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Senators, Representatives Moving Closer to Reigning in Unconstitutional NSA

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Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAUdall: NSA close to unconstitutional

By Hadas Gold. Sen. Mark Udall said on Sunday the NSA program that monitors Americans’ phone calls is close to being “unconstitutional.”

“I would argue that it comes close to being unconstitutional, and there’s a better way to do this,” Colorado Democrat said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Udall said a new bill he recently introduced with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) protects not just Americans, but the “biggest, baddest weapon we have,” the Bill of Rights.

“My bill, which I want to push as hard as I possibly can, would limit the ways in which the intelligence community accesses average Americans’, innocent Americans’, phone records. That’s the way to go forward,” Udall said. “That’s the way in which to protect not just our people but the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is the biggest, baddest weapon we have.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Opponents of NSA surveillance emboldened by close House vote

By Brendan Sasso and Jennifer Martinez. A close vote in the House on National Security Agency surveillance has given privacy advocates new momentum in their quest to curtail the agency’s power.

Critics of the agency are reviewing their options and plotting their next move in an attempt to build on their surprisingly strong showing.

“The House took a shot across NSA’s bow, and the NSA noticed,” said Gregory Nojeim, a senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.

It’s a heady time for privacy advocates, who for years have been on the defensive against claims that tougher privacy standards would endanger national security and help terrorists.

“This was the closest vote I’ve ever seen post-9/11 in regard to reeling in the NSA apparatus,” said Amie Stepanovich, director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “The numbers on this vote show there’s incredible interest in reforming these programs. I don’t think it matters that it didn’t pass.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesWyden calls Fisa court ‘anachronistic’ as pressure builds on Senate to act

By Ed Pilkington. Pressure is building within the US Senate for an overhaul of the secret court that is supposed to act as a check on the National Security Agency’s executive power, with one prominent senator describing the judicial panel as “anachronistic” and outdated.

Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator for Oregon, said discussions were under way about how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, the body entrusted with providing oversight on the NSA and its metadata-collecting activities. He told C-Span’s Newsmaker programme on Sunday that the court, which was set up in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), was ill-equipped to deal with the massive digital dragnet of millions of Americans’ phone records developed by the NSA in recent years.

“In many particulars, the Fisa court is anachronistic – they are using processes that simply don’t fit the times,” Wyden said.

The Oregon senator is at the forefront of a growing chorus of political voices criticising the Fisa court for being biased towards the executive branch to the exclusion of all other positions. “It is the most one-sided legal process in the US, I don’t know of any other legal system or court that doesn’t highlight anything except one point of view – the executive point of view.”

Wyden added: “When that point of view also dominates the thinking of justices, you’ve got a fairly combustible situation on your hands.” Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Surveillance Critics – Including Glenn Greenwald – to Testify Before Congress

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Photo Credit: Michael Reynolds/EPACongress will hear testimony from critics of the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices for the first time since the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s explosive leaks were made public.

[Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first revealed details of the surveillance programmes leaked by Snowden, had also been invited to testify via video-link from his base in Rio.]

Democratic congressman Alan Grayson, who is leading a bipartisan group of congressman organising the hearing, told the Guardian it would serve to counter the “constant misleading information” from the intelligence community.

The hearing, which will take place on Wednesday, comes amid evidence of a growing congressional rebellion NSA data collection methods.

On Wednesday, a vote in the House of Representatives that would have tried to curb the NSA’s practice of mass collection of phone records of millions of Americans was narrowly defeated.

However, it exposed broader-than-expected concern among members of Congress over US surveillance tactics…

Read more from this story HERE.

Half of Americans Supposedly Approve of NSA Surveillance Program

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Photo Credit: APBy James Arkin. Most Americans are suspicious they aren’t being told the full truth about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, but half still approve of the program overall, according to a new poll released Friday.

Fifty percent of Americans approve of the NSA program while 44 percent disapprove, according to the poll from the PEW Research Center.

Despite the overall approval, 70 percent of those surveyed said they thought the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism. Similarly, 63 percent of those surveyed said they believed the government was collecting information about content of communications, not just metadata. Of that group, 27 percent said they thought the government had listened to their calls or read their emails, while 28 percent did not. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Michael Reynolds/EPANSA surveillance critics to testify before Congress

By Paul Lewis. Congress will hear testimony from critics of the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices for the first time since the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s explosive leaks were made public.

Democrat congressman Alan Grayson, who is leading a bipartisan group of congressman organising the hearing, told the Guardian it would serve to counter the “constant misleading information” from the intelligence community.

The hearing, which will take place on Wednesday, comes amid evidence of a growing congressional rebellion NSA data collection methods.

On Wednesday, a vote in the House of Representatives that would have tried to curb the NSA’s practice of mass collection of phone records of millions of Americans was narrowly defeated.

However, it exposed broader-than-expected concern among members of Congress over US surveillance tactics. A majority of Democrat members voted in support of the amendment. Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Move to Seize Web Firms’ User Account Passwords

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Photo Credit: James MartinThe U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person’s password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.

“I’ve certainly seen them ask for passwords,” said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We push back.”

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies “really heavily scrutinize” these requests, the person said. “There’s a lot of ‘over my dead body.'”

Some of the government orders demand not only a user’s password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

Read more from this story HERE.

How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program (+video)

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Photo Credit: FPBy John Hudson

The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday’s shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment’s defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic.

Ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA’s ability to collect data on Americans’ telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aid with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable.

“Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that had a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything Alexander had to say,” said the source, keeping in mind concerted White House efforts to influence Congress by Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Had Pelosi not been as forceful as she had been, it’s unlikely there would’ve been more Democrats for the amendment.”

With 111 liberal-to-moderate Democrats voting for the amendment alongside 94 Republicans, the vote in no way fell along predictable ideological fault lines. And for a particular breed of Democrat, Pelosi’s overtures proved decisive, multiple sources said.

“Pelosi had a big effect on more middle-of-the road hawkish Democrats who didn’t want to be identified with a bunch of lefties [voting for the amendment],” said the aide. “As for the Alexander briefings: Did they hurt? No, but that was not the central force, at least among House Democrats. Nancy Pelosi’s political power far outshines that of Keith Alexander’s.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: The BlazeA different amendment restricting NSA spying was passed overwhelmingly by the House – but ‘no one is talking about it’

By Jason Howerton

While the most talked-about news out of the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday was the defeat of the so-called Amash amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s massive data collection program, another amendment related to NSA spying was quietly passed overwhelmingly by lawmakers.

The Pompeo amendment (championed by Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas) passed the House with a bipartisan vote of 409-12. However, “no one is talking about it,” Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) told TheBlaze on Thursday.

The amendment that passed is reportedly intended to “ensure none of the funds may be used by the NSA to target a U.S. person or acquire and store the content of a U.S. person’s communications, including phone calls and e-mails.”

In contrast, the Amash amendment sought to “end authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. It would also bar the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

Culberson told TheBlaze in a phone interview why he supported the Pompeo amendment over the more sweeping amendment authored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.). Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsFox News Poll: Voters concerned NSA can’t keep a secret

By Dana Blanton

Voters think the National Security Agency surveillance program is more likely to hurt than protect law-abiding Americans. They are also concerned the agency can’t keep its own secrets secret.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Thursday — a day after the U.S. House voted down legislation that would have stopped the NSA from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

By a 47-41 percent margin, more voters think the government’s electronic surveillance program does more to hurt Americans by using their private info improperly than it does to help track down terrorists and protect Americans.

The number of Democrats who believe the NSA’s efforts are more likely to help catch terrorists (52 percent) is matched by the number of Republicans who think it will hurt everyday Americans (52 percent). More than 7 in 10 voters who are part of the Tea Party movement say the tracking is more likely to hurt Americans (72 percent). Read more from this story HERE.


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Photo Credit: J Scott ApplewhiteNSA amendment’s narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight

By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Lewis

The razor-thin defeat of a congressional measure to rein in domestic surveillance galvanized civil libertarians on Thursday for what they expect to be a drawn-out political and legal struggle to clip the wings of the intelligence apparatus in the US.

While a measure by Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, failed in the House on Wednesday night, the tight vote was the closest that privacy advocates have come since 9/11 to stopping the National Security Agency from collecting Americans’ data in bulk.

Members of Congress, liberties groups and former surveillance officials pointed to a variety of measures, from new legislation in both the Senate and House to court cases, as means to reset the much-contested balance between liberty and security in the US over the coming weeks and months.

“There are many voices concerned in the Senate about this same issue,” said J Kirk Wiebe, a former senior NSA analyst turned whistleblower. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of it. It’s the beginning.”

Aides to congressman James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who wrote the Patriot Act, told the Guardian on Thursday that he plans to introduce legislation through the House judiciary committee that would restrict the NSA’s bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone records.

“Yesterday’s amendment was only a first step in what will be a long debate,” said Sensenbrenner spokesman Ben Miller. Read more from this story HERE.

Army’s Giant Surveillance Blimp to Start Tracking Objects in DC Region

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While Congress debates the merits of spending tens of millions of dollars to add missile interceptors on the East Coast while increasing the number already in place out West, a long-running developmental Army radar system is packing up and heading for Maryland.

From May 4 to June 14, Raytheon’s JLENS, or Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, was put through its paces by about 100 soldiers during user assessment tests out in Utah, but the company announced today that the 74-foot-high tethered airship is now headed to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for a more ambitious operational assessment run by the US Northern Command.

The soldiers who were trained up to use the system in Utah will make the trip with the airship, but since JLENS will be running on a 24/7 basis once on the East Coast—and tracking anything that flies, drives, or floats near the National Capital Region—more soldiers will be trained to operate it before the assessments kick off in 2014.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obstruction? NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

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Photo Credit: George Frey/GettyThe NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

Read more from this story HERE.

And You Thought the NSA was Bad: Obamacare Data Hub a ‘Honey Pot’ for Leftist ID Thieves, Warn Critics (+videos)

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Photo Credit: National Review Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA

By John Fund. President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.

Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare data hub a ‘honey pot’ for ID thieves, warn critics

By Paul Bedard. The data hub President Obama’s health care team is creating to exchange personal health and financial information on Obamacare users will be a ripe target for computer hackers and identity thieves, charge critics who claim it hasn’t been tested for security flaws.

“It’s the greatest collection of private identification information ever assembled on Americans that will be put into one place,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, who chairs a House cybersecurity subcommittee. “It is every bit of sensitive information one would need to know to completely take over the identification of a person,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

The Obamacare data hub, he added, “creates a honey pot and the day that it goes online it is going to be a target for hackers and others and they are unprepared to protect the system.”

At an oversight hearing last week, administration officials said that the hub, still under creation, will be used to verify Obamacare applications. It will share information among federal agencies, like the IRS, and state agencies. A separate system will keep store key information such as income, Social Security numbers, email addresses, and even pregnancy status of Obamacare users.

Officials called on the public and Congress to “trust” that the information will be protected from hackers, but several lawmakers balked. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesMidlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

By Ben Sasse. The author has served as chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as assistant U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Currently president of Midland University, he has been exploring a U.S. Senate candidacy.

Obamacare is a ticking time bomb for Democrats in the 2014 elections. Nobody knows this better than President Barack Obama, which is why over the Fourth of July holiday weekend he unilaterally decided to delay its controversial employer mandate provision until after the midterm elections.

No wonder: The $2,000 per-worker fine is disastrously unpopular. Already, employers are laying off workers and dramatically cutting others’ hours in an effort to skirt the new penalty. The fact that this perfectly predictable development surprises many in Washington only underscores that they didn’t really read this 2,300-page monstrosity before they passed it.

Desperate for any appearance of victory, Republican leaders have decided to match the president’s delay with one of their own: proposing legislation to delay for a year the mandate for individuals. Perhaps useful, perhaps not. Well-meaning people can differ about legislative strategy.

But if Republicans don’t have a larger plan to actually oppose this unprecedented power grab in a way the American people will understand, then they will have given up the ghost on actually turning back the slew of new job-killing bureaucracies. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesGOP Senator says coalition to block and defund Obamacare is growing, names names

By Becket Adams. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told TheBlaze Monday he has recruited more than a dozen Senate Republicans to help him defund President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.

Fifteen Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), John Cornyn (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), James Inhofe (Okla.), David Vitter (La.), Roger Wicker (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), will block a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for Obamacare, Lee said.

“The president has said that he’s not willing and not able to enforce Obamacare as it was written,” Sen. Lee told TheBlaze in a phone interview. “And so he has chosen instead to enforce this law selectively.”

“He has picked out two things that he has said he won’t enforce. One is the employer mandate and the other is the requirement that the government obtain some kind of proof for those who are claiming eligibility for Obamacare exchange subsidies,” he added.

The senator continued, arguing that the president “doesn’t have the power” to selectively enforce and amend laws passed by Congress. Read more from this story HERE.

How Secrecy Erodes Democracy

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Photo Credit: ReutersIn early June, leaked documents revealed that the U.S. government was collecting the details — if not the content — of virtually every call that every American made. President Barack Obama claimed that the PATRIOT Act gave him the authority to know whom we called, when and how long we talked.

This claim came from the same man who, as a senator, wrote, “We believe the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.”

It appears the president now believes we are all connected to terrorists. It’s as if he’s playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with our civil liberties.

Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in 2001 after a vociferous public debate. To protect against abuses, the act was scheduled to sunset — it would expire if Congress did not renew it after five years.

When it was reauthorized in 2006, Congress sought to limit the government’s warrantless access to records. Under the revised law, the government can obtain records if a court determines they are relevant to an authorized investigation into international terrorism or foreign spying.

Read more from this story HERE.

Your Place in the Database

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerRegarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time. We learned about the FBI’s Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed “reasonably suspicious.” In September 2001, we saw the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor. September 11 left a unified country in its wake, but unfortunately, it was also a country more acquiescent than ever to big government. The PATRIOT Act was quickly shuttled through the lawmaking process, and life went on. We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. The program was given the formality of legality (though not constitutionality) in 2007. Would it have been had no one blown the whistle?

The surveillance state became even more unsettling with the Change of 2009, no less after political campaigning by the victor against domestic spying. We found out in 2009 that returning veterans were being targeted as possible extremists by the “Vigilant Eagle” program, a name positively Orwellian in its irony. The floodgates opened in 2013 once Obama’s re-election was secured. We found out that our government scans all domestic cell phone metadata (phone numbers, recipients, times), all letter and package labels are scanned and saved, and the NSA has agreements with every major internet provider to provide backdoor access to customers’ information (see PRISM). Even our credit card activity is analyzed. Of course, those are just high points. The entire last decade we have heard warnings from whistleblowers such as William Binney, as well as periodic admissions from U.S. officials of intelligence oversteps, which they falsely claim are immediately corrected.

One must wonder how the people of this nation would have reacted had all of this come out at once. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that we would have shown a tenth the gumption of the Egyptians, who in July 2013 unceremoniously flung their Islamist government to the side. They took to the streets in outrage against tyrants at just the time we learned of the sickening scope of our national government’s spying. We meekly sat by. As each little bit of this diabolical system is leaked, it is palatable enough to warrant only a minor outrage, and then life goes on, albeit with a new normal. Tiny violations of our 4th-Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and our 5th-Amendment right against self-incrimination, keep piling up, until it seems that those rights have bled to death from a thousand cuts. If Americans are the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the temperature has been ratcheted to a near-boil.

The Relational Database

For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation’s road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center. The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes. One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child. It’s a staggering capacity. Now, for Americans, the camera is always rolling, creating a record of our every digital move. It reminds one of The Truman Show, a movie in which Jim Carrey’s entire life was filmed and broadcast as entertainment without him knowing it.

Because of the power of relational databases, and the laws governing internet service provider record-keeping, anything stored in the data centers (there are many across the nation, the Utah Center being the largest and most recent) can be tied to us directly. When tied to other sources of government data, it’s a more complete picture of our life than most of us could even provide about ourselves. The websites we browse, the comments we make, the e-mails we send, the phone calls to friends, the internet purchases, the Facebook associations, and most everything else you can think of are easily tied together.

Read more from this story HERE.