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Microsoft and Google to Sue Over US Surveillance Requests

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Microsoft and Google are to sue the US government to win the right to reveal more information about official requests for user data. The companies announced the lawsuit on Friday, escalating a legal battle over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the mechanism used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US government agencies to gather data about foreign internet users.

Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, made the announcement in a corporate blog post which complained of the government’s “continued unwillingness” to let it publish information about FISA requests.

Each company filed a suit in June arguing that they should be allowed to state the details under the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, and in the process defend corporate reputations battered by Edward Snowden’s revelations. Critics accused the companies of collaborating in the snooping.

“On six occasions in recent weeks we agreed with the department of justice to extend the government’s deadline to reply to these lawsuits. We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all,” Smith wrote.

The negotiations failed, he wrote, so Google and Microsoft were going to court. He did not specify when, or to which court.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Having Flashbacks to Watergate Era (+video)

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NSABy Ken Dilanian

The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations.

Thanks to former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden’s flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration’s uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA’s powers.

“This is a secret intelligence agency that’s now in the news every day,” said Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and later led the CIA. “Each day, the workforce wakes up and reads the daily indictment.”

President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s largest intelligence agency. “There’s no doubt that, for all the work that’s been done to protect the American people’s privacy, the capabilities of the NSA are scary to people,” he said in a CNN interview.

He added, “Between all the safeguards and checks that we put in place within the executive branch, and the federal court oversight that takes place on the program, and congressional oversight, people are still concerned as to whether their emails are being read or their phone calls are being listened to.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Corker: Congress Doesn’t Know Extent of NSA Surveillance

By Washington Free Beacon Staff

Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) told Fox News Sunday even he was not sure to what extent the National Security Agency kept tabs on Americans, adding he wanted the NSA to brief Congress “from top to bottom” to explain the programs in place and help ensure appropriate oversight.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Officers Spy on Love Interests

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.

The “LOVEINT” examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said.

In the wake of revelations last week that NSA had violated privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions in a one-year period, NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong emphasized in a conference call with reporters last week that those errors were unintentional. He did say that there have been “a couple” of willful violations in the past decade. He said he didn’t have the exact figures at the moment.

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NSA Paid Millions to Cover Prism Compliance Costs for Tech Companies

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Photo Credit: The Guardian

Photo Credit: The Guardian

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA’s inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

The intelligence agency requires the Fisa court to sign annual “certifications” that provide the legal framework for surveillance operations. But in the wake of the court judgment these were only being renewed on a temporary basis while the agency worked on a solution to the processes that had been ruled illegal.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Collected Non-Terrorism-Related Emails (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Reid J. Epstein.

The National Security Agency began improperly collecting Americans’ electronic communications that had no connection to terrorism in 2008, but the government didn’t learn of the problem until 2011, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will release three documents that reveal the extent of the error, posting them on a new tumblr page.

The NSA revealed the improper collection of emails to the FISA court in 2011, which demanded a halt to the practice. The officials said the problem was technological and not malicious.

Congress, the administration officials said, knew when it authorized the surveillance programs in 2008 that some Americans would inadvertently have their communications intercepted.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

NSA ‘Goes After Man who Mocked Agency’

By Joe Kovacs.

The National Security Agency, the secretive federal department under fire for spying on U.S. citizens, is now accused of crushing the free-speech rights of a businessman clowning around about the NSA.

LibertyManiacs.com, a company that markets “freedom products for liberty lovers,” says the NSA is using a claim of copyright infringement to stop it from selling T-shirts and other products making fun of the Big Brother agency.

“Two months ago the NSA’s lawyers came after our parodies of the rogue agency and forced our host to take them down,” the company said Friday on its Facebook page.

At issue is use of the NSA logo, which was partially altered by LibertyManiacs owner Dan McCall. He kept the name of the agency and most of the artwork intact, but changed the bottom portion from “United States of America” to the laugh-inspiring “Peeping while you’re sleeping.”

Underneath the doctored logo is the phrase “The NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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NSA collected thousands of emails from Americans, rebuked by court

By Fox News.

The National Security Agency was rebuked by a secret court in 2011 for collecting thousands of emails and other online details from Americans with no ties to terrorism, according to court opinions which were declassified for the first time on Wednesday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of declassifying more than 100 pages of documents, amid the escalating public debate about government surveillance programs. The release comes several days after a report showed that the NSA had violated privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times.

Some of those incidents were minor, but the documents released Wednesday detail major compliance problems.

In 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was notified of a problem involving “upstream collection,” which is the collection of Internet traffic outside of the service providers. The NSA was collecting bundled email communications under a provision which focuses on foreign Internet traffic. The NSA, though, was not effectively segregating all the traffic from Americans.

The court rebuked the NSA for the violation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Warrantless Cellphone Searches

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obama_shreds_constitutionIf the police arrest you, do they need a warrant to rifle through your cellphone? Courts have been split on the question. Last week the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and rule that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless cellphone searches.

In 2007, the police arrested a Massachusetts man who appeared to be selling crack cocaine from his car. The cops seized his cellphone and noticed that it was receiving calls from “My House.” They opened the phone to determine the number for “My House.” That led them to the man’s home, where the police found drugs, cash and guns.

The defendant was convicted, but on appeal he argued that accessing the information on his cellphone without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Earlier this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the man’s argument, ruling that the police should have gotten a warrant before accessing any information on the man’s phone.

The Obama Administration disagrees…

Read more from this story HERE.

Idiot Big Brother

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:

A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top-secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).

Seriously.

I enjoy as much as the next chap all those Hollywood conspiracy thrillers about the all-powerful security state — you know the kind of thing, where the guy’s on the lam and he stops at a diner at a windswept one-stoplight hick burg in the middle of nowhere and decides to take the risk of making one 15-second call from the payphone, and as he dials the last digit there’s a click in a basement in Langley, and even as he’s saying hello the black helicopters are already descending on him. It’s heartening to know that, if I ever get taken out at a payphone, it will be because some slapdash timeserving pen-pusher mistyped the code for Malaysia (60) as that of New Hampshire (603).

The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo. On the global scene, America has imploded: Its leaders have no grasp of its national interests, never mind any sense of how to achieve them. The assumption that we are in the early stages of “the post-American world” is now shared by everyone from General Sisi to Vladimir Putin. General Sisi, I should add, is Egypt’s new strongman, not Putin’s characterization of Obama. Meanwhile, in contrast to its accelerating irrelevance overseas, at home Washington’s big bloated blundering bureaucratic security state expands daily. It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.

Read more from this story HERE.

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

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NSAThe 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.

Democrat Senators Warn That NSA Violations ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

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udall_wydenTwo Democratic senators warned Friday that a new report detailing thousands of instances in which the National Security Agency broke laws while spying was only “the tip of a larger iceberg” of surveillance violations.

“We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg,” said Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., in a prepared statement.

The senators’ comments follow a Washington Post report Friday that detailed the NSA breaking privacy rules or overstepping its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008.

Wyden and Udall said that while Senate rules prohibit them confirming or denying some of the details in media reports, “the American people have a right to know more details about of these violations.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Noonan: What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

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surveillance_stateWhat is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious?

Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past?

We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror.

Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens’ communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

Among the pertinent definitions of privacy from the Oxford English Dictionary: “freedom from disturbance or intrusion,” “intended only for the use of a particular person or persons,” belonging to “the property of a particular person.” Also: “confidential, not to be disclosed to others.” Among others, the OED quotes the playwright Arthur Miller, describing the McCarthy era: “Conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration.”

Read more from this story HERE.