to "other levels of law enforcement enforcement from local, state and federal who want it for whatever law enforcement purposes they're authorized to obtain it." He also raised a frightening prospect: "Civil litigation could also seek to obtain it for such things as relatively mundane as divorce actions," he said. "Who's calling who with your spouse ... So if the data is kept only by the companies than I think the privacy considerations certainly warrants scrutiny."

There was some irony in that idea. In September, the NSA's inspector general revealed several cases in which NSA employees illegally spied on partners or spouses in an incident known internally as "LOVEINT" (love intelligence).

Any act of Congress modifying the phone records database could include provisions prohibiting the use of telephone metadata for purposes not related to national security. And if lawmakers wanted to keep the information out of the hands of local police or civil attorneys, they could write a provision preserving its exclusive use by the NSA and the intelligence agencies.

Still, the lawyers painted dire scenarios of what would happen if section 215 was fully scrapped rather than modified. "We wouldn't be able to see the patterns that the NSA's programs provide us," Kelley said. "We'd be less agile, we'd be less informed, we'd be less focused, and as a result we'd be a lot less effective in preventing the attacks."

The lawyers also pushed back against a proposal being debated in Congress to appoint a "special advocate" to argue against the government's position in certain matters before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes NSA surveillance. Currently, only lawyers representing the government appear.

"There's a precedential issue that we're very concerned about," said Litt. "Are you going to set up a process that provides more protection for foreign terrorists than for Americans who are subject to criminal search warrants?"

The idea of a special advocate is included in the reform bill sponsored by Leahy and Sensenbrenner that already has more than 80 co-sponsors in the House and Senate. The advocate would not be present every time the government wants to get court approval for surveillance. Rather, he or she would weigh in on matters that affected interpretation of law. A less ambitious reform effort by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) authorizes the FISA court to designate an outside "Amicus Curiae" or "Friends of the Court" to offer an independent perspective.

Privacy advocates speaking to The Cable objected to Litt's reluctance regarding a special advocate. "There should of course be two sides arguing major cases in front of the FISA court," said the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Trevor Timm. "The adversarial process is a bedrock of our judicial system (and democracy), and one of the reasons we've seen such a secret warping of public laws in the past few years is because the [surveillance] court has never heard from anyone but the government."

In other cases, Litt opened the door to more modest reforms, such as retaining copies of Americans' records for a period of less than five years and reducing the kinds of information that the NSA is allowed to query. The other lawyers did not explicitly support those reforms.

The independent board, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is expected to deliver its recommendations to President Obama and Congress by the end of 2013. It's five members report to Congress but were appointed by the president.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/04/top_obama_lawyers_reforming_the_nsa_could_hurt_americans_privacy_rights

So we've got to violate privacy on a massive scale to protect it? Pretty sure lesser authorities are already doing this anyways, talk about a red-herring.

 

[Slapdash]

Realistically though, not major is going to change about these programs. They are broadly supported by both parties and the media either misrepresents or ignores the criticisms against it. This story just gets bigger everyday while there is hardly any coverage on most mainstream outlets.

 

[tom22406]

Realistically though, not major is going to change about these programs. They are broadly supported by both parties and the media either misrepresents or ignores the criticisms against it. This story just gets bigger everyday while there is hardly any coverage on most mainstream outlets.

Why do you think this is the case?

I totally agree with you on both parts of this.This will be swept under the rug with very little to no changes being made.

 

[Nikki2200]

Probably because people's attention spans are small and now there's Obamacare to get riled up about.

The media really was all over this when the Snowden stuff first came out. So it's unfair to say they were trying to hide it.

 

[Ilov80s]

Probably because people's attention spans are small and now there's Obamacare to get riled up about.

The media really was all over this when the Snowden stuff first came out. So it's unfair to say they were trying to hide it.

The media also took a very anti-Snowden viewpoint. I think the media coverage has been pro-government all things considered. Especially when you look at their editorial panel segments (which seems to dominate cable news). Ultimately, you are right that people don't care enough. It bores people.

 

[tom22406]

Probably because people's attention spans are small and now there's Obamacare to get riled up about.

The media really was all over this when the Snowden stuff first came out. So it's unfair to say they were trying to hide it.

No question when this story first broke it was everywhere so I'm certainly not saying they were hiding it then.My concern is everything we have learned since this story came out(and it is quite substantial)but you rarely hear a word out of the tv media no matter what slant they may have regarding the new findings.Sure we get a little here and there from time to time but the story has basically went away and I'm sure the reason you wrote is fair and accurate.

You can see how this thread basically died as a prime example.Most either don't care or don't think they can really do anything to stop it so why bother.

 

[SacramentoBob]

Realistically though, not major is going to change about these programs. They are broadly supported by both parties and the media either misrepresents or ignores the criticisms against it. This story just gets bigger everyday while there is hardly any coverage on most mainstream outlets.

Why do you think this is the case?

Because Obama bullied media members who tried to report on this.

 

[Slapdash]

After Snowden, we're self-censoring and we don't care

By Suzanne Nossel

Headlines have focused on irate calls by heads of state to President Barack Obama and parliamentary moves to restore privacy. Diplomats have been summoned to repair fractured relationships.

And just this week, the United Nations' senior counterterrorism special rapporteur, Ben Emmerson, announced that he would launch an investigation into the surveillance tactics used by American and British intelligence agencies citing the Snowden leaks at "the very apex of public interest concerns."

Yet for all the ruckus globally, the most enduring damage from omnipresent surveillance may be right here at home.

Early evidence suggests that knowing that our e-mails, phone calls and social media circles are being vacuumed up into a giant government database may reshape what we say and write, and whom we associate with.

Surveillance may be chipping away not just at our privacy, but at the American values of freedom of expression and association enshrined in the First Amendment.

Invasion of privacy or no big deal?

Yet while foreign politicians are up in arms, many Americans are shrugging their shoulders. There have been lawsuits, bills introduced in Congress and even a few public demonstrations. But surveys from Pew Research indicate that the National Security Agency programs are actually supported by roughly half of Americans, even though many believe that their own personal e-mails and calls have been read or listened to.

However, a survey of American writers done in October revealed that nearly one in four has self-censored for fear of government surveillance. They fessed up to curbing their research, not accepting certain assignments, even not discussing certain topics on the phone or via e-mail for fear of being targeted. The subjects they are avoiding are no surprise -- mostly matters to do with the Middle East, the military and terrorism.

Because they rely on free expression for their work and livelihoods, some writers may be more prone to caution in what they say and who they say it to for fear of activating an NSA tripwire.

But as awareness of mass surveillance sets in for the general public, it is hard to imagine the rest of us will be far behind. In a country that has prided itself for the world's staunchest protections of free speech and association, certain subjects, names, and ideas may become virtually off-limits for all those who'd rather not tangle with the NSA.

Topics that are foreign, alien or frightening may become all the more so if researchers, writers, journalists and even students are afraid to investigate and explain them.

Surveillance so intrusive it is putting certain subjects out of bounds would seem like cause for alarm in a country that prides itself as the world's most free. Americans have long protested the persecution and constraints on journalists and writers living under repressive regimes abroad, yet many seem ready to accept these new encroachments on their freedom at home.

We've already given it away

Some Americans' relative nonchalance toward the government prying into e-mails and calls we long thought were private may stem in part from knowing that we have already ceded so much of our privacy voluntarily. Social media, online shopping, and simple browsing have become semi-public acts. It's hard to know who can see what, and worrying about it can stand in the way of buying a birthday present, posting a great photo or getting your taxes done.

Moreover, for most Americans, learning that the government is a lurking hidden online "friend" doesn't evoke the fears it would have in communist Eastern Europe or today's Russia or Iran.

Because we are all subject to the NSA's intrusions, there is no single group -- not Muslims, or African-Americans, or people of Middle Eastern descent -- that has emerged as a target of these newly revealed programs.

While Americans are used to fighting against discrimination, we are less accustomed to standing up for rights to privacy, expression and association that belong to us all.

Finally, because of the utter secrecy of the programs -- schemes we would not even know about short of Snowden's astonishing breach -- unless you're Angela Merkel you wouldn't know whether you were under investigation, questioned at the airport, or denied a visa because of something you said or wrote.

It may be years, if ever, before stories come to light of people done in by their own texts, web-surfing or Facebook posts.

Did it really matter?

When the Snowden story first broke, Obama claimed that the newly exposed programs had foiled 50 terrorist plots. After reading through a classified list of the thwarted assaults, Sen. Patrick Leahy called the figure "plainly wrong."

In the few cases where details have been released, journalists and intelligence experts have argued that the evidence gathered through surveillance could have been obtained in other ways, or wasn't crucial.

Not all surveillance powers are bad. The Congress and courts have, for decades, focused on where to draw the boundaries to ensure that both we and our constitutional rights are kept safe.

With new and expansive surveillance technologies, and new evidence that our most treasured rights may be at risk, the public is depending on judges and representatives to demand the information they need to properly weigh up the purported benefits of surveillance, as well as its harms.

Americans shouldn't be out-outraged by the international community about a program that puts our own liberties at risks.

The public's dulled senses when it comes to online privacy should not be grounds for forfeiting the rights the Founding Fathers put first above all others.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/opinion/snowden-chilling-effect/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

 

[Slapdash]

Pretty sure we tried to make this point to Tim dozens of pages ago. That violating privacy in this manner has a chilling effect on freedoms of speech and the press.

 

[Slapdash]

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Wednesday, December 4, 3:18 PM

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.

U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.

Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.”

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text.

CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces.

“One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.”

The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection.

The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity.

The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara Mikulski (Md.) — have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for “a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.”

NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.

Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”

The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate.

“It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure.

An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.

According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators.

A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.”

STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location.

The agency’s access to carriers’ networks appears to be vast.

“Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “This ‘flat’ trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency — hostile or friendly — can get ‘one stop shopping’ to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.”

Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit cites two U.S.-based carriers to illustrate the challenge of correlating the travels of phone users on different mobile networks. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus.

The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile.

Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time.

Side-by-side security efforts — when nearby devices power off and on together over time — “assist in determining whether co-travelers are associated … through behaviorally relevant relationships,” according to the 24-page white paper, which was developed by the NSA in partnership with the National Geospatial Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate and private contractors.

A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations.

The most basic analytic tools map the date, time, and location of cellphones to look for patterns or significant moments of overlap. Other tools compute speed and trajectory for large numbers of mobile devices, overlaying the electronic data on transportation maps to compute the likely travel time and determine which devices might have intersected.

To solve the problem of undetectable surveillance against CIA officers stationed overseas, one contractor designed an analytic model that would carefully record the case officer’s path and look for other mobile devices in steady proximity.

“Results have not been validated by operational analysts,” the report said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_print.html

 

[grateful zed]

Realistically though, not major is going to change about these programs. They are broadly supported by both parties and the media either misrepresents or ignores the criticisms against it. This story just gets bigger everyday while there is hardly any coverage on most mainstream outlets.

Why do you think this is the case?

Because Obama bullied media members who tried to report on this.

they threatened to expose their pron habits.

 

[grateful zed]

what would nixon do?

 

[Ilov80s]

what would nixon do?

Lied about it's existence and then lied about his knowledge of it's existence.

 

[Sand]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'

"Nobody cares about what kind of porn you're watching"

I don't see the problem here. These aren't US citizens (the article wasn't hugely clear, but that's what I get out of it). Using this against them when they are screaming Jihad on one side in a religious fervor and then hitting up porn sites on the other is fine - it makes them ripe to have their reputations tarnished.

 

[RCon]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'

"Nobody cares about what kind of porn you're watching"

I don't see the problem here. These aren't US citizens (the article wasn't hugely clear, but that's what I get out of it). Using this against them when they are screaming Jihad on one side in a religious fervor and then hitting up porn sites on the other is fine - it makes them ripe to have their reputations tarnished.

"It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident."

 

[tom22406]

The real problem I see with the porn collecting is it shows to what lengths they will go to if they need to build a case against you or are a target so all you would need if for one of these "radicals" to call your phone or a friends phone or has been stated a friend of a friends phone and boom you are on the list.

I doubt it matters what location you are from either.

 

[tom22406]

Obama: NSA reforms will give Americans 'more confidence' in surveillance programs




By Andrew Rafferty, NBC News
President Barack Obama said he will propose new reforms to the National Security Agency aimed at giving Americans "more confidence" in the organization after various leaks revealed numerous wide-ranging government surveillance programs.

"The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to ... the contents of their phone calls," the president said Thursday during an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws. And part of what we're trying to do over the next month or so is having done an independent review and brought a whole bunch of folks, civil libertarians and-- lawyers and others to examine what's being done."

"I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence."

The president did not specify what the reforms may be. But some U.S. allies were angered by reports accusing the agency of monitoring the phone conversations of 35 world leaders.

Obama's remarks came in the immediate wake of a Washington Post report which charged the NSA with gathering 5 billion records a day as a way to track cellphone locations worldwide.

Obama did not comment on this report, but did say that these leaks, largely perpetrated by former government contractor Edward Snowden, have identified some areas of legitimate legal concern.

The White House, under fire from closest allies, is taking a closer look at the National Security Agency's vast data collection. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
But, he added, "some it has also been highly sensationalized."

While the president said he is looking to reform how the NSA operates overseas, he also defended the importance of the agency's overall mission.

"We do have people that are trying to hurt us, and they communicate through these same systems. ... we've got to be in there in some way to help

protect people even as we're also making sure that government doesn't abuse it," he said.

"I want everybody to be clear. The people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages," he added later. "And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening."

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/05/21776882-obama-nsa-reforms-will-give-americans-more-confidence-in-surveillance-programs

 

[RCon]

Well, I'm reassured. I'm sure that no one is more upset about this than the president.

 

[Slapdash]

"I want everybody to be clear. The people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages," he added later. "And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening."

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/05/21776882-obama-nsa-reforms-will-give-americans-more-confidence-in-surveillance-programs

The courts and Congress have the ability to rein in the NSA? What a crock of ####.

I do love the "generally" qualifier.

 

[tom22406]

Well, I'm reassured. I'm sure that no one is more upset about this than the president.

"I want everybody to be clear. The people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages," he added later. "And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening."

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/05/21776882-obama-nsa-reforms-will-give-americans-more-confidence-in-surveillance-programs

The courts and Congress have the ability to rein in the NSA? What a crock of ####.

I do love the "generally" qualifier.

I was watching this last night and I seriously did laugh out loud when he said this.

The generally being thrown in was a nice touch

 

[The Commish]

Obama: NSA reforms will give Americans 'more confidence' in surveillance programs




By Andrew Rafferty, NBC News
President Barack Obama said he will propose new reforms to the National Security Agency aimed at giving Americans "more confidence" in the organization after various leaks revealed numerous wide-ranging government surveillance programs.

"The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to ... the contents of their phone calls," the president said Thursday during an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws. And part of what we're trying to do over the next month or so is having done an independent review and brought a whole bunch of folks, civil libertarians and-- lawyers and others to examine what's being done."

"I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence."

The president did not specify what the reforms may be. But some U.S. allies were angered by reports accusing the agency of monitoring the phone conversations of 35 world leaders.

Obama's remarks came in the immediate wake of a Washington Post report which charged the NSA with gathering 5 billion records a day as a way to track cellphone locations worldwide.

Obama did not comment on this report, but did say that these leaks, largely perpetrated by former government contractor Edward Snowden, have identified some areas of legitimate legal concern.

The White House, under fire from closest allies, is taking a closer look at the National Security Agency's vast data collection. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
But, he added, "some it has also been highly sensationalized."

While the president said he is looking to reform how the NSA operates overseas, he also defended the importance of the agency's overall mission.

"We do have people that are trying to hurt us, and they communicate through these same systems. ... we've got to be in there in some way to help

protect people even as we're also making sure that government doesn't abuse it," he said.



"I want everybody to be clear. The people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages," he added later. "And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening."

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/05/21776882-obama-nsa-reforms-will-give-americans-more-confidence-in-surveillance-programs

So to be clear....he DOES know about what the super secret NSA is doing but is always caught off guard with the bad news about his crown jewel piece of legislation?!

 

[Slapdash]

Obama did not comment on this report, but did say that these leaks, largely perpetrated by former government contractor Edward Snowden, have identified some areas of legitimate legal concern.

If there are checks and balances from the courts and Congress, why does it take a leak to raise legitimate concerns?

 

[StrikeS2k]

Unrelated to the NSA, but on the topic of the government's overreach of powers in the name of "fighting terrorism", some may be interested in knowing that there is a trial going on right now in San Francisco that is the first time the no fly list has reached the trial stage. It involves a woman who was put on the no fly list without cause based on her religion. She was studying here at the time. Her daughter, a U.S. citizen, was apparently also put on the no fly list recently so she couldn't fly here to testify in her mother's trial. The government denies this of course and testimony on this issue is scheduled for this morning, but the preliminary reports on this suggest to me that the government did in fact stop this woman from flying here to testify. If anyone is interested in the trial or the issue with the daughter, you can read about it here:

http://papersplease.org/wp/?s=Ibrahim

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/04/dhs-stalls-no-fly-list-trial-b.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

 

[Ted Mullins]

The real problem I see with the porn collecting is it shows to what lengths they will go to if they need to build a case against you or are a target so all you would need if for one of these "radicals" to call your phone or a friends phone or has been stated a friend of a friends phone and boom you are on the list.

I doubt it matters what location you are from either.

Yeah, I find it pretty disturbing - this can't even really be construed as for anyone's safety, it's just for propaganda purposes. And from what we have seen so far, I have a hard time belieiving there is a strong distinction between what they are doing to US citizens and foreigners.

 

[tom22406]

And now we learn video gamers were also being spied upon

Revealed: spy agencies' covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gamesNSA and GCHQ collect gamers' chats and deploy real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life
World of Warcraft: the NSA described games communities as a 'target-rich network' where potential terrorists could 'hide in plain sight'.
To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.

Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users world wide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of innocent elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight".

Games, the analyst wrote "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.

If properly exploited, games could produce vast amounts of intelligence, according to the the NSA document. They could be used as a window for hacking attacks, to build pictures of people's social networks through "buddylists and interaction", to make approaches by undercover agents, and to obtain target identifiers (such as profile photos), geolocation, and collection of communications.

The ability to extract communications from talk channels in games would be necessary, the NSA paper argued, because of the potential for them to be used to communicate anonymously: Second Life was enabling anonymous texts and planning to introduce voice calls, while game noticeboards could, it states, be used to share information on the web addresses of terrorism forums.

Given that gaming consoles often include voice headsets, video cameras, and other identifiers, the potential for joining together biometric information with activities was also an exciting one.

But the documents contain no indication that the surveillance ever foiled any terrorism plots, nor is there any clear evidence that terror groups were using the virtual communities to communicate as the intelligence agencies confidently predicted.

The operations raise concerns about the privacy of gamers. It is unclear how the agencies accessed their data, or how many communications were collected. Nor is it clear how the NSA ensured that it was not monitoring innocent Americans whose identity and nationality may have been concealed behind their virtual avatar.

The California-based producer of World of Warcraft said neither the NSA nor GCHQ had sought its permission to gather intelligence inside the game. "We are unaware of any surveillance taking place," said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment. "If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission."

Microsoft declined to comment on the latest revelations, as did Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and former CEO of Linden Lab, the game's operator. The company's executives did not respond to requests for comment.

The NSA declined to comment on the surveillance of games. A spokesman for GCHQ said the agency did not "confirm or deny" the revelations but added: "All GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that its activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee."

Though the spy agencies might have been relatively late to virtual worlds and the communities forming there, once the idea had been mooted, they joined in enthusiastically.

In May 2007, the then-chief operating officer of Second Life gave a "brown bag lunch" address at the NSA explaining how his game gave the government "the opportunity to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviours of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil".

One problem the paper's unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case – and avoiding suspicion their goal was merely trying to play computer games at work without getting fired – was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate.

A 2007 invitation to a secret internal briefing noted "terrorists use online games – but perhaps not for their amusement. They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds." But the agencies had yet to find any evidence to support their suspicions.

The same still seemed to hold true a year later, albeit with a measure of progress: games data that had been found in connection with IPs, email addresses and similar information linked to terrorist groups.

"Al-Qaida terrorist target selectors and … have been found associated with XboxLive, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs [Games and Virtual Environments]," the document notes. "Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hizballah, and Hamas members."

However, that information wasn not enough to show terrorists are hiding out as pixels to discuss their next plot. Such data could merely mean someone else in an internet café was gaming, or a shared computer had previously been used to play games.

That lack of knowledge of whether terrorists were actually plotting online emerges in the document's recommendations: "The amount of GVEs in the world is growing but the specific ones that CT [counter-terrorism] needs to be methodically discovered and validated," it stated. "Only then can we find evidence that GVEs are being used for operational uses."

Not actually knowing whether terrorists were playing games was not enough to keep the intelligence agencies out of them, however. According to the document, GCHQ – the UK's equivalent to the NSA – already had a "vigorous effort" to exploit games, including "exploitation modules" against Xbox Live and World of Warcraft.

That NSA effort, based in the agency's New Mission Development Centre in the Menwith Hill UK air force base in North Yorkshire, was already paying dividends by May 2008.

At the request of GCHQ, the NSA had begun a deliberate effort to extract World of Warcraft metadata from their troves of intelligence, and trying to link "accounts, characters and guilds" to Islamic extremism and arms dealing efforts. A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies".

The UK agency did not stop at World of Warcraft, though: by September a memo noted GCHQ had "successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live".

Meanwhile, the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Humint Service were all running human intelligence operations – undercover agents – within the virtual world of Second Life. In fact, so crowded were the virtual worlds with staff from the different agencies, that there was a need to try to "deconflict" their efforts – or, in other words, to make sure each agency wasn't just duplicating what the others were doing.

By the end of 2008, such human intelligence efforts had produced at least one usable piece of intelligence, according to the documents: following the successful takedown of a website used to trade stolen credit card details, the fraudsters moved to Second Life – and GCHQ followed, having gained their first "operational deployment" into the virtual world. This, they noted, put them in touch with an "avatar [game character] who helpfully volunteered information on the target group's latest activities".

Second Life continued to occupy the intelligence agencies' thoughts throughout 2009. One memo noted the game's economy was "essentially unregulated" and so "will almost certainly be used as a venue for terrorist laundering and will, with certainty, be used for terrorist propaganda and recruitment".

In reality, Second Life's surreal and uneven virtual world failed to attract or maintain the promised mass-audience, and attention (and its userbase) waned, though the game lives on.

The agencies had other concerns about games, beyond their potential use by terrorists to communicate. Much like the pressure groups that worry about the effect of computer games on the minds of children, the NSA expressed concerns that games could be used to "reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes", noting that Hezbollah had produced a game called Special Forces 2.

According to the document, Hezbollah's "press section acknowledges [the game] is used for recruitment and training", serving as a "radicalising medium" with the ultimate goal of becoming a "suicide martyr". Despite the game's disturbing connotations, the "fun factor" of the game cannot be discounted, it states. As Special Forces 2 retails for $10, it concludes, the game also serves to "fund terrorist operations".

Hezbollah is not, however, the only organizsation to have considered using games for recruiting. As the NSA document acknowledges: they got the idea from the US army.

"America's Army is a US army-produced game that is free [to] download from its recruitment page," says the NSA, noting the game is "acknowledged to be so good at this the army no longer needs to use it for recruitment, they use it for training".

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life?CMP=twt_gu

 

[Slapdash]

And now we learn video gamers were also being spied upon

The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.
The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players.

Pretty much assumed this is what the mandatory Kinect push was all about.

This stuff is really out of hand.

 

[SacramentoBob]

We know damn well that was an excuse for the computer geeks at the NSA to get paid to play WoW. Is BGP working there? Did bagger get his epic mount?

 

[Slapdash]

We know damn well that was an excuse for the computer geeks at the NSA to get paid to play WoW. Is BGP working there? Did bagger get his epic mount?

Seems like the NSA is pretty good at being extremely wasteful while invading our privacy.

Funny Slashdot comment:

Sir! Sir! It's an emergency, sir! We have word that xXxNoScopezN00bKill3rxXx will dip his balls on the President at 21:00

 

[jonessed]

World of Warcraft secret agents? These people have way too much time and money on their hands.

 

[Slapdash]

World of Warcraft secret agents? These people have way too much time and money on their hands.

Any money going to the NSA is too much.

 

[Ilov80s]

So what weren't they spying on ?