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Political Moves: How Dianne Feinstein Cut Off One Of The Few Attempts At Actual Oversight By Senate Intelligence Committee

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | September 27, 2013

We’ve already covered how Dianne Feinstein used the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to play games with the English language, while Senator Dan Coats used it to rant against all you stupid Americans for not trusting the NSA, but there have been some actual attempts to have the Senate Intelligence Committee perform its actual duty of oversight. Both Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall — who have been trying to raise these questions for years — actually had specific questions for the assembled panel, but the panel (mainly Keith Alexander) did its best to completely avoid answering the questions, then used political gamesmanship to block Wyden from asking followups.

Wyden used his question to highlight what he’s been hinting at for years, that it’s almost certain that the NSA has collected bulk data on the locations of Americans (something not yet officially revealed, and which they’ve sort of tried to deny for a while). Wyden has been asking versions of this question for a few years (and trying to pass legislation blocking this kind of thing for nearly as long). But watch how Keith Alexander never actually answers the question:

Wyden: Now with respect to questions, let me start with you Director Alexander, and, as you all know, I will notify you in advance so that there won’t be any surprise about the types of issues we are going to get into. And Director Alexander, Senators Udall, Heinrich and I and about two dozen other senators have asked in the past whether the NSA has ever collected or made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site information in bulk. What would be your response to that?

Gen. Keith Alexander: Senator, on July 25, Director Clapper provided a non-classified written response to this question amongst others, as well as a classified supplement with additional detail. Allow me to reaffirm what was stated in that unclassified response. Under section 215, NSA is not receiving cell-site location data and has no current plans to do so. As you know, I indicated to this committee on October 20, 2011, that I would notify Congress of NSA’s intent to obtain cell-site location data prior to any such plans being put in place. As you may also be aware….

Note the word games: “under Section 215.” He does not say whether they’ve used some other authority to do so. And then he’s just repeating talking points so Wyden flat out cuts him off:

Wyden: General, if I might. I think we’re all familiar with it. That’s not the question I’m asking. Respectfully, I’m asking, has the NSA ever collected or ever made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site information. That was the question and we, respectfully General, have still not gotten an answer to it. Could you give me an answer to that?

Alexander: We did. We sent that — as you’re also aware I expressly reaffirmed this commitment to the committee on June 25, 2013. Finally, in the most recent and now declassified opinion renewing this program, the FISA court made clear in footnote number five that notice to the court in a briefing would be required if the government were to seek production of cell-site location information as part of the bulk production of call detail records. Additional details were also provided in the classified supplement to Director Clapper’s July 25th response to this question. So what I don’t want to do, Senator, is put out in an unclassified forum anything that’s classified there so I’m reading to you exactly. So we sent both of these to you. I saw what Director Clapper sent and I agree with it.

Wyden: General, if you’re responding to my question by not answering it because you think that’s a classified matter that is certainly your right. We will continue to explore that because I believe this is something the American people have a right to know whether the NSA has ever collected or made plans to collect cell-site information. I understand your answer. I’ll have additional questions on the next round. Thank you, Madam Chair.

First off, Alexander’s answer shows that, contrary to the assertions of some staunch NSA defenders, it is entirely possible to answer a question by saying “there is more information in classified documents that shouldn’t be shared in an open setting.” Some have tried to excuse James Clapper’s lies to Congress by suggesting he couldn’t have said more or less what Alexander said here.

Second, note the doublespeak that Alexander is engaged in here. Even asked, again, to answer the basic question, Alexander pulls an “under this program” type of answer, suggesting (again) that American location data either has been, or is planned, to be collected in bulk. That is worrisome, and should not be classified information. Rather it should be open to public debate as to whether or not it’s appropriate.

But here’s where the political gamesmanship came in. Committee chair Dianne Feinstein gave Senators only five minutes each for their questions. It seemed like a majority of this “oversight” committee didn’t actually ask any questions, but rather, like Coats, simply filibustered angrily at the American public or press for not trusting the NSA. But when actual questions were asked, not enough time was given to get a straight answer. At the very end of the hearing, after most of the other Senators had left, Senator Wyden made a perfectly normal request: could he ask his followup questions. He noted that he just had two questions and both could be asked within an additional five-minute window. Senator Susan Collins, who had similarly filibustered during her own five minutes (focusing mainly on knocking down a complete strawman: falsely insisting that people were upset that the NSA was using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to record all phone calls, when everyone knows that it’s just about call records, not call contents), objected to Wyden’s request because she thought everything would go in order. It was pure political gamesmanship.

So instead of getting to conduct more actual oversight by having the committee ask important questions of the surveillance bosses, the panel, instead, moved on to the “second part” of the hearing, which involved two staunch non-governmental NSA defenders who basically sat down to talk about the awesomeness of being able to spy on everyone. Ben Wittes opened with a “joke” about how the NSA’s director of compliance John DeLong, mocked the level of scrutiny the NSA was under by pointing out that if he had typos in a document he’d have to reveal that to some oversight authority. Har har. This was useless. There was no reason to have them testify, and they were given a hell of a lot more time than the Senators actually asking questions.

That time could have been used to actually conduct oversight. Instead, we got nothing. Throughout the panel Senators pointed out that the American public doesn’t trust the NSA right now (though, they often blamed the public and the press for this, rather than the direct actions and statements of the NSA). If they wanted a lesson in how not to build up that trust, holding a completely toothless “oversight” hearing was a pretty good start.

After Wyden, Udall also asked some specific questions, in which the deputy Attorney General basically just repeated the FISA Court ruling saying that “relevant” has been redefined by the intelligence community to mean basically anything that the intelligence community feels is “necessary” to its investigations, and seems to think that it’s a good thing that this is a “low bar.” He completely ignores the basics of the 4th Amendment, as well as recent Supreme Court decisions on the topic.

I’ve included the video of both Wyden and Udall’s questions below, so you can see the less than 20 minutes of the two-hour session where actual serious questions were asked.

September 28, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Tone Deaf Dianne Feinstein Thinks Now Is A Good Time To Revive CISPA

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | September 25, 2013

We had believed, along with a number of others, that the Snowden leaks showing how the NSA was spying on pretty much everyone would likely kill CISPA dead. After all, the key component to CISPA was basically a method for encouraging companies to have total immunity from sharing information with the NSA. And while CISPA supporters pretended this was to help protect those companies and others from online attacks, the Snowden leaks have reinforced the idea (that many of us had been pointing out from the beginning) that it was really about making it easier for the NSA to rope in companies to help them spy on people.

Also, if you don’t remember, while CISPA had passed the House, the Senate had shown little appetite for it. Last year, the Senate had approved a very different cybersecurity bill, and had expressed very little interest in taking up that fight again this year. Except now, in an unexpected move, Senate Intelligence Committee boss, and chief NSA defender because of reasons that are top secret, has now announced that she’s been writing a Senate counterpart to CISPA and is prepared to “move it forward.”

Yes, it seems that even though the NSA gleefully hid the evidence of widespread abuses from Feinstein’s oversight committee, she’s playing the co-dependent role yet again. Yes, there’s a chance that this new version of the bill will actually take into account privacy and civil liberties, but I doubt many people would take a bet on that being likely.

Right now what the public is concerned about are not “cyberattacks” from foreigners — they’re concerned about our own government undermining the security and privacy of Americans themselves. Giving those responsible for that destruction of privacy and trust more power to abuse the privacy of Americans is not what people are looking for. Quite the opposite.

September 25, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Uncontrolled by FISA court, NSA commits ‘thousands of privacy violations per year’

RT | August 16, 2013

The National Security Agency broke the law and ignored privacy protections thousands of times in each of the years since Congressional leaders expanded the agency’s power in 2008, according to a new report citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The majority of the violations are related to unauthorized surveillance on Americans or foreigners inside the United States, conditions deemed illegal by executive order, according to a new report from the Washington Post.

The account is based on top-secret documents and a May 2012 internal NSA audit that found 2,776 infractions – including unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications – in the preceding 12 months alone. The audit, originally only meant to be seen by top NSA leaders, only accounted for violations at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Virginia, and other locations in the Washington DC region.

Three government sources told the Post that the 2,776 infractions would in fact be much higher had the audit included all NSA data collection centers. Each of the 2,776 violations could have potentially encompassed thousands of communications.

“One key to the Washington Post story,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first published Snowden’s disclosures in June, “the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting and white-washing.”

One of the most flagrant examples is a 2008 incident when a “large number” of telephone calls were inadvertently intercepted because a programmer erroneously typed “202” instead of “20,” Egypt’s national calling code, according to a “quality assurance” memorandum never seen by NSA oversight staff.

Another time, the NSA kept 3,032 files they were ordered to destroy by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Each individual file included an undisclosed number of telephone call records, according to the Post.

In a separate incident, the NSA failed to notify the FISA court about a new collection method the agency was using for months, at which point the court deemed the method unconstitutional. The agency reportedly “diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.”

This finding, and others like it, refutes claims made by NSA chief Keith Alexander and other brass that the government does not store or process the information it collects. As per NSA policy, the number of Americans affected was not disclosed in the top-secret documents.

NSA officials also failed to explain why, with the number of violations lower in 2008 and 2009 than in later years, violations only increased as time went on.

US District Judge Reggie Walton, the chief judge of the FISA court, admitted that the court’s rulings are based only on information provided by the government. Consequently, judges entrusted with determining what the NSA may and may not do are forced to rely on the NSA to prove the government has not and will not overstep its legal bounds.

“The [FISA court] is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” Walton wrote to The Washington Post. “The [FISA court] does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the [FISA court] is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

Privacy advocates have previously expressed concern that the court is never informed of many of the violations. Even when the court is informed of the agency’s intentions, however, the judges are sometimes ignored.

A recently declassified Justice Department review from 2009 discovered a “major operational glitch that had led to a series of significant violations of the court’s order and notified the court.” While specifics of the error were not disclosed, problems including the so-called “over-collection” of phone call metadata were reported.

“The problems generally involved the implementation of highly sophisticated technology in a complex and ever-changing communications environment which, in some instances, results in the automated tools operating in a manner that was not completely consistent with the specific terms of the Court’s orders,” a December 2009 memo to the Senate and House intelligence committees stated.

The Washington Post notified the NSA of Thursday’s report before it was published, at which point the agency said it stops mistakes “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive them down.”

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” said one senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You can look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”

The documents also described a tutorial that NSA collectors and analysts are required to complete. Titled the “Target Analysts Rationale Instructions,” the training instructs employees on how to complete oversight requirements without revealing “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers,” a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

California Senator Dianne Feinstein said she did not receive a copy of the audit until questioned by the Post, despite her position as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman. She said the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

The timing of the report comes just after US President Barack Obama defended the NSA’s widespread domestic and foreign surveillance. Obama said the programs were necessary to protect national security and legitimate partly because of comprehensive oversight.

“If you look at the reports – even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden has put forward – all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails,” Obama said.

“What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

After the initial report was published Thursday night the Washington Post issued an appendix revealing that after reporters spoke with NSA leadership, the Obama administration refused allow the Post to publish their names or official titles. The explanation from the newspaper is reproduced in full below:

“The Obama administration referred all questions for this article to John DeLong, the NSA’s director of compliance, who answered questions freely in a 90-minute interview. DeLong and members of the NSA communications staff said he could be quoted “by name and title” on some of his answers after an unspecified internal review. The Post said it would not permit the editing of quotes. Two days later, White House and NSA spokesmen said that none of DeLong’s comments could be quoted on the record and sent instead a prepared statement in his name. The Post declines to accept the substitute language as quotations from DeLong. The statement is below.

“We want people to report if they have made a mistake or even if they believe that an NSA activity is not consistent with the rules. NSA, like other regulated organizations, also has a “hotline” for people to report — and no adverse action or reprisal can be taken for the simple act of reporting. We take each report seriously, investigate the matter, address the issue, constantly look for trends, and address them as well — all as a part of NSA’s internal oversight and compliance efforts. What’s more, we keep our overseers informed through both immediate reporting and periodic reporting. Our internal privacy compliance program has more than 300 personnel assigned to it: a fourfold increase since 2009. They manage NSA’s rules, train personnel, develop and implement technical safeguards, and set up systems to continually monitor and guide NSA’s activities. We take this work very seriously.”

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August 16, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Guide to the Deceptions, Misinformation, and Word Games Officials Use to Mislead the Public About NSA Surveillance

By Trevor Timm | EFF | August 14, 2013

It’s been two months since President Barack Obama first said that he welcomes a debate about NSA surveillance, which he once again reiterated last week at his press conference. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have a real debate about a subject when the administration constantly and intentionally misleads Americans about the NSA’s capabilities and supposed legal powers.

Infamously, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper was forced to apologize for lying to Congress about whether the government was collecting information on millions of Americans, but that was merely the tip of the administration’s iceberg of mendacity and misdirection. At this point, it seems nothing the government says about the NSA can be taken at face value.

NSA’s Bizarro Dictionary

The latest example comes from the New York Times last week, which reported that the NSA is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country.” Despite the fact that millions of people’s communications are collected in bulk, the NSA says that this isn’t  “bulk collection.” From the NYT story:

The senior intelligence official argued, however, that it would be inaccurate to portray the N.S.A. as engaging in “bulk collection” of the contents of communications. “ ‘Bulk collection’ is when we collect and retain for some period of time that lets us do retrospective analysis,” the official said. “In this case, we do not do that, so we do not consider this ‘bulk collection.’ ”

In other words, because the NSA does some sort of initial content searches of the bulk communications that they collect, perhaps using very fast computers, then only keep some unknown subset of that greater bulk for a later date, no “bulk collection” occurs. This is ridiculous. No matter how you slice it, the NSA is mass collecting and searching millions of American communications without a warrant.

Keep in mind that officials have previously said communications aren’t even “collected” when they are intercepted and stored in a database for long periods of time, much less “bulk collected.”  Orwell would be impressed.

We’ve long documented the NSA’s unbelievable definitions of ordinary words like “collect,” “surveillance,” and “communications,” publishing a whole page of them last year. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer has added to the NSA’s bizarro dictionary, with words like “incidental,” “minimize” and even “no.”

The fact is, no one should have to read and parse a sentence a half-dozen times, plus have access to a secret government dictionary, in order to decipher its meaning. Yet, that’s apparently how the administration wants this debate to proceed.

Question Misdirection

When government officials can’t directly answer a question with a secret definition, officials will often answer a different question than they were asked. For example, if asked, “can you read Americans’ email without a warrant,” officials will answer: “we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant.” As we explained last week, the NSA’s warped definition of word “target” is full of so many holes that it allows the NSA to reach into untold number of Americans’ emails, some which can be purely domestic.

“Under this Program” Dodge

Another tried and true technique in the NSA obfuscation playbook is to deny it does one invasive thing or another “under this program.” When it’s later revealed the NSA actually does do the spying it said it didn’t, officials can claim it was just part of another program not referred to in the initial answer.

This was the Bush administration’s strategy for the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”: The term “TSP” ended up being a meaningless label, created by administration officials after the much larger warrantless surveillance program was exposed by the New York Times in 2005. They used it to give the misleading impression that the NSA’s spying program was narrow and aimed only at intercepting the communications of terrorists. In fact, the larger program affected all Americans.

Now we’re likely seeing it as part of the telephone records collection debate when administration officials repeat over and over that they aren’t collecting location data “under this program.” Sen. Ron Wyden has strongly suggested this might not be the whole story.

From Downright False to Impossible to Understand

Some statements by government officials don’t seem to have any explanation.

The night before the New York Times story on “vast” warrantless searches of Americans’ communications came out, Obama told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Mr. President, what do you call collecting the phone records of all Americans and searching any email sent by an American that happens to cross the border? That sounds a lot like a domestic spying program.

Similarly, Sen. Dianne Feinstein,  chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee,  recently said this: “[T]he government cannot listen to an American’s telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause.” Leaked documents and, honestly, the FISA Amendments Act itself show Feinstein’s statement simply isn’t true—if Americans are talking to a “target” their telephone calls are listened to and their emails can be read without a warrant (and that doesn’t even include the searching of Americans’ communications that are “about a target”). All of those searches are done without a court order, much less a warrant based on probable cause.

Previously, President Obama has called the inherently secret FISA court “transparent,” to the befuddlement of just about everyone. A court that has issued tens of thousands of secret orders, while creating a secret body of privacy and Fourth Amendment law, is not “transparent” by any measure.

Just last week, the president claimed he would appoint an “independent” board of “outside” observers to review the surveillance programs, only to put DNI Clapper—the same man who lied to Congress and the public about the scope of the program—in charge of picking the members. The White House has since backtracked, but the DNI still will report the group’s findings to the President.

These are not all of the misleading statements, merely just a few that stick out at the moment. If the president is serious about transparency, he can start by declassifying the dictionary his administration is using to debate, and start speaking straight to the American public. A one-sided presentation of the facts, without straightforward answers to the public’s questions, isn’t really a debate at all.

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August 15, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Congressional Oversight? Dianne Feinstein Says She’s ‘Not A High-Tech Techie’ But Knows NSA Can’t Abuse Surveillance

By Mike Masnick | TechDirt | August 2, 2013

As the NSA and defenders of NSA surveillance are trying to minimize the damage from the latest leak, which revealed the details of the XKeyscore program, they’re bending over backwards to insist that this program is both limited and immune from abuse. We’ve already mentioned that the claims that it can’t be abused are laughable since there’s already a well-documented history of abuse. However, even more bizarre is the following quote from Senate Intelligence Committee boss, Senator Dianne Feinstein (a staunch defender of the surveillance programs):

Feinstein said, “I am not a high-tech techie, but I have been told that is not possible.”

Note that among Feinstein’s jobs is oversight of this program. Yet, what kind of “oversight” is it when she admits that she’s not qualified to understand the technology but “has been told” that such abuses are not possible? That doesn’t seem like oversight. That seems like asking the NSA “can this system be abused?” and the NSA saying “oh, no no no, not at all.” That’s not exactly oversight, now is it?

August 3, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSA Scandal: How Leaks Advance Liberty and Resist Tyranny

Using technology to keep the government in check

By Jerry Brito | Reason | June 18, 2013

We now know what we have long suspected: that the National Security Agency is collecting the phone call records of all Americans. And we are now justified in suspecting what we have long feared: that it is also keeping a permanent backup copy of everything that happens on the Internet, ready to be rewound and replayed in the future. Such a massive surveillance apparatus is a threat not only to privacy, but also to liberty. So what hope do we have that such power can be kept in check, and that we don’t succumb to ever greater tyranny?

If the secret surveillance itself is any indication, then the separation of powers is not up to the task. According to President Obama, domestic surveillance programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government.” Yet it doesn’t seem very strict when more than half of the Senate couldn’t be bothered to show up last week for a major briefing by the government’s top intelligence officials.

“Strict supervision” also doesn’t seem very meaningful when you consider that the FISA Court is a hand-picked non-adversarial specialist court that approved every surveillance request it got last year. Experience suggests that specialist courts tend to get captured by their bar, and in the case of the FISA Court, that means just the government.

More to the point, a secret court issuing secret orders based on secret interpretations of the law makes any debate or commentary impossible. Even when there is a will on the part of some lawmakers to carry out oversight, executive branch officials will apparently lie under oath. So if not on the Constitution and its institutions, on what can we rely to keep government power in check?

Technology might be the answer, but not in the way you might think.

Yes, we can encrypt our communications by using PGP, Tor, and OTR chat, and we can transact using Bitcoin. These are invaluable tools of resistance to censorship and oppression. Ultimately, though, most people won’t use them because they won’t see any immediate benefit to justify the effort. And in a world where few use these tools, those who do will perversely draw attention to themselves.

Instead, technology might help keep government power in check the same way it helps it grow: by making it impossible for anyone to keep secrets—including the government itself.

When Daniel Ellsberg decided to leak the Pentagon Papers in 1969, he spent a year sneaking out the 7,000 classified pages one briefcaseful at a time. He spent countless hours each evening in front of a primitive photocopier, and he spent thousands of dollars on the endeavor. In contrast, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden’s leaks of considerably more data were relative cakewalks. The same digital technology that makes it possible to capture and store vast quantities of surveillance information also makes it possible for the first time in history to copy and release hundreds of thousands of pages of classified information.

A surveillance state as big as the one that’s now coming into view necessarily means that there are more secrets and more people with access to those secrets than ever before. More than 92 million documents were classified in 2011, up from 76 million the year before, and 23 million when President Obama took office. All of that data is digital, and therefore eminently reproducible.

There are also over 4.2 million persons with security clearances, and over a million of those can access top secret documents. Contractors, like Snowden, are an indispensable part of the system, and there are almost 2,000 private companies working for the government on programs related to homeland security and intelligence.

There simply has to be that many documents and that many people with access in order to build and run such a massive edifice. The larger it grows, however, the more untenable it becomes. As Julian Assange pointed out in a pre-Wikileaks essay, an organization keeps secrets because if what it’s doing is revealed, it will induce opposition. A small criminal conspiracy may be able to keep its secrets by limiting its numbers and not writing anything down. A large conspiracy, on the other hand, can’t function unless it systematizes its activities, and that involves a long paper trail and lots of confidants, which makes it more difficult to prevent leaks.

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie,” Assange wrote. To cope, such an organization can shrink and do less, he wrote, or introduce more security and controls and thus inefficiency. Either way, the organization’s power will contract.

We’re already witnessing such a reaction to Snowden’s leaks. On Thursday Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that Congress plans to draft legislation limiting private contractor access to secret documents. “We will certainly have legislation which will limit [or] prevent contractors from handling highly classified data,” she said. Today NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander announced that the agency will implement a “two-person rule” that would require anyone copying data to do so with another person present—a buddy system that potentially halves the NSA’s efficiency.

In attempting to limit leaks, such legislation would also effectively limit government’s power. That’s the happy dilemma the technology introduces. Digital communications makes achieving and exploiting “total information awareness” possible, but it also makes it almost impossible to keep the resulting corruption under wraps. Secrecy just doesn’t scale.

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June 25, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | 1 Comment

After Bragging about Using Surveillance Law to Catch Terrorists, Government Balks at Proving it in Court

By Matt Bewig | AllGov | June 24, 2013

Even as the Obama administration continues its aggressive defense of the PRISM domestic spying program, with defense and intelligence officials claiming that it foiled as many as 50 terror plots, the Justice Department continues to play coy, as though PRISM did not exist.

This disconnect likely arises from the fact that government surveillance often turns out to be a two-edged sword when prosecutors bring criminal charges against alleged wrongdoers. Implementing the constitutional right of “due process under law,” state and federal laws require prosecutors to share all relevant information with defendants, which their attorneys use to identify exculpatory facts and witnesses and develop legal defenses.

In the case of teenage terror defendant Adel Daoud, attorneys alleged in papers filed last week in federal court that the government has not lived up to its obligations. Daoud, an American citizen, was arrested and charged in September 2012 with plotting to blow up a downtown Chicago bar.

Three months later, during a debate on the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which the Obama administration claims as the legal basis of its PRISM domestic spying program, a key Senator claimed that the FAA had helped investigators catch Daoud. Specifically, on December 27, 2012, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D.-California), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated that the FAA had helped thwart “a plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar” that fall.

If that is true, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would require the government to share the results of the surveillance that led investigators to Daoud, yet prosecutors refuse even to confirm or deny the substance of Feinstein’s comments. Daoud’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Thomas A. Durkin, argues that the government manipulates “a Global War on Terror playbook” to its advantage and then refuses to disclose it.

“Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly. When a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets,” wrote Durkin in a court filing demanding the government confirm or deny the use of the surveillance.

“Whether the government relied on FAA surveillance when it obtained its FISA order is a crucial element of giving adequate notice to criminal defendants. The government should be compelled to provide a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question of whether its evidence was obtained or derived from electronic surveillance conducted under the FAA,” the motion explains.

To Learn More:

Chicago Federal Court Case Raises Questions about NSA Surveillance (by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post)

Teen Terror Suspect Says Feds must Admit Spying on Him, Americans (by Chuck Goudie, abc7 Chicago)

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June 24, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , , | 1 Comment

The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Snooping

By Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer | ProPublica | June 10, 2013
The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland

Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.

But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. Here’s what we still don’t know:

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?

It’s not entirely clear.

The Guardian published a court order that directed a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone metadata — the time and duration of calls, as well as phone numbers and location data — to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported the program also covers AT&T and Sprint and that it covers the majority of Americans. And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself acknowledged that the “collection” is “broad in scope.”

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said last week that the NSA has been collecting the records going back to 2006. That’s the same year that USA Today revealed a similar-sounding mass collection of metadata, which the paper said had been taking place since 2001. The relationship between the program we got a glimpse of in the Verizon order and the one revealed by USA Today in 2006 is still not clear: USA Today described a program not authorized by warrants. The program detailed last week does have court approval.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?

That’s classified.

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records – “any tangible things” – as part of a “foreign intelligence” or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.

As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman recently wrote, the details of that interpretation matter a lot: “Read narrowly, this language might require that information requested be shown to be important or necessary to the investigation. Read widely, it would include essentially anything even slightly relevant — which is to say, everything.”

In the case of the Verizon order — signed by a judge who sits on the secret court and requiring the company to hand over “all call detail records” — it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don’t know the specifics.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told CNN on Sunday, “It’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we could [not] have developed through other data and other intelligence.”

He said he could not elaborate on his case “without further declassification.”

Sen. Feinstein told ABC that the collection of phone records described in the Verizon order had been “used” in the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi. Later in the interview, Feinstein said she couldn’t disclose more because the information is classified. (It’s worth noting that there’s also evidence that old-fashioned police work helped solve the Zazi case — and that other reports suggest the Prism program, not the phone records, helped solve the case.)

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?

It’s not clear.

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description that the government can’t get information using Prism unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

One thing we don’t know is how the government determines who is a “foreign target.” The Washington Post reported that NSA analysts use “search terms” to try to achieve “51 percent confidence” in a target’s “foreignness.” How do they do that? Unclear.

We’ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don’t know how broad they are. The Post reported that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”

So, how does Prism work?

In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap “directly into the central servers” of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies denied giving the government “direct access” to their servers. In a later story, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

For more on mass surveillance in America, read our timeline of loosening laws and practices.

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June 11, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Totalitarianism of Universal Background Checks

By Anthony Gregory | The Beacon | April 4, 2013

Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with this terrible proposal.

Ever since Sandy Hook, the Obama administration and its progressive choir have demanded a new Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Now it looks like that plan is toast. California Senator Dianne Feinstein blames gun owners and the NRA, and in a sense we should have expected all along that this proposal would get nowhere. Such a ban would mostly target “semi-automatic” rifles—which, despite all the hysterics, simply refers to any standard rifle that fires one round each time the trigger is pulled—that happen to have esthetic elements like the pistol grip that do not in fact add to the weapons’ lethality. This is the nonsensical standard used to ban some classes of weapons instrumentally identical to the ones banned in 1994.

The first AWB devastated the Democrats politically, and probably contributed as much as anything to the Republicans’ crushing victory in the 1994 congressional elections after forty years in the legislative minority. It also hurt Al Gore in his run against George W. Bush in 2000. The ban generally prohibited ordinary but scary looking rifles, which are used in about two percent of violent crimes committed with firearms. The law did not apply to, say, most of the weapons used at the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But it did interfere with Americans’ basic right to own what we can fairly call the modern version of the musket. Millions of Americans own such weapons like the AR-15, the most popular rifle and one targeted by the Democrats’ proposal for a new, robust AWB. These weapons are used for hunting, sport, and self-defense. They are not, despite all the misinformation to the contrary, repeating, military-style rifles.

In any event, the unpopularity of an AWB always doomed this proposal, especially under a Democratic president as distrusted on the right as Obama. The Republicans have the House and too many Democrats in the Senate are loyal to their gun-owning constituents.

So this whole time, the real threat to our firearms freedom has been these less debated, peripheral proposals—proposals that strip people the state deems “mentally ill” of the right to bear arms, proposals that violate the civil rights of released convicts, proposals to increase penalties for violations of current law, and, as disturbing as anything, proposals to institute “universal background checks.”

The gun restrictionists have pointed to polls showing more than 90% approval of such background checks, including among a vast majority of conservatives, Republicans, and gunowners. Liberty is always attacked on the margins, and most Americans don’t go to gun shows and so don’t see the big deal. Surely the state should know who is armed. Surely we don’t want people buying and selling guns freely.

But, in fact, universal background checks are arguably even more tyrannical than banning whole classes of weapons. Why should the government know who is armed? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely buy and sell private property without government permission? Half of Americans see background checks as the first step toward full registration then confiscation. Many fear that the new law would create records of these deals that would not immediately be destroyed, which could form databases or enable government in further nefarious purposes. The progressives have tended to regard any of these worries as paranoia, but it looks like the ACLU is now among the paranoid.

There is no need to discuss pure hypotheticals. There have been gun confiscations in the United States. After the Civil War, officials conducted confiscations to disarm American Indians and blacks became the target in the Jim Crow South. Confiscations followed Hurricane Katrina, along with the rest of the government’s martial law response. Since many gun controllers openly say they want a total ban of certain kinds of firearms, or all firearms, why wouldn’t gun owners fear that registration will lead to confiscation? The U.S. president promised that he would not take away Americans’ rifles, then went ahead and proceeded to propose to do just that. Add all of this to the database growth, the warrantless wiretapping, the domestic surveillance drones, the frightening executive power grabs concerning detention, interrogation, and executions, and the overall militarization of policing that has unfolded thanks to the wars on drugs and terror, and it seems fairly appropriate that in the age of Bush and Obama, civil libertarians of all stripes would resist the drive toward universal background checks or anything with such an Orwellian name as that.

This whole matter should also remind us of the interlocking nature of personal liberties. Abolishing the Second Amendment necessarily means abolishing the Fourth as well. Just ask the millions of black and Hispanic young men stopped and frisked in New York City in the name of gun control and with the purpose, as the police commissioner reportedly put it, to “instill fear” of police in these demographic groups. It is the violations of privacy that concern the ACLU, but anyone jealous of her security in her papers, persons, and effects should recoil at the thought of the state collecting these records.

Of course, it should go without saying that when it comes to criminal enterprise, universal background checks are unenforceable. In a country with as many guns as there are people, criminals and the state will always get the weapons they want. Firearms are easier to manufacture than many illegal drugs, and we see how well the state has stamped those out. The rapid developments in 3-D printing makes it even crazier that we’d still be talking about gun control as anything but a threat to the liberty of the law abiding.

The AWB looks defeated for now, but perhaps that was always known to be inevitable by our cynical civilian disarmament fetishists in Washington, DC. Perhaps the real goal was to get what could be gotten now—the beginnings of a national database of every lawful gun owner. The so-called gun show loophole—the freedom of owners to sell firearms to one another with few encumbrances—is a pocket of liberty. Closing this loophole would be a tragedy. We can only hope that civil libertarians across the spectrum ban together to challenge this march to erode these core freedoms.

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April 6, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two Sides to Every Drone Death

By Peter Hart | FAIR | March 18, 2013

John Brennan and Dianne Feinstein

A March 15 piece in the Washington Post tells us that the UN’s special human rights envoy found that the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country’s sovereignty. It also told readers that the drones had “resulted in far more civilian casualties than the U.S. government has recognized.”

Unfortunately, that message was muddled by reporter Richard Leiby‘s he said/she said approach to the question of civilian deaths:

Estimates of total militant deaths and civilian casualties vary widely. Independent confirmation is difficult in part because the strikes often occur in remote, dangerous tribal areas where Taliban insurgents and Al-Qaeda and its allied militants are active.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London has estimated that at least 411 civilians–or as many as 884–were among some 2,536 to 3,577 people killed in the CIA strikes in Pakistan. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings last month that confirmed new CIA Director John O. Brennan, put the number of civilian deaths considerably lower.

“The figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits,” she said.

So, on the one hand,  the Bureau has done extensive work documenting drone strikes. But then again you have a senator who heard from the government that it’s much lower.

There is, of course, a way to report the difference between Feinstein’s claim and other estimates. Conor Friesdorf did so in the Atlantic (2/11/13), contrasting the Bureau‘s totals with those of the New America Foundation and other researchers. None of these projects supports Feinstein’s claim. His conclusion:

There is no reason to treat Feinstein’s claim about civilians killed as if it is credible. All the publicly available evidence is arrayed against her position.

Yet she’s treated by the Post as one of two sides of the drone deaths debate.

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March 19, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Thoughts about the Sandy Hook School Massacre and its Implications

By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | January 19, 2013

On the morning of Friday, December 14, 2012, media in the United States began non-stop reporting of a mass shooting incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School near Newtown, Connecticut. Although there were numerous inconsistent reports surrounding the incident, plenty of which were inherently contradictory, unconfirmed, or implausible, a particular narrative of what was supposed to have occurred that day was soon anchored in the minds of the general public by the large network news media and thus, through repetition and other mechanisms of reinforcement, became firmly entrenched as working premises for a follow-up press announcement, on Monday, December 17, by the office of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has been notorious for her zealous yet outspoken efforts over the course of decades, to effectively abolish the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and disarm the American public.

The press release from her office announcing her intention to introduce strict gun control legislation explicitly pointed out in bold-type letters, that the proposed regulations had been carefully prepared by her legal team for months in advance (“I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation,”) as though she were merely waiting for the right opportunity to present them, given that these issues would be deemed far too draconian by fellow legislators to support unless they were tactically publicized in the wake of a cathartic event that galvanized the public.

Nonetheless, the media conveniently chose to present Feinstein’s new proposals, and similar ones that followed, for instance in the New York State legislature, as though they had been genuinely motivated by general outrage over the cruelty of the massacre of first grade school children at Sandy Hook rather than being a calculated maneuver to follow through with a long sought after agenda while the resolve to resist such measures appeared to be softened by the manipulation of public emotions. It practically appeared to be a well orchestrated campaign promoting public gun control.

One might recall the manner in which the ominous provisions in the voluminous PATRIOT Act were quickly passed in the wake of the staged false-flag operation on September 11, 2001. The staff of Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain had prepared that legislation over many months, and shortly after the major terror incident it was “ready to go”. It would not be too surprising if political cynics are getting the impression, that a totalitarian agenda was being served in this case as well, facilitating the introduction and quick passage of controversial gun control legislation.

Indeed, this past November 27th, fewer than three weeks prior to the Sandy Hook shooting, the Governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, US Attorney General Eric Holder and David Fein, the state’s chief prosecutor, jointly announced “Project Longevity” at an event in New Haven. This project is intended to identify and target groups or individuals deemed to be potentially responsible for gun violence. Shortly after the massacre, Governor Malloy even stated openly at a press conference:

“The Lt. Governor and I have been spoken to, in an attempt that we might be prepared for something like this playing itself out in our state”

Surely people were generally aware of the strong likelihood, that at some point in the future there would be another mass shooting somewhere by a young adult, if only because of the well-known yet intentionally under-reported link between the adverse affects of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs and such shootings. SSRI drugs, which can cause individuals who are taking them to become both violent and suicidal, continue to be widely prescribed in cases of mental depression, and this trend continues because it is very profitable for the pharmaceutical producers. Hence critics point to such SSRI drugs, perhaps also in conjunction with violent video games, as root causes of mass shooting incidents rather than the availability of guns, which have been part of American culture for over a century, whereas the abundance of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs is a comparatively new phenomenon.

However, the hallmark of recent mass shooting incidents in the US and Europe has been that they involved the use of semi-automatic handguns at close range, but not so-called assault rifles. Since getting these popular assault rifles banned has been the top priority in the context of future gun control legislation by such advocates as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, the terror event that politicians would need to be awaiting, to then exploit the resulting crisis opportunity for their agenda, would almost have to be an extremely gruesome mass shooting, involving innocent children, and carried out with an assault rifle. Yet, given the modus operandi pattern of mass shootings in America, how likely could the probability of such an ad hoc scenario actually be? How many years would agenda-driven politicians be ready to wait to introduce already prepared legislation?

Seen in the context of what has quickly followed legislatively, the unusual Sand Hook massacre certainly came very conveniently, and this in itself arouses caution regarding the official narrative and details.

Leaving aside aforementioned expressions of advance preparation from top politicians, a careful analysis of the accumulated reports on that day – police scanner audio, network television news footage as events were unfolding, helicopter shots of the scene, witness testimony, police reports, an announcement by the chief coroner, photographs from the scene, etc. – clearly reveals, that the Sandy Hook massacre did not play itself out in the manner subsequently described in the common and ultimately unsustainable media narrative, which partially draws upon imagery of drills conducted elsewhere. Events that day were not as simplistic as is now presented, so it is very important to investigate and find out what actually happened.

The well established fact is, that children are routinely killed in US drone attacks, in such countries as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, in the pursuit of some nebulous policy of “combating terrorism”; there have also been numerous instances of children having been explicitly targeted for annihilation in the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza, by soldiers and settlers who enjoy the wide support of both the US Administration and its Congress. According to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a policy vis-à-vis Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children was “worth it”, as she once stated in a televised interview.

During recent decades Operation Gladio conducted mass casualty events in Western countries for the purpose of a “strategy of tension” in which the public is made to seek the government’s protection from an ubiquitous threat. The powerful authors of these crimes have never been brought into check.

Consequently, at this time one cannot categorically preclude the possibility of the Connecticut event having been a carefully planned operation, utilizing a hit-team of assassins, decoys, helpers, handlers and trained disinformation agents.

If people in power have no qualms about killing children incidentally, in their pursuit of political agendas, why should one imagine them to have hesitations now, in a different instance closer to home, where the political agenda, to enact a policy of gun control, is far more critical to retaining state authority than an ideological foreign policy objective?

If the carefully staged mass slaughter of children appears to be a threshold prerequisite for generating sufficient public outrage in an already jaded and violent society – just so long as the operators are effective at placing the blame onto a “mentally deranged lone gunman” patsy, under some seemingly plausible scenario, and the general public never notices – will that price have been “worth it” in retrospect, when politicians may invoke the many hundreds of hypothetical lives that they will assert “were saved” because of the legislation they would otherwise have not been able to implement?

Will the proposed legislative actions actually enhance public safety or mostly the state’s monopoly on violence?

In looking at the incident at Sandy Hook analytically, it is helpful to detach oneself from the distorted narrative set by the media and see the event from a more contextual and logical perspective, while taking into account past experience of incidents that turned out to be different from the manner they were initially presented. One must not be influenced, for example, by the fact that the alleged lone gunman, Adam Lanza, who is unable to tell his side of the story, has already been publicly vilified. Subliminally, a biased perspective can already arise simply from the publication of an undated mug shot photo of him with manipulated eyeball imagery, to make him appear as a lunatic.

Since the possibility of a sophisticated operation cannot be excluded one may then consider such a scenario, however inconvenient this alternative version may be.

As is the case in complicated operations intended to create the false public impression of having been carried out by a different party, careful planning, execution, and follow-up are necessary. Since this is usually difficult to pull off successfully, tell-tale mistakes will occur along the way, and these flaws will subsequently stand out and arouse suspicion.

What appears particularly odd in the case of the Sandy Hook event is the paucity of people who reported hearing loud gunshots. Since gun reports from fired .223 Remington or 5.56 x 45 mm cartridges are exceedingly loud, a hundred rounds being fired – for “overkill”, to make the scene appear more gruesome and ensure that there are no surviving witnesses – must certainly have alerted a much larger number of people, even hundreds of yards away outside the school premises. Instead, however, one witness, a young boy, later reported on camera, that what must have been the rifle shots sounded to him like the custodian knocking things over. A young girl reported hearing a racket. Another boy, who was apparently close enough to have seen and smelled smoke, reported that he “heard something like a person was kicking on a door”. Where are the many accounts of children and neighbors providing scary accounts of many rounds of gunfire? If the media could have presented them, they would have had a sensationalistic field day, full of such ear witness stories. Furthermore, the police radio would have noted the multiple callers, and consequently there would have been a much greater sense of urgency. In light of this noteworthy absence, it is reasonable to assume that the shootings may have been carried out with sound suppressors screwed onto the barrels of the rifles, commando style. Only a few shots, including that of the semi-automatic pistol that killed Adam Lanza, would not have entailed sound suppression. Unlike in some Hollywood movies, sound suppressors are not “silencers”, so that rifle gunfire noise would have still been audible as such nearby, at least to the woman who reported having called the 911 emergency services from underneath her desk.

We should remain alert for further irregularities that may become evident. We should also cautiously examine the proposed solutions.

January 19, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Proposed Amendments to #CISPA Don’t Protect Privacy

By Michelle Richardson | ACLU | April 19, 2012

Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee released proposed changes to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, also known as CISPA that, according to its sponsors, represent “huge progress” towards addressing the privacy and internet freedom community’s concerns.

But, many privacy advocates, including the ACLU, and groups including the Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Constitution Project still maintain their opposition. The changes are so underwhelming that even the Obama administration issued a statement yesterday that their privacy concerns persist.

Here are some of the main problems with CISPA:

1. CISPA still allows companies to share lots of sensitive and private information about our internet use with the government. The proposal amended the definition of what could be shared by taking out its explicit reference to stealing “intellectual property.” But it still allows the sharing of Internet use records or the content of emails for “cybersecurity purposes” and unlike proposals drafted by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein or the Obama administration, CISPA does not require companies to even make an effort to remove information that could be tied to a specific individual.

2. CISPA still lets military agencies such as the National Security Agency directly collect the Internet records of American citizens who use the public, domestic, civilian Internet. The proposed changes state that the Department of Homeland Security should be cc’d when companies share our private details with the military and others, but this is no substitute for ensuring that a civilian agency is put in charge of collecting Americans’ information.

3. CISPA still lets the government use the private information it collects about us for any purpose it deems fit outside of regulation. For four months, the draft bill has remained the same: the government can use information collected under this broad new program for “any lawful purpose” so long as a “significant purpose” of its use is a cybersecurity or national security one. But as former federal and FISA court judge James Robertson said at a congressional briefing this week, this “significant purpose” limitation is meaningless. The Patriot Act inserted this language into our foreign intelligence surveillance laws, and since then, in Judge Robertson’s words, they’ve had a “hole you could drive a truck through.”

Hard to see the progress here.

CISPA is still expected to hit the House floor for “Cybersecurity Week” next week. You can find out more about the bills in this memo, and more importantly, help us spread the word on Twitter and write to your Member of Congress today. Let Congress know that in spite of the minor changes floated by the House Intelligence Committee, you still oppose CISPA.

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April 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 1 Comment

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