Reassured by NSA’s Internal Procedures? Don’t Be. They Still Don’t Tell the Whole Story.
By Kurt Opsahl and Mark Rumold | EFF | June 21, 2013
Yesterday, the Guardian released two previously-classified documents describing the internal “minimization” and “targeting” procedures used by the NSA to conduct surveillance under Section 702. These procedures are approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on an annual basis and are supposed to serve as the bulwark between the NSA’s vast surveillance capabilities and the private communications of Americans. As we noted earlier today, the procedures, themselves, aren’t reassuring: far too much discretion is retained by NSA analysts, the procedures frequently resolve doubt in favor of collection, and information is obtained that could otherwise never be obtained without a warrant.
Which would be bad enough, if it were the end of the story. But it’s not.
The targeting and minimization documents released yesterday are dated a few months after the first publicly known scandal over the new FAA procedures: In April 2009, the New York Times reported that Section 702 surveillance had “intercepted the private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans . . . on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress.” In June 2009, the Times reported that members of Congress were saying NSA’s “recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” Rep. Rush Holt described the problems as “so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.”
Presumably, following these “flagrant” abuses (and likely in response to the Congressional criticism of the original procedures), the government refined the procedures. The documents released yesterday are the “improved” targeting and minimization procedures, which appear to have been reused the following year, in 2010, in the FISC’s annual certification.
But these amended procedures still didn’t stop illegal spying under Section 702.
Unless the government substantially changed the procedures between August 2010 and October 2011, these are the very procedures that the FISC eventually found resulted in illegal and unconstitutional surveillance. In October 2011, the FISC issued an 86-page opinion finding that collection carried out under the NSA’s classified minimization procedures was unconstitutional. The opinion remains secret, but it is very likely that yesterday’s leaked NSA documents show the very minimization procedures the Director of National Intelligence admitted the FISC had found resulted in surveillance that was “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” and “circumvented the spirit of the law.”
And for good reason: the procedures are unconstitutional. They allow for the government to obtain and keep huge amounts of information it could never Constitutionally get without a warrant based on probable cause. As we explained, the procedures are designed such that the NSA will routinely fail to exclude or remove United States persons’ communications, and the removal of those communications are wholly entrusted to the “reasonable discretion” of an analyst.
EFF has been litigating to uncover this critical FISC opinion through the Freedom of Information Act and to uncover the “secret law” the government has been hiding from the American public. And EFF isn’t alone in fighting for the release of these documents. A bipartisan coalition of Senators just announced legislation that would require the Attorney General to declassify significant FISC opinions, a move they say would help put an end to precisely this kind of “secret law.”
When the government, and others, claim these procedures ensure your privacy is respected, know this: they’re only telling you half the story.
Take action now — to put an end to secret law, to demand the American public gets the full story, and to finally put an end to the NSA’s domestic spying program.
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Suspected Syrian rebels fire over 12 rockets at Lebanon
Al-Akhbar | June 22, 2013
At least 12 rockets fired from Syria struck a Lebanese border village Saturday, hitting some homes but causing no injuries in the latest attack on Lebanon by suspected rebels, state news reported.
Lebanon’s National News Agency said rockets struck the homes Mohammed Kouja, Walid Kouja, and Taj Eddeine in the northern Akkar village of Dababiyeh.
The army rushed to evacuate the town of frightened residents, the report added.
The attack comes one day after a rocket reportedly fired from a Lebanese village northeast of the capital struck a mountainous area near the presidential palace in Baabda.
The grad, fired overnight Monday, knocked out a power line and caused a huge rumble in surrounding areas. Authorities later in the day discovered what they believed to be the launch site of the rocket hidden in a brush covered area near Ballouneh.
A second rocket that failed to launch was reportedly found at the site. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, and its target remains unclear, but Syrian rebels have upped a campaign against Lebanon in recent months in what they claim is retaliation for Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian conflict.
Monday’s attack was the second such case of rockets being fired by suspected rebels against Lebanese targets from inside Lebanon. Last month, two rockets struck a southern suburb of Beirut injuring four Syrian workers.
Those rockets, launched from hills several kilometers southeast of Beirut, hit the Chiyah district where Hezbollah maintains strong support.
But dozens of rockets fired from Syria have hit Lebanon in recent weeks, killing and wounding a number of people since they began over the course of the Syrian conflict, now over two years old.
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Obama picks official who approved of dragnet NSA surveillance to head FBI
RT | June 21, 2013
President Barack Obama announced Friday afternoon that he’s selected James Comey to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Comey, 52, worked as the deputy attorney general for the United States under President George W. Bush and will replace outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller when he steps down later this year after he is confirmed by the Senate.
All three men were on hand at the White House Friday afternoon when President Obama formally made his pick after weeks of speculation suggested Comey would be the likely nominee.
Comey, said Obama, embodies the “core principals of fidelity, bravery and integrity” expected of FBI agents and applauded “his fierce independence and his deep integrity.”
In fact, that independence is the focus of perhaps the most widely reported instance from the Bush White House involving Comey. While serving as deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice, Comey rejected the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program that has recently reemerged as the center of controversy.
“In a confrontation he has called the most difficult night of his career, [Comey] rushed to the hospital bedside of his boss, John Ashcroft, in 2004 to stop two senior Bush White House aides from getting the ailing attorney general’s approval to reauthorize a post-9/11 program that allowed government wiretaps to be used without warrants,” the Associated Press recalled this week.
Comey’s insistence in keeping the program off the books was made notwithstanding an earlier decision to favor the surveillance program, though. Glenn Greenwald reported for The Guardian last month that Comey “approved a legal memorandum in 2004 endorsing radical executive power theories and warped statutory interpretations, concluding that the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was legal, thus making it more difficult to prosecute the Bush officials who ordered it.”
The internal conflict within the administration that erupted years later over that program almost led to Comey, Ashcroft and Mueller offering their resignation, apparently. As Greenwald noted, though, the then-deputy attorney general declined to follow up on his threat after slight adjustments were made to the NSA spy program.
“But the reason they didn’t end up resigning ,” he wrote, “was because Bush officials ‘modified’ that NSA program into something those lawyers could and did endorse: the still-illegal, still-radical NSA eavesdropping program that spied on the communications of Americans without warrants and in violation of the law.”
Those practices have come under question in recent weeks after Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former intelligence contractor, leaked documents showing the size and scope of the surveillance programs. Mr. Mueller said those disclosures caused “significant harm” to the nation’s security and that the admitted leaker is the “subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.”
“One of the great vulnerabilities terrorists understand is their communications,” Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee last week. “If we lose our ability get their communications, we are going to be exceptionally vulnerable.”
After being picked by Pres. Obama to replace Mueller on Friday, Comey said, “I don’t know whether I can fill those shoes.” Mueller was FBI chief for 12 years, making him the second-longest serving official to ever head the bureau.
Related article
US Leaves 700 troops in Jordan as CIA Trained Militants Fighting in Syria
Al-Manar | June 22, 2013
US President Barack Obama said the United States left around 700 combat-ready troops in Jordan after a training exercise in the country.soldiers in Jordan
In a letter to US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Friday, Obama said that the deployment was made at the request of the Jordanian government. He stated that about 700 of the US troops deployed to Jordan as part of a military training exercise, which ended on Thursday, would stay in the country.
“The troops will stay until the security situation becomes such that they are no longer required”, Obama claimed, but provided no further details.
“This detachment that participated in the exercise and remained in Jordan includes Patriot missile systems, fighter aircraft, and related support, command, control, and communications personnel and systems,” Obama said.
This came as a report by The Los Angeles Times said CIA operatives have been secretly providing the Syrian militants with training on the use of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons for months.
Since the opening of a new US base in the desert in southwest of Jordan in November 2012, the CIA operatives and US special operations troops have covertly trained the militants in groups of 20 to 45 at a time in two-week courses, the report said.
The militants receive training with Russian-designed 14.5-millimeter anti-tank rifles, anti-tank missiles, and 23-millimeter anti-aircraft weapons, according to a militant commander in the Syrian province of Dara’a.
“Those from the CIA, we would sit and talk with them during breaks from training and afterward, they would try to get information on the situation inside” Syria, the report quoted the unnamed commander as saying.
The training program has also been conducted in Turkey, the report said.
Yahya Bittar, another militant commander, said the training is conducted by US, Jordanian and French operatives, adding that up to 100 militants have been sent back across the border to Syria after taking the course in Jordan over the past month.
UN rejects US claim on Syria chemical weapons
Press TV – June 21, 2013
UN experts say they do not confirm the claims by the United States, France and Britain that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the militants.
“We are not able to say who has used chemical agents or chemical weapons,” said Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the United Nations human rights investigation committee on Syria, on Friday.
Speaking to reporters after an informal meeting with UN Security Council ambassadors, Pinheiro said he would not comment on evidence, including multiple blood, tissue and soil samples, that the US, Britain and France have sent to the UN about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria.
The technical data presented by the three countries is of limited value to the UN which, according to its rules, can pass a final judgment on the situation only after its own inspectors personally collect evidence.
Based on the unsubstantiated claim that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the militants, President Barack Obama ordered the CIA last week to provide arms to the anti-Syrian groups, saying the government of President Bashar al-Assad had crossed Washington’s red lines.
In an article on the Washington Post on Friday, Colum Lynch and Joby Warrick write that the US move “rests on unverifiable claims” that lack transparency.
Weapons experts say Obama’s declaration of Washington’s red line in terms of more involvement in Syria “handed the Syrian opposition a powerful incentive to fabricate evidence” against the Assad government regarding the chemical arms use, the article said.
“If you are the opposition and you hear” that the White House has drawn a red line on the use of nerve agents, then “you have an interest in giving the impression that some chemical weapons have been used,” said Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish scientist who headed UN weapons inspections in Iraq during the 1990s, the article read.
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British spy agency has access to global communications, shares info with NSA
RT | June 21, 2013
The British spy agency GCHQ has access to the global network of communications, storing calls, Facebook posts and internet histories – and shares this data with the NSA, Edward Snowden has revealed to the Guardian in a new leak.
GCHQ’s network of cables is able to process massive quantities of information from both specific targets and completely innocent people, including recording phone calls and reading email messages, it was revealed on Friday.
“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”
The Government Communications Headquarters agency has two different programs, aimed at carrying out this online and telephone monitoring – categorized under ‘Mastering the Internet’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation.’ Both have been conducted in the absence of any public knowledge, reports the Guardian.
“If you remember, even the NSA said that they did not record phone calls, but according to these latest revelations by Edward Snowden, that up to ‘600 million’ telephone events last year were recorded a day by the GCHQ,” said RT’s Tesa Arcilla from London.
“There’s no doubt as to what the objectives of these programs were, having put them in place,” she said, emphasizing the titles.
The agency is able to store the volumes of data it amasses from fiber-optic cables for up to 30 days in an operation codenamed Tempora. The practice has been going on for around 18 months.
GCHQ which was handling 600m telephone ‘events’ a day, according to the documents, had tapped into over 200 fiber-optic cables and had the capacity to analyze data from over 46 of them at a time.
The cables used by GCHQ can carry data at 10 gigabits per second, which in theory, means they could deliver up to 21petabytes of information per day. The program is continuing to develop on a daily basis with the agency aiming to expand to the point it is able to process terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at once.
By May last year, some 300 GCHQ-assigned analysts and 250 from the NSA had been specially allocated large quantities of data to trawl through as a result of the operations.
The Guardian reports that 850,000 NSA and outside contractors had potential access to the databases. However, the paper does not explain how it came to such an enormous figure
“These revelations reveal the scale of and the scope of cooperation between UK and US intelligence services,” said RT’s Gayane Chichakyan from Washington. “From these revelations we learned how dramatically it has expanded over the years.”
“The document shows the FISA court lets the NSA use data snagged ‘inadvertently.’ They basically give a warrant to target suspects,” she said, recalling Lieutenant General Keith Alexander’s quote after a 2008 visit to the Menwith RAF base in England: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he had said.
The GCHQ project was first trialed in 2008. The intelligence organization has been labeled an ‘intelligence superpower’ on account of its technical capabilities, which by 2010 gave it the strongest access to internet communications out of the ‘Five Eyes’ – an international intelligence sharing alliance, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, brought into existence in 1946.
The mass-surveillance has seen the interception of data from transatlantic cables that also carry data to western Europe through ‘intercept partners’ commercial companies that had entered into private agreements with GCHQ. Many have been paid off for their cooperation.
GCHQ feared that exposure of the names of the companies involved could lead to “high-level political fallout,” and took measures to ensure names were kept secret. Warrants had reportedly been issued to compel the companies to cooperate so that GCHQ could engage in spying through them.
“They have no choice,” said a Guardian intelligence source.
Snowden previously warned that he would be releasing further information pertaining to mass security operations carried out on the unwary public, stating in a previous Q & A with the Guardian that the “truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”
Court blocks NYPD bid to fire whistleblower as commissioner brags of ‘awesome powers’
RT | June 21, 2013
The New York City Police Department’s latest attempt to fire Adrian Schoolcraft, the whistleblower who secretly recorded evidence of corruption among his superiors over three years ago, was blocked this week in federal court.
Schoolcraft has said he began wearing a microphone to defend himself against citizens’ allegations that he used racial slurs while policing the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor and primarily African-American section of Brooklyn. By wearing the device from June 1, 2008 until October 15, 2009, though, he soon began recording directions from NYPD higher-ups who pressured officers to fill monthly arrest quotas, which is illegal.
“He wants three seat belt [summonses], one cell phone, and 11 others,” one police sergeant is heard saying on the tape. “I don’t know what the number is, but that’s what [an executive officer] wants.”
Upon complaining of corrupt policies and wrongful arrests, Schoolcraft has said, he began receiving threats from fellow police officers and was eventually reassigned to a desk job.
Three weeks after he told the NYPD the damning recordings existed, Schoolcraft’s home was raided by a large group of officers who forcibly checked him into a psychiatric ward in Queens citing suicidal tendencies. Approximately twelve of Schoolcraft’s superiors were on hand at his home. Reportedly among them was Paul Browne, a top aide to Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose presence would indicate Kelly knew of and approved of the raid.
After Schoolcraft refused treatment, the officers guarding him at a Queens hospital handcuffed him to a bed and prevented him from using a telephone. He was held there for three days until his father tracked him down and signed him out. The Schoolcraft family later received a bill for $7,185 for his stay at the facility.
Schoolcraft eventually turned over his recordings, including of the night when he was dragged to the hospital, to the Village Voice, which dubbed the audio “The NYPD Tapes.” In 2009 and 2010, the NYPD charged Schoolcraft with approximately two dozen charges of leaving work early, failing to respond to department summonses, failure to obey an order, being away without leave, and others.
The department could have tried and fired Schoolcraft in early 2010, the Voice reported, but presumably suspended him instead because of the bad publicity that would come as a natural result of dismissing a man for exposing corruption.
“I think within the precinct, he was probably seen as a little bit eccentric,” Graham Rayman, a reporter for the Village Voice, told This American Life in 2010. “And also, he wasn’t going with the program. And anyone who doesn’t go with the program is automatically marked.”
For nearly four years he has been on leave without pay, waiting for the start of a federal lawsuit he filed against the department for intimidation and retaliation.
In response, the NYPD filed its own administrative suit seeking to fire Schoolcraft, a move Schoolcraft’s lawyers said will unduly influence the verdict in the original suit. The department was blocked from filing that suit this week.
“You have the power to arrest, to take away someone’s liberty. You have the power and the authority to use force and sometimes deadly force,” Kelly said this week in a speech to this year’s graduating class of the NYPD academy. “Now these are awesome powers.”
The commissioner, quoted by CBS, also said that different ethnic groups are “not always happy” with the department and that “all it takes is one errant police officer” to undermine the “great institution” that has been built by generations.
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Federal Ban on School Prayer Widely Ignored
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | June 21, 2013
Half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer in public classrooms, religion is nonetheless very present in schools these days.
In two landmark decisions (Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp), the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 declared school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings unconstitutional.
But the rulings applied only to public school teachers and administrators.
Students were free to say grace in the cafeteria, meet outside class to study the Bible, Quran, or Torah, and participate in religious after-school programs on their campuses.
“We’ve gone from virtual silence about religion in the curriculum and virtually no student religious expression in many schools,” Charles Haynes, a scholar at the First Amendment Center and head of the Religious Freedom Education Project in Washington, DC, told the Christian Science Monitor, “to today, when social studies and other standards are fairly generous to religion, and students are expressing their faiths in many different ways in many public schools, if not most.”
Consider the following facts:
Good News Clubs, organized by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, hold Sunday school-like classes in some 3,200 public elementary schools for 156,000 students.
One million to two million students participate in “See You at the Pole” prayer services every September beneath their campus flagpoles.
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes has more than 8,000 chapters on junior and high school campuses across the country.
Campus Crusade for Christ has about 200 clubs, almost all of them in public schools.
Youth for Christ, an evangelical missionary organization, has on- and off-campus clubs at 1,200 schools, most of them public.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted in 2012 by the National Opinion Research Center showed that 57% of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court prohibition against public schools requiring the reading of Bible verses or the Lord’s Prayer, while 39% approve. However, there were sharp regional differences. A majority in the Northeast and the West did approve of the prohibition, while in the South 73% disapproved. In addition, Americans age 18-29 differed from their elders, approving of the prohibition 56% to 38%.
To Learn More:
School Prayer: 50 Years after the Ban, God and Faith more Present than Ever (by Lee Lawrence, Christian Science Monitor)
School Prayer 50 Years Later: What Do Americans Believe? (by Jaweed Kaleem, Huffington Post)
High School Valedictorian Sues to Stop Graduation Prayer (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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Corporatizing National Security: What It Means
By Ralph Nader | June 20, 2013
Privacy is a sacred word to many Americans, as demonstrated by the recent uproar over the brazen invasion of it by the Patriot Act-enabled National Security Agency (NSA). The information about dragnet data-collecting of telephone and internet records leaked by Edward Snowden has opened the door to another pressing conversation—one about privatization, or corporatization of this governmental function.
In addition to potentially having access to the private electronic correspondence of American citizens, what does it mean that Mr. Snowden—a low-level contractor—had access to critical national security information not available to the general public? Author James Bamford, an expert on intelligence agencies, recently wrote: “The Snowden case demonstrates the potential risks involved when the nation turns its spying and eavesdropping over to companies with lax security and inadequate personnel policies. The risks increase exponentially when those same people must make critical decisions involving choices that may lead to war, cyber or otherwise.”
This is a stark example of the blurring of the line between corporate and governmental functions. Booz Allen Hamilton, the company that employed Mr. Snowden, earned over $5 billion in revenues in the last fiscal year, according to The Washington Post. The Carlyle Group, the majority owner of Booz Allen Hamilton, has made nearly $2 billion on its $910 million investment in “government consulting.” It is clear that “national security” is big business.
Given the value and importance of privacy to American ideals, it is disturbing how the terms “privatization” and “private sector” are deceptively used. Many Americans have been led to believe that corporations can and will do a better job handling certain vital tasks than the government can. Such is the ideology of privatization. But in practice, there is very little evidence to prove this notion. Instead, the term “privatization” has become a clever euphemism to draw attention away from a harsh truth. Public functions are being handed over to corporations in sweetheart deals while publicly owned assets such as minerals on public lands and research development breakthroughs are being given away at bargain basement prices.
These functions and assets—which belong to or are the responsibility of the taxpayers—are being used to make an increasingly small pool of top corporate executives very wealthy. And taxpayers are left footing the cleanup bill when corporate greed does not align with the public need.
With this in mind, let us not mince words. “Privatization” is a soft term. Let us call the practice what it really is—corporatization.
There’s big money to be made in moving government-owned functions and assets into corporate hands. Public highways, prisons, drinking water systems, school management, trash collection, libraries, the military and now even national security matters are all being outsourced to corporations. But what happens when such vital government functions are performed for big profit rather than the public good?
Look to the many reports of waste, fraud, and abuse that arose out of the over-use of corporate contractors in Iraq. At one point, there were more contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. soldiers. Look to the private prisons, which make their money by incarcerating as many people as they can for as long as they can. Look to privatized water systems, the majority of which deliver poorer service at higher costs than public utility alternatives. Visit privatizationwatch.org for many more examples of the perils, pitfalls and excesses of rampant, unaccountable corporatization.
In short, corporatizing public functions does not work well for the public, consumers and taxpayers who are paying through the nose.
Some right-wing critics might view government providing essential public services as “socialism,” but as it now stands, we live in a nation increasingly comprised of corporate socialism. There is great value in having public assets and functions that are already owned by the people, to be performed for the public benefit, and not at high profit margins and prices for big corporations. By allowing corporate entities to assume control of such functions, it makes profiteering the central determinant in what, how, and why vital services are rendered.
Just look at the price of medicines given to drug companies by taxpayer-funded government agencies that discovered them.
(Autographed copies of my new book Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns are available from Politics and Prose, an independent book store in Washington D.C.)
Most in US distrust newspapers, TV reports: Gallup poll
Press TV – June 21, 2013
A new nationwide opinion poll indicates that over 77 percent of people in the United States do not trust mainstream newspapers and television reports.
The survey, which was conducted by Gallup on June 1-4, was based on nationwide telephone interviews with 1,529 American adults. Its results were released on June 17.
Only 23 percent of Americans trust news institutions in the United States. The figure shows a fall from 25 percent in 2012 and 28 percent in 2011.
The Gallup poll also pointed out that news consumers have found increasingly better ways to access news amid the expanding social media sites and the Internet in general, making it difficult for the news industry to find a suitable niche.
Newspapers and television ranked near the bottom of the confidence list of 16 societal institutions, placing alongside banks, Congress and big businesses.
Americans’ in all key demographic groups including conservatives, moderates and liberals have experienced a drop in confidence in mainstream news since the early 2000s. The confidence has worsened further since 2007, the study revealed.
The opinion poll was released as mainstream media outlets are under fire for their extensively lopsided coverage of key international events including the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, the National Security Agency’s spy scandal involving whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the unresolved Boston Marathon bombings.
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From the Archives
Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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