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NSA Collection Systems are Recording ‘Every Single’ Conversation Nationwide (+video)

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Photo Credit: APNSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

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Photo Credit: AFP Photo/Beto BarataRobot Snowden promises more US spying revelations

By Glenn Chapman.

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden emerged from his Russian exile Tuesday in the form of a remotely-controlled robot to promise more sensational revelations about US spying programs.

The fugitive’s face appeared on a screen as he maneuvered the wheeled android around a stage at the TED gathering, addressing an audience in Vancouver without ever leaving his secret hideaway.

“There are absolutely more revelations to come,” he said. “Some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.”

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who has been charged in the United States with espionage, dismissed the public debate about whether he is a heroic whistleblower or traitor.

Instead, he used the conference organized by educational non-profit organization TED (“Technology Entertainment Design”), to call for people worldwide to fight for privacy and Internet freedom.

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Zuckerberg Phones Obama to Blast Him about NSA

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Photo Credit: UPIFacebook Inc. chief executive Mark Zuckerberg blasted the US government’s electronic surveillance practices on Thursday, saying he’d personally called President Barack Obama to voice his displeasure.

“When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his personal Facebook page.

“I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform,” the 29-year-old Zuckerberg continued.

The phone call and Zuckerberg’s 300-word missive on Thursday come amid a series of revelations about controversial government surveillance practices that were leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“The president spoke last night with Mark Zuckerberg about recent reports in the press about alleged activities by the US intelligence community,” a White House official said.

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Snowden: NSA Leaders Have Harmed Our National Security ‘More Than Anything’ Else

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Photo Credit: Sunshinepress/Getty ImagesBy Dustin Volz.

America’s most high-profile fugitive visited one of the country’s most popular entertainment festivals in Texas on Monday, drawing thunderous applause from a crowded room filled with his adoring fans.

Edward Snowden, appearing from Russia through a live video stream, told attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin that Congress had fundamentally failed to do its job as an overseer of the government’s bulk surveillance programs, declaring that “we need a watchdog that watches Congress.”

The former National Security Agency contractor, in a conversation with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner, also charged the current and most recent chief of the NSA as the two people most responsible for jeopardizing the country’s national security due to their preference for aggressive collection of data rather than protection of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“More than anything, there are two officials who have harmed our Internet security and national security,” Snowden said, his image backdropped by an enlarged copy of the U.S. Constitution. “Those two officials are Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander.”

He added: “When you are the one country that has a vault that is more full than anyone else’s, it doesn’t make any sense to be attacking all day and never defending your vault. And it makes even less sense when you’re setting the standards for vaults worldwide and leaving a huge back door open.”

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Edward Snowden: NSA is ‘setting fire to the future of the Internet’

By Ashe Schow.

Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the National Security Agency data collection programs, said Monday the act of mass surveillance is “setting fire to the future of the Internet.”

Snowden, speaking via satellite feed (in front of a green-screen display of the U.S. Constitution) to a panel at the annual South by Southwest conference, urged attendees to fight back against the spy programs and remember that more countries than the U.S. are involved.

“The NSA, the sort of global mass surveillance that’s occurring in all of these countries, not just the U.S. — and it’s important to remember that this is a global issue — they’re setting fire to the future of the Internet,” Snowden said. “And the people who are in this room now — you guys are all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix it.”

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Snowden Claims He Raised Concerns about NSA Internally 10 Times Before Leaking Documents

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Photo Credit: AP / THE GUARDIANEx-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he tried more than 10 times to go through official channels to alert someone about government spying programs, but nobody listened.

According to The Washington Post, Snowden claimed in European Parliament testimony that he reported policy or legal issues about the NSA to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue the matter.

“As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the U.S. government, I was not protected by U.S. whistle-blower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process,” Snowden said in his testimony.

Snowden was at the CIA before becoming an NSA contractor. He was working for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii when he leaked information about the NSA spying programs to the press, The Washington Post reported.

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Court Rules NSA Can’t Keep Metadata Longer Than 5 Years

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge denied a request Friday by the National Security Agency to keep Internet and phone metadata gathered through bulk surveillance programs longer than five years.

Judge Reggie Walton of the secret FISA Court that approves classified surveillance warrants said the government failed to make a compelling case for preserving the data beyond the current five-year maximum, especially in light of escalating privacy concerns sparked by programs leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Many of those program’s protocols were either misrepresented to the court, or not presented at all.

“The amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government to aid in national security investigations,” Walton wrote in the order posted by Politico.

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Spy Chief: We Should’ve Told You We Track Your Calls

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/GettyThe U.S. government long considered its collection of Americans’ call records to be a state secret. Now the Director of National Intelligence admits it would have been better if Washington had acknowledged the surveillance in the first place.

Even the head of the U.S. intelligence community now believes that its collection and storage of millions of call records was kept too secret for too long.

The American public and most members of Congress were kept in the dark for years about a secret U.S. program to collect and store such records of American citizens on a massive scale.The government’s legal interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act that granted the authority for this dragnet collection was itself a state secret.

Then came Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked the court warrant authorizing the surveillance—along with troves of other top-secret documents. Since that first disclosure of the secret warrant, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has had to defend the government’s activities against a skeptical Congress and wary public.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper said the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community over its collection of phone records could have been avoided. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn’t have had the problem we had,” Clapper said.

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Rand Paul: ‘Do We No Longer Have a Fourth Amendment?’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeSen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., released a new video in defense of the Fourth Amendment pointing out that many Americans were disturbed by the news that the National Security Agency was collecting phone data on American citizens.

“It posed a serious constitutional question: Do we no longer have a Fourth Amendment?” Paul asked.

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesRand Paul Will Sue Obama Over the NSA

By Matt Berman and Dustin Volz.

Here comes some fun. Sen. Rand Paul will join a lawsuit against President Obama, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, and NSA Director Keith Alexander. The suit, Paul says, is because Obama “has publicly refused to stop a clear and continuing violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Bill of Rights protects all citizens from general warrants. I expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and I predict the American people will win.”

The Kentucky Republican is joining a suit from FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. And to just round out the group, the lead counsel is Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate. In the press release from RandPac, Cuccinelli says that “we expect to be opposed by the vast resources of the federal government, yet I am optimistic that we will prevail.”

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Judge Mocks Obama’s NSA Lawyer

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Photo Credit: WNDI just denied your motion to dismiss,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon told Department of Justice attorney Marcia Berman.

“Do you understand that?” he asked, speaking slowly and deliberately, as though to a child.

The judge appeared frequently perplexed by Berman’s explanations Monday afternoon in the federal courtroom as to why the government was not prepared to argue its case after filing a motion three weeks ago asking him to halt further proceedings while appeals go forward in the nation’s biggest spy case.

Leon had already ruled in December that the National Security Agency had probably violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure with its PRISM program.

Monday, the two sides in the case were to argue over whether the NSA had also violated First Amendment rights to free speech and Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

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Conservative Legal Activist, Who Succeeded at Trial Court, Asks Supreme Court to Hear NSA Case

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Photo Credit: APThe conservative legal activist who won the first court ruling questioning the legality of the National Security Agency’s massive phone-call tracking database is asking the Supreme Court to short circuit the normal appeals process and take up the case directly.

Attorney Larry Klayman said he sent the unusual petition to the high court on Monday.

“We went to the Supreme Court because, unlike the government, we’re not dragging our feet. We want a quick decision here,” Klayman said in a brief phone interview Monday afternoon.

A Justice Department spokesman had no immediate comment on the submission

The filing, known as a petition for writ of certiorari before judgment, is granted exceesingly rarely by the court. Usually, the justices prefer for cases to have full appellate review and in many cases review by appeals courts from more than one circuit.

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Welcome to the United States of Paranoia

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Photo Credit: APFeel like Big Brother is watching you these days? You’re not alone.

“This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. “Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive . . . will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ”

Twelve years on, this is the world we live in, but worse. Through a combination of fear, cowardice, political opportunism and bureaucratic metastasis, the erstwhile land of the free has been transformed into a nation of closely watched subjects — a country of 300 million potential criminals, whose daily activities need constant monitoring.

Once the most secret of organizations, the NSA has become even more famous than the CIA, the public face of Big Brother himself. At its headquarters on Savage Road in Fort Meade, Md., its omnivorous Black Widow supercomputer hoovers up data both foreign and domestic, while its new $2 billion data center near Bluffdale, Utah — the highly classified Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center — houses, well, just about everything. As James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine two years ago, as the center was being completed:

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private e-mails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ ”

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