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NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds

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Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

Read more from this story HERE.

White House Insists James Clapper Will Not Lead NSA Surveillance Review

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Photo Credit: EPABy Ewen MacAskill

The White House has moved to dampen controversy over the role of the director of national intelligence James Clapper in a panel reviewing NSA surveillance, insisting that he would neither lead it nor choose the members.

Statements by Barack Obama and Clapper on Monday night were widely interpreted as the director of national intelligence being placed in charge of the inquiry, which the president had announced on Friday would be “independent”.

The apparent involvement of Clapper, who has admitted lying to Congress over NSA surveillance of US citizens, provoked a backlash, with critics accusing the president of putting a fox in charge of the hen house.

But the White House national security council insisted on Tuesday that Clapper’s role would be more limited.

“The panel members are being selected by the White House, in consultation with the intelligence community,” national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APIntelligence committee withheld key file before critical NSA vote, Amash claims

By Spencer Ackerman

A leader of the US congressional insurrection against the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs has accused his colleagues of withholding a key document from the House of Representatives before a critical surveillance vote.

Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican whose effort to defund the NSA’s mass phone-records collection exposed deep congressional discomfort with domestic spying, said the House intelligence committee never allowed legislators outside the panel to see a 2011 document that described the surveillance in vague terms.

The document, a classified summary of the bulk phone records collection effort justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, was declassified by the Obama administration in late July.

The Justice Department and intelligence agencies prepared it for Congress before a 2011 vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and left it for the intelligence committees in Congress to make the document available to their colleagues.

“It is not acceptable for the intelligence committee, or any other committee, to withhold critically important information pertaining to a program prior to the vote,” Amash told the Guardian.

Read more from this story HERE.

The NSA is Turning the Internet into a Total Surveillance System

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Photo Credit: Roger ToothBy Alexander Abdo and Patrick Toomey

Another burst of sunlight permeated the National Security Agency’s black box of domestic surveillance last week.

According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant. To accomplish this astonishing invasion of Americans’ privacy, the NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds.

If you emailed a friend, family member or colleague overseas today (or if, from abroad, you emailed someone in the US), chances are that the NSA made a copy of that email and searched it for suspicious information.

The NSA appears to believe this general monitoring of our electronic communications is justified because the entire process takes, in one official’s words, “a small number of seconds”. Translation: the NSA thinks it can intercept and then read Americans’ emails so long as the intrusion is swift, efficient and silent.

That is not how the fourth amendment works.

Read more from this story HERE.

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N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S.

By Charlie Savage

The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence.

Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the “target” was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Edward Snowden A Patriot?

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Photo Credit: APBy Trevor Timm

Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid?

That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what has changed over the past two months, though, it’s hard not to wonder, “What could be more patriotic than what Snowden did?”

First, the results: More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress. The list goes on.

These actions have been accompanied by a sea change in public opinion about surveillance. Poll after poll has shown that for the first time ever, Americans think the government has gone too far in violating their privacy, with vast majorities believing the NSA scooping up a record of every phone call made in the United States invades citizens’ privacy.

Read more from this story HERE.

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McCain: Young Americans admire Snowden, see him as ‘some kind of Jason Bourne’

By Ben Wolfgang.

A deep distrust of government has led young Americans to hold up NSA leaker Edward Snowden as a hero, Sen. John McCain said Sunday.

“There’s a young generation who believes he’s some kind of Jason Bourne,” the Arizona Republican said during on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the lead character in the Bourne movie trilogy who battled his own government, particularly the CIA.

Mr. Snowden’s revelations — including details of the National Security Agency’s data-collection efforts — have led to a debate on the national security vs. privacy question, and how to balance the two.

President Obama last week laid out a series of proposed reforms to government spying programs in an effort to reassure Americans that their Fourth Amendment rights aren’t being trampled. His proposals include having a privacy advocate argue against the federal government in court, more restrictions on the mass collection of phone records and other steps.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple, Google and AT&T Meet Obama to Discuss NSA Surveillance Concerns

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Photo Credit: APBarack Obama hosted a summit on government surveillance and digital privacy attended by Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Google vice-president Vint Cerf and the boss of US telecoms network AT&T on Thursday.

The US president attended in person, sources told the Politico blog, as did other technology company executives. Additional attendees included representatives of the Center for Democracy and Technology and Gigi Sohn, leader of internet campaign group Public Knowledge.

The meeting was apparently prompted by growing concerns among US technology companies that revelations from the Guardian and others about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the companies’ obligation to allow access to data under secret court rules, could be damaging their reputation and commercial interests abroad.

The gathering followed a closed-doors meeting earlier this week with Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough and general counsel Kathy Ruemmler at the White House.

On the agenda at Tuesday’s meeting were the surveillance activities of the NSA, commercial privacy issues and the online tracking of consumers.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama’s Pledge to Boost Oversight of NSA Surveillance Draws Scrutiny

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Fox News.

President Obama’s pledge to work with Congress on “appropriate reforms” for parts of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs came under scrutiny Friday from some Republicans and skeptical Democrats.

Surveillance programs that allow the government to collect basic information about phone calls and email communications have been under scrutiny since NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed classified programs in June. The government has defended these programs as necessary to prevent terror attacks.

Obama on Friday acknowledged the domestic spying has troubled Americans and hurt the country’s image abroad. But he called it a critical counterterrorism tool.

“I am comfortable that the program currently is not being abused,” Obama said. “I am comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, that they would say, ‘You know what? These folks are following the law.'”

His most significant proposal would create an independent attorney to argue against the government during secret hearings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews requests for surveillance inside the U.S. As it stands now, prosecutors alone can go to the court and make their case unopposed.

Read more from this story HERE.

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NSA Debate a ‘Privileged Discussion’

DOJ Memo Asserts that All US Phone Calls Are ‘Relevant’ to Terrorism

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Photo Credit: USDAgovThe Justice Department on Friday released its legal rationale for why all U.S. phone calls are “relevant” to terrorism investigations.

The administration released the memo as part of President Obama’s push to enhance public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to collect business records if they are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. The NSA has acknowledged that it has been using the provision to force phone companies to turn over records on all U.S. phone calls.

The records include phone numbers, call times and call durations, but not the contents of the conversations.

Numerous lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the author of the Patriot Act, have accused the NSA of abusing its power under Section 215.

Read more from this story HERE.

America’s Soviet-Style Police State

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Photo Credit: katesheetsHow is it that the government can charge Edward Snowden with espionage for telling a journalist that the feds have been spying on all Americans and many of our allies, but the NSA itself, in a public relations campaign intended to win support for its lawlessness, can reveal secrets and do so with impunity? That question goes to the heart of the rule of law in a free society.

Since Snowden’s June 6 revelations about massive NSA spying, we have learned that all Americans who communicate via telephone or the Internet (who doesn’t?) have had all of their communications swept up by the federal government for two-plus years. The government initially claimed that the NSA has gathered only telephone numbers and billing data. Now we know that the NSA has captured and stored the content of trillions of telephone conversations, texts and emails, and can access that content at the press of a few computer keys. All of this happened in the dark, with the permission of President Obama, with the knowledge and consent of fewer than 20 members of Congress who were forbidden from doing anything about it by the laws they themselves had written, and based on secret legal arguments accepted by a secret court that keeps its records secret even from the judges who sit on the court.

This massive spying – metadata gathering, as the NSA calls it – was also done notwithstanding statements NSA officials made in public under oath and in secret classified briefings to Congress, which effectively denied it. The denials were in one case admitted to – “least untruthful,” as the director of national intelligence later called his own testimony. Then, when even members of Congress who usually support a muscular national security apparatus realized that they, too, had been lied to by the NSA, the NSA responded with its own leaks.

It has leaked, for example, that as a consequence of its spying it has prevented at least 50 foreign-originated plots from harming Americans. It eventually backed off that number and declined to reveal with specificity what it independently learned and how that knowledge foiled the plots. But we do know that its colleagues in the FBI were participants in many of those plots, which means they weren’t real plots at all – just government stings going after dopes and dupes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rep. Amash: Congress Purposely Kept in Dark on Surveillance Efforts

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photo credit: gage skidmoreIt’s “total nonsense” to say Congress was told about the NSA collecting communications data on Americans, and as a matter of fact, efforts are made to keep members of Congress in the dark, says Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan.

Members would have a stack of documents hundreds of pages long stacked on a table in front of them and told to read it, Amash said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor.”

If congressional members don’t know the definitions of terms used by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency, they have no way of knowing what the documents mean, he said. One example: There is a difference between the words “collect” and “acquire.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Former Obama Advisor: President’s Claim of No Domestic Spying Program ‘Ridiculous’

When President Barack Obama went on “The Tonight Show” Tuesday and said America has no domestic spying program, he didn’t convince one of his most ardent supporters — his own former green jobs adviser Van Jones.

“If we don’t have one now, I would hate to see us with one,” Jones said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“Everybody knows I love this president,” Jones said, “but this is ridiculous. What we need to do is figure out how we’re going to balance these things, not pretend there’s no balancing to be done.”

Read more from this story HERE.

He Just Can’t Tell the Truth: Obama Tells Leno, “We Don’t Have a Domestic Spying Program” (+video)

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Making his sixth appearance on Leno — his fourth as president — Obama and his host stuck to serious subjects as the president promoted his economic and heath care policies, discussed terrorist threats in the Middle East, and defended National Security Agency surveillance programs.

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, describing the NSA efforts as “mechanisms that can track a phone number or an e-mail address that is connected to a terrorist attack … That information is useful.”

Obama also told Leno he’s disappointed that Russia granted temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but said the two nations can still work together on other issues.

“There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality,” Obama said. “What I continually say to them and to President (Vladmir) Putin, that’s the past.”

Read more from this story HERE.