Video Link WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is defending the government's secret seizure of millions of domestic telephone records from Verizon, saying the data collection program “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.”
A senior administration official released a statement Thursday after the British newspaper The Guardian first reported the secret operation. The paper posted on its website a classified court order that requires the telecommunications company to turn over daily records with the length, location and time of individual phone calls, as well as phone numbers.
The official did not confirm the existence of the order, which is marked "Top Secret." It was issued in late April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that meets in Washington, and allowed the government to collect the bulk data until July 19. It's unclear if the 90-day order was a renewal of a standing request.
"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber," the official said. "It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.
The official said telephone data "allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
The official requested anonymity to discuss the counterterrorism program.
President Obama has come under increasing criticism from civil liberties groups and others who accuse the White House of masking government action in unnecessary secrecy.
The criticism has generally focused on the lack of transparency about targeted killings of suspected terrorists and militants overseas. It intensified recently after the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed telephone records from the Associated Press, and obtained a warrant to examine emails of a Fox News reporter.
In defending the data collection program, the administration official sought to spread responsibility, noting that “all three branches” of government were tasked with review and oversight of surveillance.
The court order was authorized under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect business records in bulk if its requests are approved by the FISA court.
"There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," the official said. He said that involves oversight by the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA court.
The disclosure of the order, which has not been independently verified by NBC News, comes after the Obama administration has taken fire for a Justice Department subpoena of Associated Press phone records.
Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, called the collection of call data as described in the Guardian report “an outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy” in a news release Thursday. “This bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have been kept secret from the public. Significant FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be declassified.”
Verizon had 98.9 million wireless customers at the end of the first quarter this year, according to an earnings report released in April, as well as about 11.7 million residential and 10 million commercial lines. It is not clear whether other parts of Verizon might have received similar orders.
The order explicitly prohibits any person from disclosing that the NSA or FBI Investigation has sought records under the order.
“Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate an investigation,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress.”
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a March 2012 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that most Americans would “stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
“As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” the senators wrote in the letter. “This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”
Former vice president Al Gore called the practices described in the order “obscenely outrageous” in a message posted on Twitter Wednesday night. “In digital era, privacy must be a priority,” Gore wrote. “Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous.”
The order is the first concrete evidence that U.S. intelligence officials are continuing a broad campaign of domestic surveillance that began under President George W. Bush and caused great controversy when it was first exposed, according to Reuters.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- President Barack Obama should explain to Americans why the U.S. government's collection of phone records from Verizon VZ +2.32% customers is necessary, House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday. Boehner at a press briefing said it's important for Obama to detail why such tools are "critical" to protecting Americans. The Guardian reported late Wednesday that a U.S. court order granted to the FBI orders Verizon to hand over data to the National Security Agency.
Exactly a month after President Obama told Ohio State graduates to “reject voices that warn about government tyranny,” The Guardian is reporting that at least as far back as April of this year, the FBI has demanded that Verizon turn over records of every call made by its customers in the United States and all incoming calls from abroad to its U.S. customers. While many liberals have been offering defenses of the current administration, and some have even been apologetic, this latest scandal may be the breaking point that turns Democrats and Independents against the president.
With reason, the presidents supporters have been able to defend him on the topics of Benghazi, the IRS targeting, and the subpoena of AP phone records. It seems likely that warnings of the security situation in Benghazi never left the State Department, that the IRS acted alone, and that the Justice Department could be given the benefit of the doubt for the subpoena of AP records, which were after all obtained legally by subpoena.
In fact, in a poll released Wednesday, President Obama’s approval rating remains essentially unchanged over the last two months, holding steady at 48% despite the Washington controversies. What this suggests is that thus far, not surprisingly, opinions about these issues have been highly partisan.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) says, “when the media repeats the word ‘scandals’ you are repeating partisan lines. They are issues that have occurred that have to be addressed. I don’t think they rise to the level of a scandal.” Others like Connolly are downplaying the recent slate of scandal. “I don’t think there is any long-term political impact on House Democrats for any of this stuff,” said Rep. Jim McGovern. “There clearly needs to be more accountability at the IRS and I think that will be taken care of. I think the administration has been handling it correctly.”
White House controversies of administrations past have usually had similar reaction, where approximately 25% are well informed with opinions divided along partisan lines. But while the President’s Party base has remained faithful throughout what USA Today said was “one of the most challenging weeks at the White House for the Obama administration,” independents are more skeptical.
The president’s approval rating has dropped among independents, from 37% in April to 28% now. A major reason for this is that, by a 44% to 28% margin, more independents say the administration was involved in the IRS decision than say it was not. This most recent NSA scandal may exacerbate the President’s problem, and could even force some civil libertarians in his own Party to turn on him.
Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Or.) have been warning for some time about the widespread nature of the Obama's administration domestic surveillance activities, sending a letter to Attorney General Holder and openly criticizing the Justice Department for misleading the American public on their use of the PATRIOT Act.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Or.) agreed, adding: "This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans' privacy.”
"In digital era, privacy must be a priority," tweeted former vice president Al Gore. "Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
Others, still, are claiming this isn’t even a scandal. MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe said, “I’m kind of scratching my head over the outrage on this one,” Wolffe began. “What was outrageous under the Bush administration, what really troubled people, was that there was warrantless. They were doing this without going to court. That was the key principle here.”
The top GOP and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, added that the monitoring of phone records has been going legally for years, and Congress has been briefed about it.
"It's called protecting America," Feinstein told reporters. "I understand privacy, Sen. Chambliss understands privacy, we want to protect people's private rights and that is why this is carefully done."
However, even Wolffe conceded that “Frankly, these courts actually never reject an application.”
The minimal effects the other scandals on polling data can be traced to the partisan divide between supporters and opponents of the White House. It would appear though that this controversy if different from all the rest that have plagued the Obama White House recently because outrage over the NSA's phone-record collection does not seem to be clearly partisan, with the government's surveillance program finding support in both parties. What will determine how this plays out in terms of Obama support is to what extent the public associates itself with civil libertarianism, and that remains to be seen.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Thursday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) practice of collecting phone records from millions of Americans, and said that he had no problem with being spied on.
During an interview on Fox News, Graham was asked to react to the news that Verizon had been required to provide phone records metadata to the NSA on a daily basis.
“I think we should be concerned about terrorists trying to infiltrate our country and attack us and trying to coordinate activities from overseas within inside the country,” he explained. “Under the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] law, you just can’t track people’s phone calls, you’ve got to have a reasonable belief that that the people you’re monitoring — in terms of monitoring conversations — one of the person is involved in terrorism. So, you’re trying to data mine and find out, you know, these numbers that we know are in the hands of guys who they are calling. And then once you find a match, you can monitor.”
Fox News host Steve Doocy pointed out that he was a Verizon customer and had been “tracked by the NSA following all our phone detail.”
“I’m a Verizon customer,” Graham revealed. “I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government’s going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So, we don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I’m glad the activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to,” the South Carolina Republican added.
“Are you sure?” co-host Brian Kilmeade wondered. “That’s what it’s supposed to be, but are you sure they’re still doing that?”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what they’re doing,” Graham insisted. “I’m sure we should be doing this.”
Watch this video from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, broadcast June 6, 2013.
June 6th, 2013, 18:03
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Hahahahahaha
I have Sprint!
hhahahahahaha
(They are next I'm sure, if they haven't been and it's just not yet in the news, lol)
June 6th, 2013, 18:05
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Here's the issue.
1) If someone is reasonably believed to be a terrorist, connected to terrorist, or planning a terrorist attack go after them.
2) if you have to data mine information without any IDEA someone is or even might be a terrorist, connected to terrorist, or planning a terrorist attack then you SHOULD NOT BE LOOKING FOR ANY REASON. It's not the government's business to find "potential targets".
Of course, it isn't the first time that a US administration has spied on its own people. The origins of this particular order lie first in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and then in Section 215 of the Patriot Act, backed by George W Bush and passed by Congress after 9/11. Normally, domestic surveillance only targets suspicious individuals, not the entire population, but in 2006 it was discovered that a similarly wide database of cellular records was being collected from customers of Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth. There was plenty of outrage and plenty of lawsuits, but the National Security Agency never confirmed that the programme had been shut down. It would appear that it’s still in rude health: the latest court order for collecting data runs from April 25 to July 19.
A few observations. First, America is so conscious and proud of its history as a beacon of liberty that it often overlooks the tyranny that occurs on its own shores in the name of safeguarding democracy. The national security state has expanded to the point whereby it now functions outside of democratic control and with clear disregard for the Constitution. What’s especially creepy about this case is that the state felt no legal obligation to tell citizens that it was spying on them – or at least considering it. The result is a disturbing paradox: it’s legal to collect information from companies but illegal for the companies to try to tell their customers about it. It seems that the law prefers to take the side of the state.
Second, you get what you vote for – and both Republicans and Democrats keep on voting for authoritarians. There’s a frustrating hypocrisy that many conservatives applauded the accrual of state power under Bush for the sake of fighting the War on Terror only to scream blue murder about it now that it’s happening under Obama. Likewise, many liberals resented the domestic espionage programme of Bush but have been less vocal about opposing it under Obama. The journalist Martin Bashir has gone to far as to claim that the IRS scandal is a coded attack upon the President’s race, that “IRS” is the new “n word”. Sometimes it feels like Obama could be discovered standing over the body of Sarah Palin with a smoking gun in his hand and liberals would scream “racist!” if anyone called him a murderer. Their capacity for self-delusion knows no bounds.
Finally, totaling every scandal up – IRS, AP phone records, Fox journalists being targeted, the Benghazi mess – this has to be the most furtively authoritarian White House since Nixon’s. We don't yet have a "smoking email" from Obama ordering all of this, but it can’t be said often enough that there is a correlation between Obama’s “progressive” domestic agenda and the misbehavior of the other agencies governed by his administration – forcing people to buy healthcare even when they can’t afford it, bailing out the banks, war in Libya and the use of drone strikes to kill US citizens. This is exactly what the Tea Party was founded to expose and oppose. All the laughter once directed at the “paranoid” Right now rings hollow.
June 6th, 2013, 18:34
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Good. He's in deep, deep doo doo. Good.
Holder was just ordered back to stand before the committee to answer for "discrepancies" (lies) in his previous testimony.
June 6th, 2013, 18:37
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Congrats, Everyone: You Voted For NSA Overreach Under Obama And Bush; Now Can We All Finally End It?
http://static01.mediaite.com/med/wp-...-nsa-obama.jpgThe news that the Obama administration’s National Security Agency is collecting the telephone records of millions of US Verizon customers via a top secret court order is astonishing and appalling on many levels. But there is one thing it is not: Surprising.
In the post-9/11 world, the US government has increasingly found ways to expand its surveillance capabilities through secretive court orders, malleable standards, and blanket laws — seemingly without restraint. This latest NSA news, as broken by the venerable Glenn Greenwald, only serves to confirm what civil libertarians have long suspected: the NSA has repeatedly engaged in massive surveillance of domestic communications of millions of Americans, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.
Libertarians who struggled through the Bush years will recall how the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, with the help of telecommunications giants like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. “The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime,” USA Todayreported in 2006, several years after Bush initiated the secretive program.
Given Greenwald’s report, this all sounds eerily familiar. We now have confirmation that Obama has continued, if not expanded, that exact sort of egregious surveillance program. In fact, as Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez told Greenwald, this Obama incident perhaps goes further with an “extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion.”
This latest example of Obama overreach is sure to rankle the feathers of conservatives already rightfully disturbed by the DOJ’s extensive snooping on journalists and the IRS’s intentional targeting of tea party organizations. While many of these same conservatives were rah-rah’ing the expansion of the NSA and United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the Bush years, it is a pleasant change to see them finally care about FISA. Welcome aboard.
Now it’s up to the liberals who lauded Obama as the “anti-Bush” civil liberties champion in 2008 to swallow their pride as well and take a stand against this administration’s overreach, despite what they might see as partisan opportunism coming from the right.
As the last 13 years have proven, regardless of who is in the White House the security state will continue to expand. And it will take some hypocrisy on both sides to finally end it.
June 6th, 2013, 19:37
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
From CNN....
NSA's phone snooping a different kind of creepy
By Douglas Rushkoff, Special to CNN
June 6, 2013 -- Updated 1834 GMT (0234 HKT)
(CNN) -- I'm finding it hard to get too worked up over the revelation that the National Security Agency has been authorized by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all our call data from Verizon. Hasn't everyone already assumed this? Everything we do in the digital realm -- from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call -- creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it -- or will be soon enough.
This particular style of privacy invasion looks a bit different from those old TV movies where FBI agents sit in a van listening in on phone calls and recording them on reel-to-reel tape recorders. The government isn't interested in the content of our phone calls -- our conversations -- so much as who is calling whom and when, or what has become known as "meta-data." Your life and pursuits are less important than the statistical profile of the way you use your digital devices. This is the world of big data.
I remember the days when talking about such possibilities was considered conspiracy theory or paranoia. Many of us imagined a future in which people would be planted with chips that monitor our conversations and whereabouts. Perhaps we'd even accept such tagging voluntarily, if it meant being able to track down our children in the unlikely event of a kidnapping.
What does the Verizon order mean for me?
But such extraordinary measures proved unnecessary; we're all walking around with tracking devices in our pockets, which are capable not simply of broadcasting our phone calls, but our physical locations, our movements, our interests -- and then tying all this data to our consumer profiles, credit histories ... everything.
Yes, it's still creepy, but it's a different kind creepy than it appears. Big data analysis works by identifying patterns and anomalies in our behavior. Nobody cares about the reasons why certain people do certain things. They only need to be able to predict the future. Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism -- and for this, they need us.
The only way for them to identify the kinds of statistical anomalies that point to a terror candidate is to have a giant database of all those behavior patterns that don't suggest imminent violence. What is different about the Tsarnaev brothers' patterns of telephone usage from that of every other young male Chechen immigrants? You need both sets of data to figure that out. We are not the targets so much as the control group.
Everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Douglas Rushkoff
Of course, that's small comfort to a people who have long valued and assumed some measure of privacy from government observation. The American assumption of privacy allows those of us who do break certain laws -- say, smoking pot or engaging in prostitution -- from the fear of selective enforcement if we happen to be personal or political enemies of those in charge. As recent Internal Revenue Service scandals prove, our most trusted agencies are not above targeted investigations of ideological foes.
The harder truth to accept is that we are moving into a digital reality where the assumption of privacy must be exchanged for an assumption of observation. Our telephone meta data is just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, President Barack Obama was quick to respond to the surprise discovery of his administration's covert surveillance operation, promising Americans that the leaked document describes the full extent of this technological intrusion on our privacy. But this court order was already "top secret." Had it not been uncovered, its provisions would have been denied as well.
My own friends in the digital telephony and networking industries have long told me about "splitters" at all major communications companies, through which every data signal can be observed and diverted. Other technicians have told me about giant server farms in Virginia and Utah, where all of our digital data -- including encrypted e-mails and phone calls -- are being stored. No, they don't have the technological ability or legal authority to search this tremendous repository of data (if it really exists). But they may at some point in the future. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/ass...story-body.jpgCrowley on national security
Besides, the lack of court orders authorizing a particular style of surveillance don't stop any of this surveillance from happening. It simply makes any information collected inadmissible in a court of law. Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it -- whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.
Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Does this excuse our government's behavior? Of course not. But the silver lining here is that this digital transparency cuts both ways. No sooner does the government win a court order to spy on us than the digital trail of that court order is discovered and leaked to the press. The government's panicky surveillance of Associated Press reporters and disproportionate prosecution of WikiLeaks participants lay bare its own inability to contend with the transparency of digital communications.
It is disheartening and disillusioning to realize that our government knows every digital thing we say or do. But now, at least we know they know.
June 6th, 2013, 19:38
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Not just Verizon? Secret NSA effort to gather phone data is years old
The National Security Agency is reportedly keeping track of the telephone records of millions of American Verizon customers.
By Richard A. Serrano and Kathleen Hennessey
June 6, 2013, 8:54 a.m.
WASHINGTON -- The massive National Security Agency collection of telephone records disclosed Wednesday was part of a continuing program that has been in effect nonstop since 2006, according to the two top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.
Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: "This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."
Obama administration defends collecting Verizon phone data Obama administration defends collecting Verizon phone data
Same-sex marriage 'inevitable,' most Americans say Same-sex marriage 'inevitable,' most Americans say
Obama shakes up national security team Obama shakes up national security team
The statements by the two senators, whose committee positions give them wide access to classified data, appeared to rule out the possibility that the court order directing Verizon to turn over telephone records was related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The order was effective as of April 19, shortly after the bombings, which had sparked speculation about a link.
Instead, the surveillance, which was revealed Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, appears to have been of far longer duration. Although the senators did not specify the scope of the surveillance, the fact that it has been in place since 2006 also suggests that it is not limited to any one phone carrier.
The Obama administration defended the program Thursday, saying the data collection “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.”
A senior administration official released a statement which did not confirm the existence of the court order authorizing the surveillance, which, according to the copy released by the Guardian, is marked "Top Secret." It was issued in late April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that meets in Washington, and allowed the government to collect the bulk data until July 19.
"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber," the official said. "It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.
The court order was authorized under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect business records in bulk if its requests are approved by the court.
The official said telephone data allow "counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
The official requested anonymity to discuss the counterterrorism program.
In defending the data collection program, the administration official sought to spread responsibility, noting that “all three branches” of government were tasked with review and oversight of surveillance.
"There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," the official said. He said that involves oversight by the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA court.
Separately, the Justice Department released a letter defending the administration’s handling of the FISA law that they had sent in 2011 to two senators who had objected to it.
“We do not believe the Executive Branch is operating pursuant to ‘secret law’ or ‘secret opinions of the Department of Justice,’ “ said the letter, signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Ronald Weich. The “Intelligence Community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the Intelligence Communities of both Houses.”
“Many other collection activities are classified,” Weich added, saying that “this is necessary because public disclosure of the activities they discuss would harm national security and impede the effectiveness of the intelligence tools that Congress has approved.”
Weich further defended the program by saying intelligence officials have “determined that public disclosure of the classified use” of the law “would expose sensitive sources and methods to our adversaries and therefore harm national security.”
He said collection of records, as now underway with Verizon phone logs, was different than material obtained through grand jury subpoenas. Grand jury subpoenas, he said, can be obtained by prosecutors without court approval. In contrast, he said, the intelligence collections can be done only with approval from a federal judge sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Most importantly, he noted that FISA courts require a showing by officials that the records sought “are relevant to an authorized national security investigation.”
The Weich letter was sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-0re.).
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is testifying Thursday morning before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and is expected to address the matter further.
June 6th, 2013, 19:39
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
June 6, 2013, 2:48 PM
Lawmakers’ Mixed Reactions on NSA Surveillance of Phone Records
By Janet Hook
While the Obama administration called government review of complete phone records of U.S. customers a “critical tool” in protecting the public from terrorists, reaction was mixed on Capitol Hill to a report showing a secret U.S. intelligence court had approved a three-month collection of phone-call data from Verizon.
The report was in the British newspaper Guardian.
Many congressional leaders defended the surveillance program and said it had been place for years, dating back to the George W. Bush administration.
More In NSA
Lawmakers' Mixed Reactions on NSA Surveillance of Phone Records
Eric Holder's Apple Store Encounter
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday that the NSA program helped avert a “significant domestic terrorist attack” in the United States “within the last few years.” He did not provide further information about the threatened attack, but said the committee was trying to classify information about it.
“We should just calm down and understand this is not something that is brand new,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who said that the program has been in place for seven years and has “worked to prevent” terrorist attacks.
Getty Images
Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said the program was lawful and that it is renewed every three months. She said this revelation seems to coincide with its latest renewal.
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said he believed that Mr. Obama should reassure Americans with a public explanation and defense of the program.
“There are public policy and civil liberties concerns among Americans today. I trust the president will explain (to the American people) why the administration considers this a critical tool,” Mr. Boehner said. “I’m fully confident both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have provided oversight on this subject. It is important for the president to outline why these tools are critical.”
Asked if he knew about this program, Mr. Boehner said, “I don’t discuss classified data….we’re still waiting for the rest of the details.”
Other members of Congress were more alarmed. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R.,Wis.), an author of the Patriot Act, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder protesting the broad collection of phone records and arguing that it violates the law.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), who has offered amendments to curb this NSA power, said this report was not a surprise to him but is an “invitation for us to revisit” the the Patriot Act. He said the law has surveillance limits, but “the question is whether it is adequate. This gives us a chance and opportunity to do just that.”
Sen. Rand Paul ( R., Ky.) said the NSA’s surveillance of Verizon’s phone customers “is an astounding assault on the Constitution.”
“After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low,” he said.
Here is more reaction:
Sen Dean Heller (R., Nev.): “This is yet another example of government overreach that forces the question, ‘What sort of state are we living in?’ There is clearly a glaring difference between what the government is doing and what the American people think they are doing … keeping American citizens safe is one of government’s most important responsibilities, but there is a fine line between protecting our nation and protecting our Fourth Amendment rights. Our government continues to come close to that line and in some areas may have even crossed it.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.): “The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans … While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans.”
Rep. Louise M. Slaughter ( D., N.Y.): ”I am outraged by reports that the NSA is collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. Verizon customers under a secret court order. I have consistently opposed reauthorizations of the USA Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) precisely because they grant overly-broad powers that could infringe on our civil liberties. We do not need to choose between security and civil liberties.”
June 6th, 2013, 19:40
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Quote:
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Well? You were worried. You helped create this monster. WTF are you GONNA DO ABOUT IT????????
June 6th, 2013, 19:42
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
This guy should just go flush himself down the nearest toilet or leap off a bridge. Calm down my ass. JUST because something has been being done wrong for seven YEARS doesn't MAKE IT RIGHT.
NSA's Verizon records collection: "Calm down," Reid says
Updated at 2:20 p.m. ET
The National Security Agency's blanket request for Verizon to hand over all records of telephone calls within its system -- both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries -- was a routine request made under congressionally-approved laws, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and some other members of Congress insisted Thursday.
"Right now I think everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that is brand new, it's been going on for some seven years, and we have tried to often to try to make it better and work and we will continue to do that," Reid told reporters, referring to the surveillance protocols put in place by the updated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Patriot Act.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, concurred with Reid, commenting, "This is nothing particularly new."
"This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA authority and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this," he said.
Other members of Congress, however -- including one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. -- expressed outrage and concern about the data collection.
"As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely disturbed by what appears to be an overbroad interpretation of the Act," Sensenbrenner said in a letter sent Thursday to Attorney General Eric Holder. Sensenbrenner said the Patriot Act was intended to balance national security and civil rights, but he has "always worried about potential abuses."
As first reported by the Guardian newspaper in Britain, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted a request from the NSA and the FBI to collect the Verizon data from a three-month period ending on July 19. The order was granted under the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, though Sensenbrenner pointed out in his letter to Holder that the provision requires the government to prove the relevancy of the information and meet certain thresholds before acquiring business records, especially with respect to records pertaining to U.S. citizens.
Sensenbrenner said he doesn't believe the FISA order meets those standards. "How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation?" he asked in the letter. He asked Holder to explain why the request was so broad and whether the FBI believes there are any limits to the information they can obtain from the Patriot Act's "business records" provision.
Other members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed concern over whether the executive branch could be monitoring members of Congress or the Supreme Court. If members of the executive branch were monitoring telephone records from Congress, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said Thursday, it "would give them unique leverage over the legislature." Kirk expressed this concern directly to Holder, who was testifying about the Justice Department's budget in a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
Holder said he could brief the committee in a closed-door session later, given the sensitive nature of the subject. Kirk retorted, "The correct answer would be to say no, we stayed within our lane, and I'm assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress."
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., head of the Appropriations Committee, told Holder that the full Senate -- not just the Intelligence Committee -- should be briefed on the surveillance. "I will send a note to [Democratic and Republican leaders] Reid and McConnell because I think this cuts across committees," she said. "I think it goes to Judiciary. I think it goes to Armed Services. I think it goes to intel."
June 6th, 2013, 19:44
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
The Media, the government officials, everyone are all trying to make this into NOTHING at all.
Originally published June 6, 2013 at 9:46 AM | Page modified June 6, 2013 at 11:02 AM
US gov't collecting huge number of phone records
The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach.
By DONNA CASSATA and MATT APUZZO
WASHINGTON —
The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told reporters Thursday that the court order for telephone records, first disclosed by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice. The records have been collected for some seven years, according to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
"I think people want the homeland kept safe to the extent we can," Feinstein said at a Capitol Hill news conference. "We want to protect these privacy rights. That's why this is carefully done in federal court with federal judges who sit 24/7 who review these requests."
And the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, said the NSA search of telephone records had thwarted an attempted terrorist attack in the United States in the past few years. He said it was a "significant case" but declined to provide further details.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that he couldn't provide classified details but that the court order in question is a critical tool for learning when terrorists or suspected terrorists might be engaging in dangerous activities. He said there are strict legal rules on how such a program is conducted and that congressional leaders are briefed.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent whose comments were echoed by several members of both parties, said: "To simply say in a blanket way that millions and millions of Americans are going to have their phone records checked by the U.S. government is to my mind indefensible and unacceptable."
The disclosure raised a number of questions: What is the government looking for? Are other big telephone companies under similar orders to turn over information? How is the information used and how long are the records kept?
The sweeping roundup of U.S. phone records has been going on for years and was a key part of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, according to a U.S. official.
Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.
The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the Guardian reported. It requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis," to give the NSA information on all landline and mobile telephone calls of Verizon Business in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration, the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether the people are suspected of any wrongdoing.
A former U.S. intelligence official who is familiar with the NSA program said that records from all U.S. phone companies would be seized by the government under the warrants, and that they would include business and residential numbers.
Reaction to the revelation - both pro and con - reflected the vigorous debate in Washington over how best to balance the sometimes-competing goals of protecting the nation from terror attacks while safeguarding the privacy and civil rights of Americans. President Barack Obama, in a recent national security address, said the nation is at a crossroads as it determines how to remain vigilant yet move beyond a post-9/11 mindset focused on global antiterrorism.
Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted that privacy was essential in the digital era.
"Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" wrote Gore, the Democrat who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he had no problem with the court order and the practice, declaring, "If we don't do it, we're crazy."
"If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, who ran against Obama for president in 2008, said that if the records sweep was designed to track "people in the United States who are communicating with members of jihadist terrorist organizations," that might not be a problem. "But if it was something where we just blanket started finding out who everybody called and under what circumstances, then I think it deserves congressional hearings."
Senate Democratic leader Reid played down the significance of the revelation.
"Right now I think that everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," he said. "This is a program that's been in effect for seven years, as I recall. It's a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not."
The disclosure of the records sweep was just the latest controversy to hit the Obama administration.
The president also is facing questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalist phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.
At the very least, the controversies threaten to distract the White House at a pivotal time, when the president wants to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. At most, the controversies collectively could erode the American people's trust in him, threatening both to derail his second term agenda and sully his presidential legacy.
The court order did not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify what are known in intelligence circles as "communities of interest" - networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.
Once the government has zeroed in on numbers it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.
The court document related to Verizon offers a glimpse into the larger NSA effort. Under the law, the government would need to demand records from each phone company individually. While subpoenas for other phone companies have not been made public, for the data-mining program described by government officials to work, the government would need records for all providers.
"There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or novel. It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records. And this has been going on for at least 7 years, and probably longer," wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.
Jim Harper, a communications and privacy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, questioned the effectiveness of using so-called pattern analyses to intercept terrorism. He said that kind of analysis - finding trends in transactional data collected by Verizon - would produce many false positives and give the government access to intricate data about people's calling habits.
"This is not just entertainment or a sideshow. This is a record of who you called every day this month," he said, urging Congress to require the government to provide "a full explanation" of how this data turns up terrorism plots.
Under Bush, the National Security Agency built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the roundup continued under authority granted in the USA Patriot Act, the official said.
The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.
The official had not seen the court order released by the Guardian newspaper but said it was consistent with similar authorizations the Justice Department has received.
Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment.
The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. In a brochure it distributes, which includes a DVD for reporters to view video that it provides for public relations purposes, it pledges that the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties - and its commitment to accountability," and says, "Earning the American public's trust is paramount."
Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April - 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn't specify which customers' records were being tracked.
Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as are call time and duration, and unique identifiers. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.
A senior administration official, defending the collection of phone records by the government, said, "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Interviewed separately, the former intelligence official described a system in which the database needed to be kept current so that if intelligence agencies obtained a phone number from a terror suspect overseas, it could immediately be matched against the records on file. Because it is not easy or quick to obtain the records from phone companies, the Obama administration needed to renew the Bush-era program on an ongoing basis to keep it updated, the former official said.
It's not clear how long the records are kept, or if they are destroyed. The former official said that since terror suspects frequently change phone numbers to cover their tracks, there is little need for older records.
Congressional intelligence agencies were briefed extensively on the program, and received support from both Republicans and Democrats to continue it, the former official said. "Some were nervous about it, but there was never any attempt to stop the program," he said. He described it as a White House-led process.
The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks was very controversial.
The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.
---
Associated Press writers Adam Goldman, Julie Pace, Lara Jakes, David Espo and Jack Gillum contributed to this report.
June 6th, 2013, 20:11
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Sounds like the Government decided because records are deleted every couple of years, they pulled all this data to "archive" it.....
June 6th, 2013, 20:26
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
America's surveillance state: anger swells after data revelations
Senior politicians reveal that US counter-terrorism efforts have swept up personal data from American citizens for years
• Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 16.01 EDT
A White House spokesman said that laws governing such orders 'are something that have been in place for a number of years now'. Photograph: Rex Features
The scale of America's surveillance state was laid bare on Wednesday as senior politicians revealed that the US counter-terrorism effort had swept up swaths of personal data from the phone calls of millions of citizens for years.
After the revelation by the Guardian of a sweeping secret court order that authorised the FBI to seize all call records from a subsidiary of Verizon, the Obama administration sought to defuse mounting anger over what critics described as the broadest surveillance ruling ever issued.
A White House spokesman said that laws governing such orders "are something that have been in place for a number of years now" and were vital for protecting national security. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the Verizon court order had been in place for seven years. "People want the homeland kept safe," Feinstein said.
But as the implications of the blanket approval for obtaining phone data reverberated around Washington and beyond, anger grew among other politicians.
Intelligence committee member Mark Udall, who has previously warned in broad terms about the scale of government snooping, said: "This sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking." Former vice-president Al Gore described the "secret blanket surveillance" as "obscenely outrageous".
The Verizon order was made under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) as amended by the Patriot Act of 2001, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, said he was troubled by the Guardian revelations. He said that he had written to the attorney general, Eric Holder, questioning whether "US constitutional rights were secure".
He said: "I do not believe the broadly drafted Fisa order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."
The White House sought to defend what it called "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats". White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Fisa orders were used to "support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations" on which members of Congress were fully briefed.
"The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the intelligence community in both houses of Congress," Earnest said.
He pointed out that the order only relates to the so-called metadata surrounding phone calls rather than the content of the calls themselves. "The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls," Earnest said.
"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to call details, such as a telephone number or the length of a telephone call."
But such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off.
The disclosure has reignited longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.
Ron Wyden of Ohio, a member of the Senate intelligence committee who, along with Udell, has expressed concern about the extent of US government surveillance, warned of "sweeping, dragnet surveillance". He said: "I am barred by Senate rules from commenting on some of the details at this time, However, I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information.
"Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans' privacy."
'Beyond Orwellian'
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents.
"It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."
Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama.
The order names Verizon Business Services, a division of Verizon Communications. In its first-quarter earnings report, published in April, Verizon Communications listed about 10 million commercial lines out of a total of 121 million customers. The court order, which lasts for three months from 25 April, does not specify what type of lines are being tracked. It is not clear whether any additional orders exist to cover Verizon's wireless and residential customers, or those of other phone carriers.
Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific, named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual.
Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."
The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the secret court order was unprecedented. "As far as we know this order from the Fisa court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon [business services] subscribers anywhere in the US.
"The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it."
Russell Tice, a retired National Security Agency intelligence analyst and whistleblower, said: "What is going on is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined."
Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.
"I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now."
June 7th, 2013, 00:18
Phil Fiord
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Heard this on my way home today. I'd like to say I'm shocked, but I am not. We did know about the thing years ago and we also knew they made broader provisions. As to the idea they need our data as a control group, that actually has merit in an analysis to find the 'normal' in order to see the abnormal traffic, but it is wholly against our rights and any law allowing it is as well.
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/andyg....55.59-AM1.pngWhen it comes to modern law enforcement surveillance, no one watches the wiretappers.
The vast majority of law enforcement’s demands that phone carriers and Internet services hand over users’ private data don’t require a warrant, and occur with little or no accountability. It’s not just that we don’t know how much surveillance takes place. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t even know what we don’t know about how much the government knows about us.
But we’re finally starting to learn more. On Monday, Congressman Ed Markey released a collection of letters he received from major phone carriers in response to a query he sent them earlier this year, demanding that they reveal how often they give users’ data to the government and under what circumstances. The responses were patchy, evasive, and in many places leave out key information. But I’ve assembled a few bullet points from them that capture the massive surveillance affecting phone users.
Sprint received 500,000 subpoenas for its data from law enforcement in the last year. That doesn’t include court orders for wiretaps and location data, which Sprint didn’t track annually but which added up to 325,982 requests in the last five years. The company also says it doesn’t have the resources to track how many of those requests it responded to or rejected. The company has 221 employees dedicated to processing and responding to government requests for its data.
Verizon received 260,000 requests for its users data in 2011, including wiretaps, calling records, text message information, and location information, but doesn’t add how many were fulfilled.
AT&T received 131,400 subpoenas in criminal cases for its information in 2011, as well as 49,700 warrants or orders that it hand over data. It rejected 965 of them. The company says it employees more than 100 staffers full-time to respond to law enforcement demands.
T-Mobile told Congressman Markey it “does not disclose” the number of law enforcement requests it receives or complies with.
MetroPCS says it received fewer than 12,000 requests a month on average for the last six years.
Cricket received 42,000 requests last year, and U.S. Cellular received 19,734 requests in 2011.
The number of data requests seems to be growing quickly across the board. The major carriers who measured the growth in requests over time agreed that law enforcement demands have risen 12-16% year-over-year.
Markey’s request for this information followed a groundbreaking report by the American Civil Liberties Union based on Freedom of Information Act requests to police departments around the country for evidence of their policies on data requests to phone carriers. The results showed a disturbing rise in the use of phones as a central tool for law enforcement, including tracking location and even using “tower dumps”–collections of all the stored information collected from all users of a cell phone tower–without a warrant.
It’s important to remember that the information revealed Monday includes “tower dumps,” too, says Chris Calebrese, an attorney with the ACLU. “Just the sheer volume of orders is amazing, but a significant chunk are dumps from entire cell towers,” he says. “That means tons of people’s information is being grabbed with a single one of these orders.”
The numbers also bring home the fact that the official wiretap report released earlier this month is now all but useless. That report showed a 14% drop in wiretaps. But with less than 3,000 of those real-time communication requests reported, they represent less than a third of a percent of actual surveillance requests.
Markey’s surveillance report puts in perspective the privacy issues for Internet services compared with phone companies. Google, which releases a bi-annual report on law enforcement requests, received only 12,271 requests for its information in 2011, compared with the hundreds of thousands received by phone companies.
The ACLU’s Calabrese says Markey’s data points to the need for both more transparency and laws to better regulate on companies hand over users’ data. He points to the GPS Act making its way through Congress, which would require a warrant to track a user’s location with a cell phone. “It’s amazing that Congress has never regulated what standard law enforcement should use before tracking someone’s location. The appropriate standard is a probable cause search warrant,” he says. ” Clearly the cell phone has become the central tool for law enforcement investigations, even as the laws governing what information about them can access accessed and with what standard have become entirely out of date.”
The full responses to Markey’s letter are posted here.
June 7th, 2013, 02:26
vector7
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove
NSA Monitoring Includes Three Major Phone Companies, as Well as Online Activity
WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities.
The Obama administration says its review of complete phone records of U.S. citizens is a "necessary tool" in protecting the nation from terror threats. Is this the accepted new normal, or has the Obama administration pushed the bounds of civil liberties? Cato Institute Director of Information Policy Studies Jim Harper weighs in.
The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.'s VZ +3.46% phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA's operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. T +1.56% and Sprint Nextel Corp., S +1.94% records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.
The agency is using its secret access to the communications of millions of Americans to target possible terrorists, said people familiar with the effort.
The NSA's efforts have become institutionalized—yet not so well known to the public—under laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most members of Congress defended them Thursday as a way to root out terrorism, but civil-liberties groups decried the program.
http://m.wsj.net/video/20130606/0606...on_512x288.jpg The National Security Agency is obtaining phone records from all Verizon U.S. customers under a secret court order, according to a newspaper report and ex-officials. WSJ intelligence correspondent Siobhan Gorman joins MoneyBeat. Photo: AP.
"Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is brand new,'' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who added that the phone-data program has "worked to prevent'' terrorist attacks.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said the program is lawful and that it must be renewed by Congress every three months. She said the revelation about Verizon, reported by the London-based newspaper the Guardian, seemed to coincide with its latest renewal.
Civil-liberties advocates slammed the NSA's actions. "The most recent surveillance program is breathtaking. It shows absolutely no effort to narrow or tailor the surveillance of citizens," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post and the Guardian on Thursday reported the existence of a previously undisclosed program, called Prism, which was described as providing the NSA and FBI direct access to server systems operated by tech companies that include Google Inc., GOOG +0.57%Apple Inc., AAPL -1.49%Facebook Inc., FB +0.31%Yahoo Inc., YHOO +1.79%Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.52% and Skype. The newspapers, citing what they said was an internal NSA document, said the agencies received the contents of emails, file transfers and live chats of the companies' customers as part of their surveillance activities of foreigners whose activity online is routed through the U.S. The Verizon program, by contrast, more directly involves data associated with Americans. The companies mentioned denied knowledge or participation in the program.
The arrangement with Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, the country's three largest phone companies means, that every time the majority of Americans makes a call, NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, according to people familiar with the matter. The practice, which evolved out of warrantless wiretapping programs begun after 2001, is approved by all three branches of the U.S. government.
AT&T has 107.3 million wireless customers and 31.2 million landline customers. Verizon has 98.9 million wireless customers and 22.2 million landline customers while Sprint has 55 million customers in total.
NSA also obtains access to data from Internet service providers on Internet use such as email or website visits, several former officials said. NSA has established similar relationships with credit-card companies, three former officials said.
It couldn't be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts. The credit-card firms, phone companies and NSA declined to comment for this article.
Though extensive, the data collection effort doesn't entail monitoring the content of emails or what is said in phone calls, said people familiar with the matter. Investigators gain access to so-called metadata, telling them who is communicating, through what medium, when, and where they are located.
But the disconnect between the program's supporters and detractors underscored the difficulty Congress has had navigating new technology, national security and privacy.
The Obama administration, which inherited and embraced the program from the George W. Bush administration, moved Thursday to forcefully defend it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called it "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats."
But Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), said he has warned about the breadth of the program for years, but only obliquely because of classification restrictions.
"When law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information," he said. "Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans' privacy."
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, phone records were collected without a court order as a component of the Bush-era warrantless surveillance program authorized by the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which permitted the collection of business records, former officials said.
The ad hoc nature of the NSA program changed after the Bush administration came under criticism for its handling of a separate, warrantless NSA eavesdropping program.
President Bush acknowledged its existence in late 2005, calling it the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.
When Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006, promising to investigate the administration's counterterrorism policies, Bush administration officials moved to formalize court oversight of the NSA programs, according to former U.S. officials.
Congress in 2006 also made changes to the Patriot Act that made it easier for the government to collect phone-subscriber data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Those changes helped the NSA collection program become institutionalized, rather than one conducted only under the authority of the president, said people familiar with the program.
Along with the TSP, the NSA collection of phone company customer data was put under the jurisdiction of a secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to officials.
David Kris, a former top national security lawyer at the Justice Department, told a congressional hearing in 2009 that the government first used the so-called business records authority in 2004.
At the time he was urging the reauthorization of the business-records provisions, known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress later approved.
The phone records allow investigators to establish a database used to run queries when there is "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity, Ms. Feinstein said Thursday.
The database allows investigators to "map" individuals connected with that information, said Jeremy Bash, who until recently was chief of staff at the Pentagon and is a former top aide to the House Intelligence committee.
"We are trying to find a needle in a haystack, and this is the haystack," Mr. Bash said, referring to the database.
Sen. Wyden on Thursday questioned whether U.S. officials have been truthful in public descriptions of the program. In March, Mr. Wyden noted, he questioned Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who said the NSA did not "wittingly" collect any type of data pertaining to millions Americans. Spokesmen for Mr. Clapper didn't respond to requests for comment.
For civil libertarians, this week's disclosure of the court authorization for part of the NSA program could offer new avenues for challenges. Federal courts largely have rebuffed efforts that target NSA surveillance programs, in part because no one could prove the information was being collected. The government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has successfully used its state-secrets privilege to block such lawsuits.
Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union's deputy legal director, said the fact the FISA court record has now become public could give phone-company customers standing to bring a lawsuit.
"Now we have a set of people who can show they have been monitored," he said.
—Danny Yadron and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries contributed to this article.
Why is anyone surprised by this stuff. It seems to pop up with each administration over and over the awareness of what they are doing slips out as people start to get their mind wrapped around the publicly available technology. What do people think they are doing with places like the Utah center and thats the public one, not to mention all that is going on in plane site.
What do you expect to happen when the military, the fed, the judicial and the politicians that are on the inside have their very own personal interpretation of the patriot act, that appears to be classified..........oh go figure. These people hide behind classification and hide everything from us and claim it is in our best interest since we can't handle what is going on. This is exactly how one day thanks to decades not years but decades of this practice administration after administration one day we will all go holy hell this is a prison.
June 7th, 2013, 09:35
vector7
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Bush was all about the WOT.
He didn't fund the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda to overthrow western dictators in the ME.
Bush wouldn't say stuff like this either after another terror attack on the anniversary of 9/11...
So they DID go to multiple companies. Said so as SOON as I heard they'd "hit" Verizon. And my carried would be the NUMBER ONE to be hit.
Sick. Sad. Wrong on several levels, but especially the level of my Rights.
NSA stop. You have no right, no business, no mission and reason to collect data on everyone and "match the phone calls to bad guys".
You are supposed to FIND THE BAD GUYS FIRST and ASSUME THEY ARE INNOCENT then collect data on THEM and them alone.
Where are the bloody lawyers THIS time?
Where's the ACLU this time?
Where's the OUTRAGE over this?
June 7th, 2013, 12:50
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
Published: June 6, 2013
Through a top-secret program authorized by federal judges working under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. intelligence community can gain access to the servers of nine Internet companies for a wide range of digital data. Documents describing the previously undisclosed program, obtained by The Washington Post, show the breadth of U.S. electronic surveillance capabilities in the wake of a widely publicized controversy over warrantless wiretapping of U.S. domestic telephone communications in 2005. These slides, annotated by The Washington Post, represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are redacted. Read related article. Introducing the program
A slide briefing analysts at the National Security Agency about the program touts its effectiveness and features the logos of the companies involved. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...sm-slide-1.jpg
The program is called PRISM, after the prisms used to split light, which is used to carry information on fiber-optic cables.
This note indicates that the program is the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.
The seal of
Special Source Operations, the NSA term for alliances with trusted U.S. companies.
It all starts for one reason to get one group then it will just keep sliding to others. I can't imagine how one could defend themselves against this if they so help them made a mistake. You know they never make mistakes or bad calls if you get looped into something or somebody made it look like you were doing the searching on connecting to other people but you weren't I imagine you might be screwed.
Dangerous and Scary
June 7th, 2013, 13:23
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
NSA snoops, IRS dupes, Holder Loops and Obama Poops
After thirty seven years of working in, around and for the government I’ve decided that this is NOT what I signed up for.
We have Eric Holder lying to the public and Congress.
We have the National Security Agency spying on not just bad guys, but all of our emails, pictures, calls, or whatever other data you put out there. That’s great perhaps they will read THIS message.
We have the IRS preventing, in a most political manner, Conservative groups from getting their tax exempt status to PREVENT them from fighting the powers that be.
We have Obama. Need I say more?
Americans, it is time to STOP this intrusion into our privacy, it’s time to stop Obama from becoming a third world dictator, it’s time to stop the IRS and the Justice Department from over reaching, over arching and from being the “police arm” of the United States Government.
Now I know that there is one and only one job our government is SUPPOSED to be doing, and that is protecting this country from outside enemies and they AREN’T EVEN DOING THAT right. The military has been cut drastically (which China, Russia have grown, Iran is producing nuclear weapons, DPRK is producing nukes and the Muslim world is coddled). Our injured and wounded are treated like crap when they come back from “Fighting for Freedom”. That’s another joke.
They aren’t fighting for OUR freedoms any more, they are fighting (without their knowledge) for the Freedom of Big Government to continue it’s oppression of the people of the United States of the America. WE THE PEOPLE.
We are the people who OWN this country. The Government doesn’t “own” anything.
Get ON the phone with your Congress people and tell them to STOP THIS CRAP NOW or the American people will stop it.
This is NOT a police state, we do not live in 1960s Soviet Union – this is the United States of America.
To all you so-called Liberals out there; don’t sit on your asses any longer and whine about “Republicans” and “Tea Party”. We’re all the same. This is NOT a “Progressive” country (and Progressive is a Code Word for Communist) so get off your asses and get into this and STOP IT.
You Liberals seems to think your precious Freedom of Speech is protected while my Right to keep and bear arms is not. We’ve said over and over without the Second, you don’t get to keep the First. Are you starting to GRASP this yet? If you’re not, shut up, don’t vote, and don’t talk; go sit in your living room and watch television so you can be further brain washed.
If We the People ALLOW this to go any further you can kiss your precious Bill of Rights good bye completely.
Now, in case you really just don’t get this, let me explain something.
Pulling phone and data records (by the NSA) for basically EVERYONE in America is wrong on many, many levels. In the USA you are INNOCENT until proved Guilt.
Thus if they THINK you are guilty, great they can look at your stuff to prove your guilt.
They CAN NOT under any circumstances look at everyone’s records and dig through them until they FIND something that MIGHT be a pointer to guild. This is the Thought Police on a scale you can’t imagine.
Essentially what is happening here with the Justice Department (with the phone records) and the NSA (with all the other stuff) is that they are digging through every record looking for ANYTHING that might be “bad” (What ever their idea of “bad” is – and keep this part in mind). When they find something “bad” they connect some links, look at other records and make a “tree” of who is connected to whom, where they live, who they are, how much they make, what they look at on the Internet, who they call, what they buy and where they go for vacation.
There are those who would say “I’m not doing anything wrong, why should *I* care?” – and in truth in a perfect world with a perfect government and perfect people this would be right. But it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave in the lower Himalayas that OUR government is less than perfect.
If on the other hand you’re like me, and millions of others and like “guns” and are a “conservative” and believe in smaller government, certain principles and just want to be left alone we become “targets” for an oppressive government looking at everything we do; and while what we do isn’t wrong, it could be considered “bad” by this particular Administration and obviously HAS been considered so. Look at all the groups shut down by the IRS because they were doing nothing more than what the Liberal groups were doing…. but were CONSERVATIVE, or TEA PARTY, or for LIBERTY, or SMALLER GOVERNMENT.
If 100% of the people out there are completely outraged over all of this, then the small percentage NOT outraged must be part of the problem.
It’s time for them to go. It’s time for Congressmen and women, President, Justice Department officials, IRS officials and anyone else who seems to think they “Control America” to get OUT of Office and be put in prison.
I’m calling for the arrest of all of those people. There are still a few good men and women in Congress and in the Government. They need to stand up, be heard and shut down the corruption and oppression in America.
This is NOT Russia. This is NOT China. Big Government is BAD, VERY VERY BAD. This has to stop.
Disclosure of the massive surveillance of phone records and internet communications risks “long-lasting and irreversible harm” to US national security, the director of national intelligence says.
Late on Thursday night US time James Clapper issued a bullet-point defence of the surveillance programs disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post, saying they contained “numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties”. To correct the “misleading impression left in the article” – apparently a reference to the Guardian’s original story – Clapper said he approved the declassification of his defence of the National Security Agency’s collection of every phone record from millions of Verizon customers.
“There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” Clapper wrote, “which ensures that those activities comply with the Constitution and laws and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties. The program at issue here is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). By statute, the Court is empowered to determine the legality of the program."
A judge for Fisa Court, as the surveillance body is known, reviewed and approved the surveillance. But critics have pointed out that the Fisa Court has almost never, in its 35-year history, rejected a US surveillance request – a perception of docility that prompted its presiding judge, Reggie Walton, to defend the court’s integrity in a statement to the Guardian on Thursday.
Clapper said the Fisa Court had established procedures preventing the government “indiscriminately sifting” through the collected phone records. “The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organisation,” Clapper said. “Only a small fraction of the records are ever reviewed” by “specifically cleared counterterrorism personnel”.
At the same time, Clapper said national security required the NSA to collect all the Verizon subscriber data, even if not all the data would be analysed, and regardless of any evidence to link the phone records to crime, foreign espionage or terrorism. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that other telecoms received similar orders from the government for the subscriber data.
“The collection is broad in scope,” Clapper wrote, “because more narrow collection would limit our ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it may assist counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.”
Yet the collection does not need to be tied to terrorism to occur – something that alarmed one Democrat senator, Jeff Merkley. He told the Guardian on Thursday that the sweeping “barn-door” collection appeared to violate the provision of the Patriot Act purportedly authorising it.
“We can't really propose changes to the law unless we know what the words mean as interpreted by the court,” Merkley said.
Clapper reiterated a point the Obama administration made on Thursday in its response to the Guardian’s story: the NSA’s dragnet of Verizon phone records, which the Fisa Court authorised until 19 July, does not include the “content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber”. Yet the so-called “metadata” – phone numbers, duration of calls – can be combined with publicly available information to easily determine subscriber identity. And a second NSA surveillance effort, disclosed by the Guardian on Thursday and codenamed PRISM, collects the content of communications provided through Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and five other large internet companies.
Clapper came under criticism on Thursday for statements to Democrat senator Ron Wyden that appeared to be contradicted by the revelations of the surveillance programs.
Asked in March whether “millions” of Americans had “any kind of [their] data” collected by the US government, Clapper replied: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."
He has denied misleading Congress, but Clapper’s statement on Thursday suggested the collection of Americans’ phone records was deliberate, methodical and institutionalised.
“Discussing programs like this publicly,” Clapper concluded, “will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.” (RD: Yes it will. But it won't STOP the NSA from collecting on AMERICANS, which is the ultimate GOAL of this program).
June 7th, 2013, 13:27
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Did Clapper lie to Congress?
posted at 9:11 am on June 7, 2013 by Ed Morrissey
Earlier, I noted that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, offered a hasty and oddly-phrased defense of PRISM, the massive data surveillance system exposed by the Washington Post yesterday evening. Clapper claimed that FISA courts have imposed restrictions that “ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons,” which doesn’t actually mean that the NSA isn’t accessing massive amounts of data from US persons while trying to find and target non-US persons. In fact, there would be almost impossible to do the latter without having access to everything.
Even before the exposure of PRISM, The Hill’s Carlo Munoz wondered if Clapper hadn’t lied to Congress in testimony three months ago, when he denied that the NSA was rummaging through American e-mails. That question may be more pertinent than Munoz thought (via Instapundit):
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clapper denied allegations by panel members the NSA conducted electronic surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil.
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing.
In response, Clapper replied quickly: “No, sir.”
“There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly,” the U.S. intelligence chief told Wyden and the rest of the committee.
That said, “particularly in the case of NSA and CIA, there are structures against tracking American citizens in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes,” Clapper added.
Earlier in the day yesterday, Clapper tried to parse his denial:
On Thursday, Clapper clarified his remarks during the March hearing, telling the National Journal his comments were referring to NSA or other intelligence agencies intentionally reviewing e-mails and other electronic communications.
“What I said was, ‘the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails.’ I stand by that,” Clapper said.
I wonder if he stands by that specific denial today? Perhaps he’ll claim that the qualifier of voyeuristically lets him off the hook. If PRISM accesses the entire output of nine major Internet providers for patterns to flag within content as the Washington Post reported, then the NSA does go through the e-mails of US citizens, even if they pledge to “minimize” its “acquisition, retention, and dissemination,” as Clapper claimed after the PRISM story broke. Whether or not the agency gets a voyeuristic thrill is hardly the issue for Americans who at least had some illusions that their government wasn’t snooping on their Internet communications without having a specific reason to do so.
Now we have another of Barack Obama’s direct reports who appears to have either flat-out lied or attempted to at least mislead Congress while the legislative branch conducted its oversight responsibilities. If one wanted to look for patterns, there seems to be one developing at the highest ranks of this administration.
June 7th, 2013, 13:49
vector7
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Mark Kirk to Holder: Tell the truth, has the DOJ been harvesting Congress’s phone records too?
posted at 2:41 pm on June 6, 2013 by Allahpundit
Via Joel Gehrke, I won’t spoil the surprise of Holder’s answer. I’ll simply amend something that I said last night on Twitter: After this exchange, we may be only two or three more scandals away from this guy’s job being in trouble.
At another point in today’s hearing, he said he won’t resign because there are still lots of “goals” he has as AG — which, given the news of the last few weeks, may be the single most terrifying soundbite to come out of Scandalmania. To cleanse your palate after you watch, read this short but pungent Onion piece that fills the gap between what Hopenchange promised circa 2008 and what it’s amounted to in practice. If you cringed at O’s insulting speech about how stricken his liberal conscience is by having to vaporize unidentified Pakistanis from the air, you’ll appreciate it.
Honestly, I HOPE they have looked at Congress' phone records. MAYBE someone will do something. Probably not though.
And who really gives a crap whether NSA was looking at some Congressman's phone records?
(Remember the reason we can't buy scanners with 900mhz on it? Because someone leaked a recording of a Congressman on a cellular phone years ago to the media and made him "look bad" so they made a LAW to prevent anyone from monitoring 900 Mhz calls... )
The National Security Agency and FBI are interested in more than just your phone records — they are also interested in your audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs, according to a bombshell report from The Washington Post.
Although the massive Internet surveillance program, code-named “PRISM,” reportedly began in 2007, we are only now learning about it because an anonymous intelligence officer apparently leaked the information to the press.
“Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials,” the report notes, “in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy.”
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
But how, exactly, are the feds tapping directly into the central servers and getting their hands on online users’ information? With the assistance of major technology companies, of course:
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley.
They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk,
AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
For some of these companies, they had no choice but to comply with the feds.
“Formally, in exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are obliged accept a ‘directive’ from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA,” the Post reports.
“In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority … for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company ‘to comply,’” it adds.
In short, the feds have strong-armed a few reluctant tech companies into playing along with the program.
“In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry,” the report continues, “neither side wants to risk a public fight.”
“The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.”
Microsoft became PRISM’s first corporate partner in 2007, according to the leaked 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, followed shortly by Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Apple didn’t join until after the death of Steve Jobs, five years after the start of PRISM.
Unsurprisingly, spokesmen for the major tech companies deny any knowledge of PRISM.
Here’s what Google said:
Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government “back door” into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Apple told The Guardian that he had “never heard” of PRISM.
An official statement released by Facebook claims the social networking sight has never given the feds “direct” access to its servers (the word “direct” may be key here).
The program is so secretive that the members of Congress who do know about it are apparently unable comment on it due to their oaths of office.
Here’s how The Washington Post reports the story:
An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year.
According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.
Under President Obama, the program has allegedly enjoyed “exponential growth” since its founding in 2007 when then-Senator Obama routinely criticized President George W. Bush’s surveillance programs.
“The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all,” the report notes.
“Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in ‘selectors,’ or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness.’”
“That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, ‘but it’s nothing to worry about,’” it adds.
Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially.
http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/upl...fkoDOkf_wE.jpg
The collection of phone records from cellular giant Verizon was authorized by the government under the Patriot Act passed after 911. The National Security Agency is indiscriminately collecting American citizens’ phone records under a top secret court order. Civil liberties groups are outraged at such blatant disregard of individual’s rights by the U.S. government.
The FBI sought an order to require Verizon to provide detailed phone records of millions of Americans’ communication transactions. The order compels a subsidiary of the phone company to provide the NSA with records of phone calls from U.S. customers within the country and from foreign locations. Spokespersons for Verizon and the FBI declined to comment on the order.
The order given upon a secret court order, “does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls,” A senior Obama administration official commented. It is believed the focus is on attaining metadata. Metadata provides information about other data which is often interlinked in certain circumstances. Specific information concerning the application of the order was not made readily available to the media or the public.
Many civil liberties groups have suspected that the U.S. was given sweeping surveillance authority over commercial carriers with the passing of the Patriot Act. The legislation laid the ground work for inventive measures in information gathering of private citizens. The 911 attacks generated the legislation in fear of future supposed occurrences.
A law expert who spoke on anonymity stated the order appears to be a renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency. White house officials have been mute concerning the particulars of past practices concerning the order.
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice stated, “This suggests that the government has been compiling a comprehensive record of Americans’ associations and possibly even their whereabouts.” She appeared outraged at such postulations related to the issue.
Obama officials contend that information obtained is for the good of national security and best interest of Americans. Officials further state all three branches of the government is regularly and fully briefed on the use of information gathered. It is believed that these intelligence steps are a critical tool in protecting the public against terrorist threats to the nation.
June 7th, 2013, 15:11
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
We the PEOPLE DEMAND immediate release of all phone calls records for the President of the United States, the head of the NSA and all of his subordinates, the records for all Congress members, Senate and House, and all records for every SES in the US Government to the public domain so that we can examine them to see what other scandals are hidden among the records.
June 7th, 2013, 15:13
Ryan Ruck
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Donaldson
Honestly, I HOPE they have looked at Congress' phone records. MAYBE someone will do something. Probably not though.
And who really gives a crap whether NSA was looking at some Congressman's phone records?
(Remember the reason we can't buy scanners with 900mhz on it? Because someone leaked a recording of a Congressman on a cellular phone years ago to the media and made him "look bad" so they made a LAW to prevent anyone from monitoring 900 Mhz calls... )
Don't worry, it isn't Congress' records in general. Just Republican Representatives.
U.K. government 'complicit' in NSA's PRISM spy program
Summary: According to a report, the U.K. government allegedly bypassed international intelligence-sharing treaties by tapping into the NSA's reported PRISM network. http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/libr...H5Mw&upscale=1
The U.K. government may have been complicit in secretly gathering intelligence from Internet companies, which were named on Thursday by a Washington Post report.
According to The Guardian, which has covered the brewing and ever-developing privacy saga extensively, the ability for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — the U.K. government's electronic intercepts and listening station — to tap directly into the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM database, may bypass mutual intelligence and information sharing treaties. Read this
The London, U.K.-based newspaper obtained documents allegedly confirming the suspicions. In the papers, the NSA included "special programmes for GCHQ exist for focused [PRISM] processing."
The British spy agency generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the year through May 2102, the documents state. This is a 137 percent increase in reports year-over-year. Such reports are then passed to the other intelligence agencies, MI5 or SIS (MI6).
The U.S.-led PRISM program allegedly taps into the databases of major technology companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and video chat room community PalTalk were named — that allows the NSA to data mine and snoop through vast amounts of citizens' private and sensitive data.
He said: "Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."
According to the leaked training documents, these companies were complicit in the acts — though it's not clear if they were legally bound to. Read this
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others have strenuously denied the claims and reiterated their stance towards maintaining user and customer privacy.
The U.K. government, an ally in intelligence sharing, reportedly tapped into the PRISM system directly, bypassing the requirement to go through "mutual legal assistance" (MLA) requests, in which a state formally asks another government for assistance in a criminal or terrorism case.
MLA requests are sent from the U.K. to the U.S. Justice Department, which are then either turned into subpoenas or search warrants served to companies based in the U.S. In some cases, some companies will comply with a request that hasn't been passed through the courts.
With around 3,000 requests made to Google alone in 2012, the MLA request is costly and time consuming. Using PRISM would allow the U.K. to process requests in bulk extremely quickly.
A Whitehall source speaking by phone declined to comment off the record. According to The Guardian, GCHQ said it declined to comment on intelligence matters.
June 7th, 2013, 16:46
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Mr. President the NSA should NOT be looking at my metadata, or anything else related to me. I'm NOT a criminal, and I have the right to free association, and will talk to anyone I like, as long as I like about anything I like. I am not a criminal and I have a RIGHT not to be snooped on, regardless if you are listening to phone calls or looking at my bloody phone records, my internet connections, searches on Google or elsewhere and I have a RIGHT NOT to be bothered by the government.
I'm not alone, there are 300 million of us that have the same right. Your government workers are government workers, and regardless of HOW "professional" they might be, if they are LOOKING at records of innocent AMERICANS they ARE SNOOPING.
You can NOT justify this by any means and blaming Bush for it is the most childish thing you did today.
Obama: 'Nobody is listening to your telephone calls'
President Obama explains the NSA's secret surveillance program at an event in California, reassuring the public, "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program's about."
By Matthew DeLuca, Staff Writer, NBC News
President Obama defended what he called long-standing Internet and phone monitoring programs as valuable tools to fight terrorism, saying that congressional lawmakers have been repeatedly briefed on the program and that federal judges oversee the program “throughout.”
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Obama said. “That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at the numbers and durations of calls. They’re not looking at names and they’re not looking at content, but sifting through this so-called meta data, they may identify potential leads with respect to people that might engage in terrorism.”
He said the programs have been subject to congressional and judicial review and approval.
“I think on balance we have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about,” Obama said.
The president’s remarks came one day after the revelation of two secret programs that allow government intelligence agencies to gather information on domestic phone and Internet usage by American citizens.
“I don’t welcome leaks, because there’s a reason why these programs are classified,” Obama said, regarding the unauthorized release of confidential documents such as the one that led to the initial Guardian report on the phone records program.
The president made the comments following a statement on the Affordable Care Act in San Jose, Calif. The president is scheduled to begin a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California later on Friday.
According to the Washington Post, Internet companies including Google and Facebook are denying involvement in National Security Agency programs, named PRISM and BLARNEY, which allow the government to look at archived data and information as it is being transmitted. NBC's Peter Alexander reports.
On Thursday, the United States’ top intelligence official declassified details of the top secret phone records program after it was revealed, while also blasting the leak.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the step in a statement issued on Thursday night, after media reports revealed the programs that have been used to collect the phone records of Americans and monitor Internet use.
Referencing a report that first appeared in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Clapper said that the “unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”
Clapper said in the statement that he was declassifying some details of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to “provide a more thorough understanding of the program.”
“Although this program has been properly classified, the leak of one order, without any context, has created a misleading impression of how it operates. Accordingly, we have determined to declassify certain limited information about this program,” Clapper said.
The program does not allow the government to surveil the contents of phone calls made by Americans, but what is referenced in the order published by the Guardian as “telephony metadata” includes the sending and receiving telephone numbers and the length of the call, according to Clapper.
“The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications,” Clapper said. “Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time. The FISA court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday that government powers under the Patriot Act are reviewed by a “robust legal regime.”
Clapper also said that members of Congress, some of whom reacted with indignation to media reports about the program on Thursday, had been “fully and repeatedly briefed” on the program described in the Guardian article. Similar statements about Congressmembers’ knowledge of the program were made by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Thursday.
June 7th, 2013, 16:47
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Obama administration on defensive over surveillance activity
(Reuters) - Reports of sweeping U.S. government surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet activity put the Obama administration on the defensive on Friday, adding pressure on President Barack Obama to explain why such tactics are necessary.
The Washington Post reported late on Thursday that federal authorities have been tapping into the central servers of companies including Google, Apple and Facebook to gain access to emails, photos and other files allowing analysts to track a person's movements and contacts.
That added to privacy concerns sparked by a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been mining phone records from millions of customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.
Obama, who pledged to run the most transparent administration in U.S. history, did not mention the surveillance furor in two meetings with supporters on Thursday evening.
He may be forced to broach the subject during his meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a California summit on Friday, in which U.S. concerns about alleged Chinese hacking of American secrets were expected to be high on the agenda.
Members of the U.S. Congress are routinely briefed by the NSA on secret surveillance programs, but it is not yet clear how much they knew about the widespread surveillance of private Internet activity reported by the Washington Post.
Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said on Friday he thought the administration had good intentions but stressed the program was "just too broad an over-reach."
"I think there ought to be some connection to suspicion, otherwise we can say that any intrusion on all of our privacy is justified for the times that we will catch the few terrorists," Waxman told MSNBC. "Good intentions are not enough. We need protections against government intrusion that goes too far."
"PRISM" SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM
The Washington Post said the surveillance program involving firms including Microsoft, Skype and YouTube, code-named PRISM and established under Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, had seen "exponential growth" under the Democratic Obama administration.
It said the NSA increasingly relies on PRISM as a source of raw material for its intelligence reports.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the report contained "numerous inaccuracies," and some of the companies identified by the Washington Post denied that the NSA and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had "direct access" to their central servers.
Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in government data collection and only complies "with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California Irvine, said the program was "deeply disturbing" and went beyond what was constitutionally acceptable.
"It is a huge gathering of information by the federal government. The argument that it protects national security is unpersuasive," he said.
The White House sought on Thursday to defend the National Security Agency's secret collection of telephone records from millions of Americans as a "critical tool" to prevent attacks. National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the data was only used in specific investigations of non-U.S. citizens.
(COLUMN - Why the government wants your metadata.
(This story was refiled to fix spelling to "broach" from "breach" in paragraph 5)
(Reporting By Laura MacInnis; Editing by Karey Van Hall and David Storey)
June 7th, 2013, 16:49
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
No more obfuscation. We will not accept it.
This "not listening to your phone calls" is another obfuscation. He is trying to deny there's spying going on without saying it.
If they are doing a BROAD LOOK at everyone's data, IT IS SPYING. Period. The issue isn't "listening in", it's SNOOPING. Do NOT let the media, Obama, his administration or anyone else make you take your eyes off the ball on this one.
June 7th, 2013, 16:51
American Patriot
Re: Obama seizing Verizon phone records
Phone Surveillance Defies Obama Campaign Civil Liberty Pledge
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
June 07, 2013
The news that Barack Obama continued the Bush administration’s domestic telephone surveillance program is sparking new doubts about a president who campaigned as a champion of civil liberties and greater transparency.
“It’s remarkable that the man who rode his way to the presidency by suggesting George Bush’s anti-terrorism policies violated the Constitution is emulating those policies himself,” said Ari Fleischer, the former president’s press secretary. “It’s as if George Bush had gotten a fourth term.”
Former Vice President Al Gore took to Twitter to say: “Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?”
The reactions were prompted by a report that the Federal Bureau of Investigation got a secret court order telling U.S.- based Verizon Communications Inc (VZ). to furnish the National Security Agency with data about domestic calls and those between the U.S. and other countries.
The disclosure, first made by the British newspaper the Guardian, sent the White House into damage-control mode once again, burying Obama’s education message at a North Carolina event. It also risked further undermining public confidence in his administration at a time when Obama is pressing for a revision of immigration laws that puts the government in charge of securing the border and creating a new program to enroll undocumented immigrants already here.
Needed Program
Even as the bipartisan leadership of intelligence committees defended the program as essential to national security, some Democrats said it’s raising potentially harmful concerns about the Obama administration’s trustworthiness. That is particularly so, they said, when viewed in light of recent disclosures that the Internal Revenue Service targeted small-government groups for scrutiny and the Justice Department conducted surveillance on Associated Press and Fox News journalists.
“It’s just one event after another, each creating doubts and uncertainty about the core principles of this administration, and that’s what’s so dangerous about this,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart of the Washington-based Hart Research Associates.
“It’s a sense of government out of control,” Hart said, adding that it could boost the Republican-aligned Tea Party that advocates for smaller government: “They may be crazy, but they have a point.”
Wider Net
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the government has access to internal data at nine Internet companies and is culling photographs, e-mails, audio and videos. The program, initiated in 2007, is code-named PRISM, the newspaper said.
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the Tea Party’s most popular figures and a presidential prospect for 2016, was among the most vocal in his criticism of Obama about the surveillance program yesterday, calling it an “astounding assault on the Constitution.”
Democrats were no more forgiving. “I hope this story will force a real debate about the government’s domestic surveillance authorities,” said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. “The American people have a right to know whether their government thinks that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being conducted.”
It’s a debate that White House says the president is ready to have.
“The president welcomes the discussion of the tradeoffs between privacy and security,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday.
Calls for Change
Top Republican and Democratic intelligence leaders in Congress said they were aware of the administration’s actions and that they considered them appropriate. That didn’t quell calls for change.
“This latest news disclosure gives us a challenge and an opportunity” to re-evaluate whether the limitations in U.S. law are sufficient, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said at a Capitol Hill news conference. He called it “an invitation to renew that conversation” about revisiting the Patriot Act, which was passed in 2001 and authorized the secret telephone-monitoring program.
Beyond the immediate furor, the episode was yet another indication that when it comes to national security and thwarting terrorist attacks, Obama has reached some of the same conclusions that Bush did.
Liberties Panel
“There isn’t as much difference as the president originally suggested there would be -- that’s not right or wrong, it’s just a fact,” former Republican Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey, who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said in an interview. For instance, he said neither Bush nor Obama followed through on the commission’s recommendation to create a civil liberties panel at the White House that would weigh in on issues such as the Verizon order.
What has changed, Kean said, is that as a Democrat, Obama has faced less scrutiny for his counter-terrorism policies than did his Republican predecessor.
“It’s much easier for a Democratic president, because many of the civil libertarians are Democrats -- although we have found some libertarians now on the Republican side who are willing to question these things,” Kean said.
Obama’s administration has acknowledged carrying out targeted killings with U.S. drones and, although it has repeatedly promised to close the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it has yet to accomplish that goal. The White House also routinely sought to block lawsuits against the government by claiming it had to withhold “state secrets” to protect national security.
Candidate Obama
It isn’t the posture the president struck as a presidential candidate, including when he argued it was an abuse of powers under the PATRIOT Act to spy on Americans.
Bush “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Obama said in an Aug. 1, 2007 speech in Washington.
“We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary,” Obama added. “This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not. There are no short-cuts to protecting America.”
‘Robust Oversight’
In his 2008 campaign literature on terrorism, he pledged as president to revisit the PATRIOT Act to ensure “real and robust oversight.” The document said, “There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties.”
Yesterday, prominent Democrats and Republicans suggested Obama has himself been failing to strike that balance.
Former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, a leading PATRIOT Act foe when he was in Congress, said the news suggests the government could be using U.S. intelligence surveillance law “in an indiscriminate way that does not balance our legitimate concerns of national security with the necessity to preserve our fundamental civil rights.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Washington at jdavis159@bloomberg.net