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by Nordic » Sat Jun 15, 2013 4:46 am
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:45 am
norton ash » Fri Jun 14, 2013 3:14 pm wrote:"Don't be evil' (unless it costs us money, power or government friends.)
NSA revelations threaten worldwide trust in Facebook, Google
Facebook and Google deny they gave the NSA special access to their servers. But 'the stink of being a pawn of the U.S. government could really hurt' global growth, a prominent tech entrepreneur says.
At a Google data center in Oregon, Denise Harwood diagnoses an overheated computer processor. Google uses these data centers to store email, photos, video, calendar entries and other information from its users. (Connie Zhou, Google / October 17, 2012)
By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2013, 7:45 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. want people the world over to trust them with the most intimate details of their lives.
Now both Silicon Valley companies are fighting to preserve that trust in the wake of damaging revelations that they turned over users' data to the National Security Agency's secret Internet surveillance program.
Facebook and Google each vigorously deny they gave the U.S. government special access to their servers or complied with broad requests for users' information and communications. And they have moved swiftly to quell criticism overseas, exerting public pressure on the Obama administration to shed light on the number and scope of national security requests they get under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
But many say the revelations have already undermined the companies' sweeping international ambitions in the very same countries where they are looking to put down deeper roots.
"The implications are not just about what happens to the privacy of Americans and to the future of American political due process," said David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect." "There are potentially vast negative global consequences."
Rebecca MacKinnon, senior research fellow with the New America Foundation, says there is a growing sense of outrage around the world. U.S. technology firms tied to the NSA surveillance program are especially vulnerable in places where citizens live under the oppression of pervasive surveillance and distrust of government runs deep, she said.
The NSA program, dubbed PRISM, targets foreigners whose online activity is routed through the United States.
"There has been a lot of discussion about Americans' privacy rights. But what about the privacy rights of everyone else?" said MacKinnon, who examines the effects of digital technologies on human rights.
More than any two other companies in recent years, Google and Facebook have come to rule the global Internet.
Google dominates online search in most of the world, with its market share in Europe exceeding 90%. The technology giant is aiming to extend its geographic reach, setting its sights on the developing world: It's preparing to fund and develop wireless networks in emerging markets in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia to bring Internet connections to people who live outside major cities.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users worldwide, 8 in 10 of whom are outside the U.S. With most major markets already saturated and growth stagnating in the U.S. and Europe, Facebook's future depends on adding billions of users in the developing world, where people may have greater qualms about a foreign government secretly having unfettered access to their accounts.
"It's an existential threat to these companies," technology investor and blogger Michael Arrington said. "The stink of being a pawn of the U.S. government could really hurt."
Much of the PRISM program is shrouded in secrecy, and the extent of the companies' involvement is unknown. National security agencies bar companies from even acknowledging that they have received a FISA request.
If people around the world begin to regard these services with suspicion or even fear, that could idle overseas growth and swing open the door to foreign competitors, Arrington said.
"It makes it easier for companies that are not in the U.S. to say, 'We will never respond to U.S. FISA orders,'" he said.
Google and Facebook say they routinely push back on government requests, to minimize how much information they must release.
Facebook, which has been in discussions with the federal government to allow it to disclose FISA requests, revealed for the first time late Friday how many government requests for user information it receives. The government, however, did not let Facebook break out national security requests.
Google is negotiating with the government to be able to disclose to users the number and scope of national security requests, including FISA requests, a person familiar with the situation said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Although they collect massive amounts of information on their users to power their advertising businesses, Facebook and Google are known for resisting sharing that information with the government. Each has libertarian values baked into their corporate cultures. But because of the secrecy surrounding FISA requests, it is impossible to know to what extent the companies are cooperating, observers say.
"There are a lot of misimpressions that are out there," Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said this week in an interview on British television.
For years, both companies have come under heavy scrutiny for how they handle the vast amounts of personal information they store on their servers. Many users strike an uneasy bargain: They hand over their personal data in exchange for free services.
Yet that calculus could quickly change — especially outside the United States — if the companies cannot give some assurances that users' personal communications are safe from the prying eyes of the U.S. intelligence agencies, MacKinnon said.
"In countries where people don't trust their own governments, in countries where people experience even higher levels of surveillance from governments that are completely unaccountable to them, these companies are going to have to be much more transparent with their users about what's happening or it's going to damage their businesses," she said.
It's an uncomfortable predicament for two companies accustomed to being viewed as white hats on the world stage, their revolutionary tools helping spread freedom and democracy and giving rise to protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo and, more recently, in Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey.
Google in particular has gone to great lengths to position itself as a model global citizen, doing more than any other Web company to disclose the nature and number of government requests for information about its users through its semiannual "transparency report." Companies such as Twitter Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have begun to follow suit. Facebook says it's considering it.
The revelations come on the heels of privacy woes, especially in Europe, which is weighing the world's strongest data protection law that would give consumers the right to withhold personal details while using the Web.
"Does [Google's unofficial motto] 'don't be evil' now come with an asterisk? As in 'don't be evil*' (*except when the government threatens us)," longtime Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo commented in an email.
Facebook received government requests for information involving 18G to 19G users' accounts
Published: June 15, 2013 9:22 AM
Photo credit: AP | A Facebook User Operations Safety Team worker looks at reviews at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook's top attorney says that after a week of negotiations with U.S. security officials, the company is allowed to make new revelations about government orders for user data. (Dec. 13, 2011)
Galleries
Mark Zuckerberg through the years
SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook and Microsoft Corp. representatives said that after negotiations with national security officials their companies have been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data.
The announcements Friday night come at the end of a week when Facebook, Microsoft and Google, normally rivals, had jointly pressured the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on national security orders.
Those actions came after Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American who works as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, revealed to The Guardian newspaper the existence of secret surveillance programs that gathered Americans' phone records and other data. The companies did not link their actions to Snowden's leaks.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.
Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.
The companies were not allowed to make public how many orders they received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.
The companies remain barred from revealing whether they've actually received FISA requests, and can only say that any they've received are included in the total reported figures.
Microsoft released similar numbers for the same period, but downplayed how much they revealed.
"We continue to believe that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues," John Frank, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel said in a statement.
Frank said Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts.
Both attorneys emphasized in their statements that those affected by the orders represent a "tiny fraction" of their huge user bases.
Google did not release its own numbers, saying late Friday that it was waiting to be able to reveal more specific and meaningful information.
"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests," Google said in a statement. "We already publish criminal requests separately from national security letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."
Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users' data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.
"We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested," Ullyot said." And we respond only as required by law."
by Canadian_watcher » Sat Jun 15, 2013 10:16 am
Alchemy wrote:
What do you think the next big revelation is that could be described as 'gut-wrenching and very hurtful,' as Mr Greenwald has called it?
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 15, 2013 10:21 am
Investigate Booz Allen Hamilton, not Edward Snowden
The firm that formerly employed both the director of national intelligence and the NSA whistleblower merits closer scrutiny
Pratap Chatterjee
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 June 2013 09.00 EDT
Booz Allen Hamilton headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia, has shot into the news recently over two of its former employees: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who has just revealed the extent of US global spying on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, and James Clapper, US director of national intelligence.
Clapper has come out vocally to condemn Snowden as a traitor to the public interest and the country, yet a review of Booz Allen's own history suggests that the government should be investigating his former employer, rather than the whistleblower.
Clapper worked as vice-president at Booz Allen from 1997 to 1998, while Snowden did a three-month stint at their offices in Hawaii in spring 2013 as a low-level contract employee. Both worked on intelligence contracts, which are estimated to make up almost a quarter of the company's $5.86bn in annual income. This past weekend, Clapper condemned Snowden's leak about US government surveillance, telling NBC News's Andrea Mitchell:
"For me, it is literally – not figuratively – literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities. This is someone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country. I think we all feel profoundly offended by that."
The following day Snowden replied from a hotel in Hong Kong, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian:
"The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
Booz Allen reacted with anger in a press statement released hours later:
"News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm."
Core values? Let's examine Booz Allen Hamilton's track record.
In February 2012, the US air force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor's contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas. US air force legal counsel concluded (pdf):
"Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm. These events caused the air force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program."
It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the air force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm's ethics policy.
Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. "Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue," wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that Meneses was not the only former air force officer who had subsequently become an executive in Booz Allen's San Antonio office.
"It couldn't hurt having [former AF people]. Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years."
Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) "employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate." The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges (pdf). Incidentally, both the Nasa and the air force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.
Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the Justice Department for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen's share of the $15m settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3m.
The incidents described above could be dismissed as aberrations. What is worthy of note, however, is that Ralph Shrader, the chairman, CEO and president of Booz Allen, came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company's government communications system division.
Today, those names may not ring a bell, but these two companies took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret in the 1970s when they agreed to hand over to the National Security Agency (NSA) all incoming and outgoing US telephone calls and telegrams. In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at Booz Allen was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.
Minaret and other such snooping programs led to an explosive series of congressional hearings in 1970s named the Senate select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.
Should the latest revelations of massive government surveillance come before Congress again, it might be worth probing Shrader and his company – rather than shooting the messenger, Edward Snowden.
Finally, Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen's other famous former employee, for possible perjury when he replied: "No, sir" to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked:
"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
SECRET TO PRISM PROGRAM: EVEN BIGGER DATA SEIZURE
By STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO
— Jun. 15 10:02 AM EDT
FILE - In this Jan. 31, 2008, file photo President Bush waves after signing a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act after a speech in Las Vegas. Sternly prodding Congress, Bush told lawmakers they were jeopardizing the nation's safety by failing to lock in the government eavesdropping law. When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. They didn't know that its passage gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially labeled US-98XN. It was known as Prism. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.
Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.
The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.
Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.
Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.
This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.
The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.
The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.
Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.
The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.
The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.
___
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.
But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.
The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a spot where fiber optic cables enter the U.S.
What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.
Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.
The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.
"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.
The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.
That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.
The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.
What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.
The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.
Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.
"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."
___
When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.
One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.
The logistics were about to get daunting, too.
For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.
It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:
Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.
A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.
With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.
While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.
All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.
"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.
Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 demands requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.
How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.
Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.
What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.
Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.
"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."
That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.
"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.
Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.
Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.
Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.
Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.
In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.
Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.
With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.
Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.
That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.
In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.
"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."
One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.
For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?
That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.
Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.
___
A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.
Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.
"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."
Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.
"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.
Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.
Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.
"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."
Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.
He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.
"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."
by barracuda » Sat Jun 15, 2013 12:07 pm
stickdog99 » Fri Jun 14, 2013 10:04 pm wrote:barracuda » 15 Jun 2013 03:36 wrote:I'm unsure which NSA thread this belongs in, and I'm not certain I ever agree with Arthur entirely, but I'm willing to give him a listen. Links in the original...
The article's title expresses exactly my sentiments about it.
by Hunter » Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:30 pm
Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home
By Alexander Bolton - 06/15/13 06:00 AM ET
A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs. [WATCH VIDEO]
Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials.
by Hunter » Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:56 pm
Canadian_watcher » Sat Jun 15, 2013 10:16 am wrote:Alchemy wrote:
What do you think the next big revelation is that could be described as 'gut-wrenching and very hurtful,' as Mr Greenwald has called it?
I hope it isn't something along the lines of actual thought control but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
so far what we're hearing is a 'soft control' (although it doesn't seem so soft, to me, knowing that people already do modify their behaviours in response to possibly being spied on) but if the devices not only record and download but also project and upload, I think that would be a really terrifying proposition.
by Elvis » Sat Jun 15, 2013 4:49 pm
Alchemy » Sat Jun 15, 2013 11:56 am wrote:Interesting that Snowden announced the other day as part of his leak package he has a lot of proof that we are hacking in to Hong Kong's business in a big way.
by Canadian_watcher » Sat Jun 15, 2013 5:20 pm
Alchemy » Sat Jun 15, 2013 1:56 pm wrote:So I assume you are in Canada, how is this all playing out there, is there outrage, unlike here where it seems it is already losing headlines and our Senators are blowing off briefings about it all and not showing up for them. How does the average Canadian feel about this since it is happening here and not there, but obviously the NSA is probably doing as much there as they are here (in fact maybe more so there because these programs are supposed to be targeting foreigners more than American citizens, in theory at least but likely not in practice), is that the feeling, that you folks over the boarder as much victims of this as we are here in the states, just curious how this is playing out outside of America? Is the general feeling a sort of "As America goes Canada goes," wrt to these sort of shenanigans or do you feel you are all less effected by it all, I notice your passion about things that happen here seems more intense than many of my fellow Yanks, I find that interesting and sort of telling, speaks volumes about who we are as Americans.
Maybe I will move to Canada. Can I bring my cat, do they like cats over there?
j/k! Just because you don't hear all the bullshit about our country doesn't mean it isn't happening. The abuses are just as bad here, but the news doesn't talk about it and alternative news doesn't exist.by ilyinternet » Sat Jun 15, 2013 7:34 pm
I hate to do this but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be. This is in no way to detract from the great courage of Glenn Greenwald in reporting the story, and the gutsiness of the Guardian in showcasing this kind of reporting, which is a service to America that US media is not performing at all. It is just to raise some cautions as the story unfolds, and to raise some questions about how it is unfolding, based on my experience with high-level political messaging.
Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them.
a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps — which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101″ — are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates.
b) In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points — again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points.
c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it.
d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’
e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded…
f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from…
g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it.
h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press — when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary.
Seeing these diligent attentive free-speech attorneys for another whisleblower reinforced my growing anxiety: WHERE IS SNOWDEN’S LAWYER as the world’s media meet with him? A whistleblower talking to media has his/her counsel advising him/her at all times, if not actually being present at the interview, because anything he/she says can affect the legal danger the whistleblower may be in . It is very, very odd to me that a lawyer has not appeared, to my knowledge, to stand at Snowden’s side and keep him from further jeopardy in interviews.
Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive — even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times — rather than the machine itself — that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests — why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times — unless we know about it?
Naomi
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:22 pm
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
by Declan McCullagh June 15, 2013 4:39 PM PDT
NSA Director Keith Alexander says his agency's analysts, which until recently included Edward Snowden among their ranks, take protecting "civil liberties and privacy and the security of this nation to their heart every day."
(Credit: Getty Images)
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."
There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws."
The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week's disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)
A portion of the NSA's mammoth data center in Bluffdale, Utah, scheduled to open this fall.
(Credit: Getty Images)
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. "They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's what they record," Binney said.
Brewster Khale, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.
NSA's annual budget is classified but is estimated to be around $10 billion.
Documents that came to light in an EFF lawsuit provide some insight into how the spy agency vacuums up data from telecommunications companies. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed in 2006 (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously "diverted" through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.
AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to a law that Congress enacted in 2008 and renewed in 2012. It's a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as the FISA Amendments Act.
That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.
A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA "may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States." A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically -- on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to "target" a specific American citizen.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, an attorney and member of the House Judiciary committee, who said he was "startled" to learn that NSA analysts could eavesdrop on domestic calls without court authorization.
(Credit: Getty Images)
Rep. Nadler's disclosure that NSA analysts can listen to calls without court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday that included FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness.
Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual."
Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked.
"I don't think so," Mueller replied.
"Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged this week that the agency's analysts have the ability to access the "content of a call."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, acknowledged this week that NSA analysts have the ability to access the "content of a call."
(Credit: Getty Images)
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA's surveillance process involves "billions" of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
They can be accessed by an analyst who's part of the NSA's "workforce of thousands of people" who are "trained" annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden's former employer.)
If it were "a U.S. person inside the United States, now that would stimulate the system to get a warrant," McConnell told the committee. "And that is how the process would work. Now, if you have foreign intelligence data, you publish it [inside the federal government]. Because it has foreign intelligence value."
McConnell said during a separate congressional appearance around the same time that he believed the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without warrants.
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN last month that, in national security investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously made telephone call. "All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not," he said. Clemente added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the "intelligence community" -- an apparent reference to the NSA -- "there's a way to look at digital communications in the past."
NSA Director Keith Alexander said this week that his agency's analysts abide by the law: "They do this lawfully. They take compliance oversight, protecting civil liberties and privacy and the security of this nation to their heart every day."
But that's not always the case. A New York Times article in 2009 revealed the NSA engaged in significant and systemic "overcollection" of Americans' domestic communications that alarmed intelligence officials. The Justice Department said in a statement at the time that it "took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance" with the law.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, says he was surprised to see the 2008 FISA Amendments Act be used to vacuum up information on American citizens. "Everyone who voted for the statute thought it was about international communications," he said.
SECRET TO PRISM PROGRAM: EVEN BIGGER DATA SEIZURE
By STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO
— Jun. 15 2:53 PM EDT
FILE - In this Jan. 31, 2008, file photo President Bush waves after signing a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act after a speech in Las Vegas. Sternly prodding Congress, Bush told lawmakers they were jeopardizing the nation's safety by failing to lock in the government eavesdropping law. When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. They didn't know that its passage gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially labeled US-98XN. It was known as Prism. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
FILE - In this June 10, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Wondering what the U.S. government might know about your phone calls and online life? And whether all of this really helps find terrorists? Good luck finding solid answers. Americans trying to wrap their minds around two giant surveillance programs are confronted with a mishmash of leaks, changing claims and secrecy. Congress members complain their constituents are baffled _ and many lawmakers admit they are, too. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2008, file photo President Bush speaks about the "Protect America Act" outside the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. They didn't know that its passage gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially labeled US-98XN. It was known as Prism. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
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WASHINGTON (AP) — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.
Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.
The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.
Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.
Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.
This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.
The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.
The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.
Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.
The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.
The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.
___
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.
But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.
The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber optic cables.
What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.
Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.
The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.
"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.
The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.
That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.
The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.
What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.
The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.
Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.
"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."
___
When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.
One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.
The logistics were about to get daunting, too.
For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.
It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:
Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.
A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.
With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.
While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.
All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.
"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.
Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.
How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.
Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.
What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.
Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.
"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."
That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.
"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.
Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.
Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.
Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.
Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.
In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.
Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.
With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.
Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.
That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.
In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.
"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."
One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.
For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?
That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.
Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.
___
A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.
Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.
"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."
Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.
"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.
Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.
Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.
"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."
Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.
He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.
"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."
The NSA Leaks Are Forcing More Transparency on Both Companies and The Government
June 15, 2013
By Trevor Timm
Thanks to the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we have learned an incredible amount about the secret NSA domestic surveillance program in the past week and a half, most critically that the NSA is collecting all the Verizon phone call records of millions of innocent Americans. In addition, in recent days, the NSA leaks have shown that the Director of National Intelligence and NSA have been misleading or lying to Congress, sparked lawsuits, and inspired new legislation that would curtail the abuses exposed in the news reports.
But equally important is what we have learned in response to the leaks. Ever since the Guardian started publishing their stories, the administration and Congress have been forced into an accountability corner. They've had reveal even more about the surveillance programs, and we’re finally getting some transparency that the government has been steadfastly blocking for years. This is demonstrable proof that leaks are often vital to democracy and an informed public.
Here's just some of the additional information we've learned since the Guardian started publishing its stories last Wednesday:
Almost immediately after the Guardian published the Verizon court order, multiple Senators admitted the shockingly broad orders have been “routine” for seven years. The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T and Sprint received them as well.
A day later, the Director of National Intelligence declassified part of the Internet surveillance PRISM program to show its relationship to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. NSA chief Keith Alexander also said the agency would declassify more information on how its previously secret surveillance program has “stopped terrorist attacks” next week. (The Associated Press reported last week that the only terrorist attack the government previously claimed the program stopped would have easily been disrupted without the NSA's involvement.)
On Thursday, we learned that Yahoo was the previously unnamed company that challenged collection under the FISA Amendments act as unconstitutional in 2008. Yahoo lost its challenge in the secret FISA court, paving the way for the major tech companies to join the PRISM program shortly after. We knew about the FISA decision before, but the name of the company has been unnecessarily classified for five years now.
Facebook and Microsoft both released aggregate numbers on how many users’ privacy is affected by FISA court orders on Friday, despite previously being barred from doing so by the government. While the government should be forced to release more specific numbers directly, this information has been kept secret for more than five years and is vitally important in understanding the scope of PRISM.
Today, NPR reported that amid pressure surrounding the leaks, the Obama administration is considering declassifying the “primary” FISA court order that allegedly gives the NSA legal authority to collect the phone records of every American, regardless of whether they have ever been suspected of a crime.
The leaks have also put renewed attention on the NSA surveillance program that have led to other news organizations not involved in the original leaks to redouble their investigative reporting around the NSA.
NBC News reported on the 1000% increase in administration’s use of Patriot Act Section 215, explaining that, “the FBI’s use of Section 215 quietly exploded, with virtually no public notice or debate.” And the Associated Press published an important story today, reporting how PRISM is actually “a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.”
All of these additional disclosures and information would not have been possible without Edward Snowden’s leaks.
Of course, there is still much the government should be forced to reveal. After emerging from a classified briefing this week, Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez says the disclosures in the media are just “the tip of the iceberg” and the American public would be “astounded” at true scope of the NSA’s program.
The government is also still arguing that the FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unconstitutional should stay secret, and have asked for more time in EFF’s lawsuits challenged the warrantless wiretapping program and demanding the release of the administration’s secret interpretation of the Patriot Act. They’ve been attempting block a judge from ruling on the merits of the cases by invoking various secrecy claims.
Luckily, Glenn Greenwald has promised more revelations in the days and weeks to come. Whether it’s through leaks to the press or official government disclosures, this transparency is long overdue, and we look forward to much, much more.
Retired Federal Judge: Your Faith In Secret Surveillance Court Is Dramatically Misplaced
By Nicole Flatow on Jun 14, 2013 at 6:00 pm
A retired federal judge warned Friday against blind faith in the secret court deciding the scope of U.S. government surveillance. During a panel discussion on constitutional privacy protection in the wake of a leaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision that revealed widespread NSA data collection, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner stood up in the audience to counter the statements of conservative law professor Nathan Sales that secret surveillance requests are subject to meaningful judicial review. She cautioned:
As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.
Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said.
Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure, was a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer before being confirmed to the federal bench in 1993. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Gertner explained that the selection process for the secret national security court formed in 1978 is more “anointment” than appointment, with the Chief Justice of the United States — now John G. Roberts — selecting from a pool of already-conservative federal judges those he thinks are most suited to decide national security cases in secret:
It’s an anointment process. It’s not a selection process. But you know, it’s not boat rockers. So you have a [federal] bench which is way more conservative than before. This is a subset of that. And it’s a subset of that who are operating under privacy, confidentiality, and national security. To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.
Gertner, an attendee at the American Constitution Society’s national convention, stood up during a panel discussion to make her comment after Sales, a law professor at George Mason University, suggested that individuals have some protection from excessive government surveillance because the Internet Service Providers who field government requests for information have the opportunity to challenge those requests before the secret court. “This isn’t a a paper tiger,” he said. “This is a court that engages in judicial review.” Gertner urged the audience to be skeptical about the court’s oversight, both because of its severely conservative make-up, and its secrecy. The judge whose order was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was Judge Roger Vinson, who authored the error-riddled federal court decision striking down the Affordable Care Act that even his fellow conservatives rejected.
Gertner also questioned the need for a secret court, noting that national security protections exist within the civilian court system:
I’m very troubled by that. When you get cases in court, in regular civilian court that have national security issues that have classified information, we developed a process whereby the parties would develop security clearances and it could be presented to the court without it being disclosed to anyone else. It is not entirely clear to me why a civilian court with those protections that is otherwise transparent couldn’t do the job. That’s the way we did it before. Then we moved to this national security court. The notion that we have to have a conversation about major incursions on civil liberties and that we have step back and say we don’t really know, we haven’t seen the standards, we haven’t seen the opinions is extraordinary troubling in a democracy.
The surveillance court has authorized almost every request for government surveillance since 1979, and flat-out rejected just .03 percent of the government requests, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. In the wake of the leak, the secret court held Wednesday that its own rules did not prevent the release of its decisions, should a federal court order their release. The plaintiffs will now have to continue their lawsuit to make one particular decision public. Senators introduced a bill this week to require the Attorney General to declassify all major FISC decisions.
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