The Criminal N.S.A.

[seemslikeadream]

How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say
A lexicon for understanding the words U.S. intelligence officials use to mislead the public.
By Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman
Posted Wednesday, July 31, 2013, at 5:29 PM

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C., on April 11, 2013.
Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.
Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label “surveillance” to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term, pointing out that this particular program doesn’t involve the NSA actually listening to phone calls—just keeping track of them. Their crabbed definition of “surveillance” allows them to claim that the NSA isn’t engaged in surveillance even when it quite plainly is.
Collect. If an intelligence official says that the NSA isn’t “collecting” a certain kind of information, what has he actually said? Not very much, it turns out. One of the NSA’s foundational documents states that “collection” occurs not when the government acquires information but when the government “selects” or “tasks” that information for “subsequent processing.” Thus it becomes possible for the government to acquire great reams of information while denying that it is “collecting” anything at all.
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Relevant. The NSA’s call-tracking program is ostensibly based on the Patriot Act’s Section 215, a provision that allows the government to compel businesses to disclose records that are “relevant” to authorized foreign intelligence investigations. The theory, it seems, is that everybody’s phone records are relevant today because anybody’s phone records might become relevant in the future. This stretches the concept of “relevance” far beyond the breaking point. Even the legislator who wrote Section 215 has rejected the government’s theory. If “relevance” is given such a broad compass, what room is left for “irrelevance”?
Targeted. The call-tracking program is only one of the NSA’s surveillance efforts. Another is what’s been branded PRISM, a program that involves the acquisition of the contents of phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. Americans need not worry about the program, the government says, because the NSA’s surveillance activities are “targeted” not at Americans but at foreigners outside the United States. No one should be reassured by this. The government’s foreign targets aren’t necessarily criminals or terrorists—they may be journalists, lawyers, academics, or human rights advocates. And even if one is indifferent to the NSA’s invasion of foreigners’ privacy, the surveillance of those foreigners involves the acquisition of Americans’ communications with those foreigners. The spying may be “targeted” at foreigners, but it vacuums up thousands of Americans’ phone calls and emails.
Incidental. Because the government’s surveillance targets are foreigners outside the United States, intelligence officials describe the acquisition of Americans’ communications as “incidental.” But the truth is that the statute behind PRISM—the FISA Amendments Act of 2008—was intended to let the government conduct warrantless surveillance of these very communications. In the debate that preceded passage of the law, intelligence officials told Congress that it was Americans’ communications that were of most interest to them. Indeed, when some legislators introduced bills that would have barred access to these communications without a warrant, President Bush said he would veto them. (One of those bills, incidentally, was introduced by then–Sen. Barack Obama.)
Inadvertent. The PRISM program sweeps up Americans’ purely domestic communications, too. Officials have said that the collection of domestic communications is “inadvertent,” but PRISM’s very design makes the collection of Americans’ domestic communications perfectly predictable. This is in part because the NSA presumes that its surveillance targets are foreigners outside the United States unless it has specific information to the contrary. In 2009, the New York Times reported that the NSA’s collection of purely domestic communications under the 2008 statute had been “significant and systemic.”
Minimize. What does the NSA do with communications that are acquired “incidentally” or “inadvertently”? As intelligence officials have told the courts and Congress, so-called “minimization” procedures limit the NSA’s retention and use of information about American citizens and permanent residents. Here again, though, the terminology is grossly misleading. The 2008 statute gives the NSA broad latitude to retain Americans’ communications, share them with other agencies, and even share them with foreign governments. The NSA’s own documents suggest that the agency retains Americans’ communications indefinitely if they include “foreign intelligence information,” a term defined so broadly that it encompasses any conversation relating to foreign affairs. Even communications that don’t include foreign intelligence information are retained for as long as five years.
No. When James Clapper was asked at a March Senate hearing whether the NSA was collecting information about millions of Americans, he answered, “No,” and then, after a pause, “not wittingly.” As Clapper has now conceded, the correct answer was simply “yes.”
Officials who describe the NSA’s activities using strategically idiosyncratic terminology presumably believe that they are telling the truth. In a certain formal sense, they usually are—though Clapper’s statement is a glaring exception. It shouldn’t need to be said, though, that their duties as public officials go beyond the avoidance of perjury charges. They have an obligation to ensure that the courts, Congress, and the public fully understand the policies that they are being asked to accept. They could start by using the same dictionary the rest of us do.

[elfismiles]

Thanks SLAD ... was just alerted by a friend about this article and was searching to see if it had been posted here yet.

PROMIS ... PRISM ... hmmm

PRISM’s Controversial Forerunner
July 11, 2013
Using a powerful computer program known as PRISM, the U.S. government has been downloading vast amounts of communications data and mining it for counterterrorism purposes. But these capabilities began more than three decades ago with the controversial PROMIS software, Richard L. Fricker reports.
...
Regardless of the Inslaw affair, PROMIS is still out there, still tracking whatever its masters require. And still, to this day, no one in government or otherwise has inquired, not about what PROMIS can do, but rather what is PROMIS doing, for whom and why.

PROMIS has been toiling in the intelligence caverns for nearly 30 years – that’s a lot of data consumption, that’s a lot of tracking. Where is the PROMIS data? Compared to 30 years of information gathering and tracking by PROMIS, PRISM could be considered the equivalent of digital binge drinking.

Richard L. Fricker lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer, where this article first appeared. His latest book, The Last Day of the War, is available at https://www.createspace.com/3804081 or at http://www.richardfricker.com. The entire story of the PROMIS software, Inslaw and what became known as “The Octopus” can be found in Fricker’s article that appeared in Wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html

[seemslikeadream]

NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication

[justdrew]

current Google News search of the phrase "on condition of anonymity" ...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22on+condition+of+anonymity%22&num=20&safe=off&tbm=nws

click it any time to see all the new "leaks"

fun game, try to find any reporting without such conditions of anonymity.

[justdrew]

Germany scraps old surveillance pact with US, Britain over NSA leaks
Published time: August 02, 2013 17:29

Germany has dissolved a fifty-years-old surveillance pact with the United States and Britain in response to a “debate about protecting personal privacy” in the country, which was sparked by revelations of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The agreement that dated back to the late 1960s gave the US, Britain and France the right to request German authorities carry out surveillance operations so as to protect their troops stationed within the country.

“The cancellation of the administrative agreements, which we have pushed for in recent weeks, is a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement on Friday.

Germany was currently in talks with France to cancel its part of the agreement as well, a German official told AP on condition of anonymity.

Following Snowden’s leaks, which disclosed the span of the NSA surveillance program and revealed that Germany is the most spied on EU country by the US, there has been a heated nationwide debate on whether the alleged massive privacy breach of German citizens should have been allowed.

The documents leaked Snowden say that the US spy agency combs through half a billion of German phone calls, emails and text messages on a monthly basis.

Weeks before German national elections, the country’s opposition parties demanded to clarification to what extent the government knew of the NSA’s intelligence gathering in Germany. This comes amid reports of seemingly close ties the two national spy agencies – the NSA and the BND – have had over the years.

German government officials have insisted that American and British intelligence agencies were never given permission to break Germany’s strict privacy laws.

[seemslikeadream]

Reps. Conyers & Massie on Bipartisan Campaign Against NSA Spying; Call for James Clapper to Resign


A bipartisan coalition against domestic surveillance is growing stronger in Washington. Last week, the House nearly passed a measure that would have prevented the National Security Agency from using the USA PATRIOT Act to collect phone records of individuals who are not under investigation. The measure failed by a narrow 217-to-205 margin. We speak to two key backers of the amendment: Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). "It was a signal that even in the partisanship that goes on too much around here there are people willing to say, 'Enough is enough. The PATRIOT Act isn't being followed,’" Conyers says. Massie also praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden who received temporary asylum in Russia on Thursday. "His disclosures have changed the course of human history," Massie says. "His initial disclosures were a service to our country, because now we’re having this conversation — and we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with a group of top lawmakers on Thursday to discuss growing concerns about the National Security Agency’s broadening surveillance powers. The meeting occurred just hours after Russia granted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden temporary asylum for a year. Snowden was the source behind a number of recent leaks about the NSA’s ability to conduct surveillance across the globe. Most recently, The Guardian newspaper revealed the existence of a secret program called XKeyscore that gives NSA analysts real-time access to, quote, "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet," including emails, chats and browsing history. The Guardian has also revealed the U.S. government has paid more than $150 million to the British spy agency GCHQ over the past three years to, quote, "secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programs."

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney criticized Russia for granting Snowden asylum.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests, in public and in private, to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him. Mr. Snowden is not a whistleblower. He is accused of leaking classified information and has been charged with three felony counts, and he should be returned to the United States as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process and protections. This move by the Russian government undermines a long-standing record of law enforcement cooperation, cooperation that has recently been on the upswing since the Boston Marathon bombings.

AMY GOODMAN: Russia’s decision to grant Edward Snowden asylum comes at a time when the White House is coming under intense criticism from an unusual coalition of Democrats and Republicans over the NSA surveillance programs. Last week, the House nearly passed a measure that would have prevented the NSA from using the PATRIOT Act to collect phone records of individuals who are not under investigation. The measure failed by a narrow 217-to-205 margin. The bill was written by Republican Congressmember Justin Amash and Democratic Congressmember John Conyers, both of Michigan. Meanwhile, a group of lawmakers including Republican Congressmember Todd Rokita of Indiana and Democratic Congressmember Adam Schiff of California have introduced a bill entitled the Ending Secret Law Act. This would require public disclosure of opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

We go now to Capitol Hill, where we’re joined by two congressmembers, Democrat John Conyers of Michigan and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the Amash-Conyers amendment to limit NSA surveillance.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let us begin with Congressmember John Conyers. You were the sponsor of this amendment you co-sponsored with Congressmember Amash, a Republican of Michigan. Why now? What is it that you’re calling for?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, we’re calling for an end to this metadata of phone numbers of everybody in the United States of America without any regard for a criminal investigation going on or anything else, Amy. The point that we’re aiming at is to have relevance, which is written into the Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, be observed and adhered to, which it wasn’t, because what they’re doing is creating a haystack in which to put a needle.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Massie, the Republicans and Democrats are not usually known for working together these days in Washington. Now, this was nearly passed, this amendment. Talk about your concerns around NSA spying.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: My concerns deal with the oversight of the programs and the reporting to Congress and the reporting to people. In March, we had the director of national intelligence come to Congress, to the Senate, and tell us that this program did not exist. Yet last week we had the head of the NSA here lobbying to fund the program. And so, what we need is more oversight. They can’t both maintain that the program doesn’t exist or tell us lies in Congress, and then ask us to fund them. Specifically what we need is more visibility into the FISA court rulings. We understand the need for secrecy in ongoing investigations, but we need to know how the FISA court is interpreting the laws that Congress has written. We need oversight over that from Congress, and we need redacted and declassified versions of those FISA court rulings for the public.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Massie, what are your thoughts about Russia granting temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who really started this ball rolling by revealing what—what the intelligence officials of this country, from Keith Alexander to James Clapper, have long denied, but now admitted they weren’t telling the truth about, that the U.S. is spying on American citizens?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, clearly his disclosures have changed the course of human history, really. And I think his initial disclosures were a service to our country, because now we’re having this conversation. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I can’t speak for Mr. Snowden’s actions now. He’s basically a person looking out for his own life at this point. But what he did initially was a service to our country. We need to facilitate a way for whistleblowers to do that in a better fashion. And I don’t think our current whistleblower laws would have provided for him to do what he’s done in a better fashion, so I’d like to see some reform there, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Russia was right to grant him temporary asylum?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I’m not going to comment on what Russia should have done with Mr. Snowden.

AMY GOODMAN: But do you feel that Mr. Snowden did the right thing?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think initially he did. And now, it would be hard for me to fault his actions at this point. He’s a person who fears for his life, and so, you know, he’s doing what he can, I think, to stay alive at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And I don’t—by the way, I don’t think our government really wants to try him. It would be a difficult trial, and I think more things would be disclosed in the process of the trial. So it’s not clear to me that we’ve actually done everything we could to get him back here and try him. There may be another story there, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Conyers, do you think NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did the right thing?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, I think that he was overzealous and probably didn’t. He has clearly broken some laws, for which they—now the government wants to prosecute him for. But inadvertently, he has revealed to us a whole area of secrecy and activity with telephone collections and other things that are now being revealed that would not have been revealed otherwise.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Can I just add that some people say he should have come to a congressman with this information. But there are actually probably 20 or 30 congressmen that already knew about this program. And if he had went to them, I think we wouldn’t be having this discussion, and he may already be in jail without the disclosure happening.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Obama during an interview with Charlie Rose in June. President Obama dismissed fears the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata could potentially be abused.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The very fact that there’s all this data, in bulk, it has the enormous potential for abuse, because they’ll say, you know, you can—when you start looking at metadata, even if you don’t know the names, you can match it up. If there’s a call to an oncologist, and it’s a call to a lawyer, and—you can pair that up and figure out maybe this person is dying and they’re writing their will, and you can yield all this information. All of that is true—except for the fact for that for the government under the program right now to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Conyers, your response?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, of course it would be illegal. That’s the whole point that’s being made, is that we’re not using relevancy in this matter at all, and that’s part of the statute. Unless there is relevancy considered, we’re on fishing expeditions, which are improper and probably illegal. Now, having said that, we’ve been offered a peek into what we didn’t know anything—most of us didn’t know anything about. And so, I think we should look at more transparency, the makeup of the FISA courts. As you know, Amy, the—most of those are Chief Justice Roberts’ hand-picked appointees to the court. And I think that there’s going to be a lot of follow-up and more legislation and oversight than there’s ever been before.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the Obama administration brought out the heavy hitters, and I was wondering, Congressmember Thomas Massie and Congressmember John Conyers, if you could describe what the scene was like on the legislation that you co-sponsored, Congressman Conyers, with Congressman Amash. I mean, you had the head of the NSA, you had intelligence chief James Clapper, coming to the House members to say, "Defeat this." And yet, it was so close.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, it was—seven votes would have made the difference. And, to be honest, we didn’t know that we were that close to victory. I had sent out "dear colleague" letters urging that Amash-Conyers amendment be supported, and they were panicked by it. It was a signal that even in the partisanship that goes on too much around here, that there are people willing to say, "Enough is enough. The law isn’t—the PATRIOT Act isn’t being followed." I didn’t support the PATRIOT Act, but the PATRIOT Act would have gone down if we had known that this was going to be part of its program.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know, on the floor of the House, you had the House majority leader, you had the speaker of the House and the House minority leader, all got up in really unprecedented fashion and spoke, you know, in favor of keeping these NSA programs going. And I was more optimistic, I think, than my colleague here that it could pass. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the president came out—and I’m not blaming the Democrats, because more of them voted in favor of the Constitution and freedom on this issue, but really when the president came out and gave that extra little nudge, I think it hurt us on the Democrat side, but I would defer to my colleague on that. More of his members voted the right way on this issue than my members.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re talking to two congressmembers, Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Democratic Congressmember John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. They are in Washington, D.C., at the Capitol. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to turn now to Edward Snowden in his own words. In his first interview with The Guardian newspaper, Edward Snowden described why he risked his career to leak the documents.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government, that that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, it will kind of get its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing, so the public is on our side." But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. But they’re typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of these people are against the country, they’re against the government. But I’m not. I’m no different from anybody else. I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office, watches what happening—what’s happening, and goes, "This is something that’s not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong." And I’m willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, "I didn’t change these. I didn’t modify the story. This is the truth. This is what’s happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Edward Snowden in his own words. Again, he has left the Russian airport. He has been granted temporary asylum by Russia for a year. The reports are, though it is not known where he is right now, that he met Americans online who offered that he could stay with them, and it’s believed that’s where he is right now, though we don’t know all the details.

We’re joined by Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Congressmember John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. You know, in a lot of the media, a tremendous amount is made of how Republicans and Democrats are not cooperating at all right now—complete breakdown on Capitol Hill. But here you both are, Congressmembers Massie and Conyers, standing together. And it’s not just the two of you; you’re not outliers. This legislation—the growing Democratic-Republican criticism of the intelligence state now is increasing. And I was wondering, Congressmember Massie, if you could explain what the next step is. You have the amendment that was defeated by just a few votes to stop the funding of the NSA’s spying on American phone calls. What is H.R. 2399? What’s the next step?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, I’m not sure what the number is, but there’s a bill called the Liberty Act that’s a very good bill, that I believe Congressmember Conyers is on and Justin Amash, that would raise the threshold and require that there’s some reasonable suspicion, articulable reasonable suspicion, and also would give us more transparency, Congress, more transparency into the goings-on of the FISA court. That bill, we’re hoping, because of the public outcry, will get a hearing at least in the Judiciary Committee, and it should possibly get a hearing in the Intelligence Committee. And that’s what we need. We need more hearings on this, hopefully a markup, and bring that bill.

You know, this measure barely failed—the amendment barely failed, by seven votes. I think if the vote were today and the members who voted no could do it over, I think this amendment would pass, because they misjudged the public outcry on this issue. And you played the tape of Mr. Snowden, and he—the one thing he said that I do agree with is that the public deserves to know about this program. And the public does know about it. The public knows how their members voted last week. And that will give us the momentum to get these stand-alone bills like the Liberty Act passed.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I’ve asked for—

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Conyers, 2399, can you explain the new stand-alone bill you’re co-sponsoring?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, what we’re really trying to do is make sure that there’s relevancy observed and that it’s made clear that we cannot massively collect metadata on everybody in the country. This is what’s alarming people. And this is why we have the wind at our backs now, because people are concerned about it. During the August recess, there will be town hall meetings all over the place on this, and people will be learning what we couldn’t have learned otherwise. Now, the person that leaked it may be an overzealous leaker. I don’t think he had criminal motives, but he sure violated the law. And the Judiciary Committee, which I think our chairman, Goodlatte, will be willing to hold these hearings in the fall, when we come back, to tighten up the law and make it clear that—that if a person is not involved in any suspicious activity, they shouldn’t be—their names or their phone numbers shouldn’t be collected.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to NSA Director Keith Alexander speaking last year the Aspen Security Forum. He was questioned by NBC’s Pete Williams about the NSA’s collection of data on Americans.

PETE WILLIAMS: I want to ask you one other question about privacy, and this—read to you a statement from a former NSA employee named William Binney, who recently told a hackers’ conference that the NSA is putting together dossiers on every U.S. citizen, listing who we have relations with, what our activities are. Is there any truth to that? And why do stories like this persist, that you’re spying on all of us?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: Yeah, first of all, it’s not true. We aren’t putting dossiers up on every—every U.S. citizen. In fact, we don’t have a dossier on you. I’ve never seen one of your emails, from an intelligence perspective or otherwise, actually. So, from my perspective, these are grossly out of the truth. They really are. To think that we would be collecting on every U.S. person, one, that would be against the law. Two, we get great oversight by all branches of the government. You know, I must have been bad when I was a kid. We get supervised by the Defense Department—I’m—not just the general counsel; by the DNI, their general counsel—so they see everything that we do; by the Justice Department; by the White House; by Congress, SSCI and HPSCI; and by the court. So all branches of government can see that what we’re doing is correct.

And so, my concern is that false statements like these seem to persist. And you see those bounce around. And it only hurts, because people think, "Well, they must have something there. There must be some element of truth there." And from my perspective, when you walk all the way through this, the reality is Congress knows we’re not doing that, all branches of our government see that we’re not doing it. And all of them can audit it. So, from my perspective, it’s—you know, one of the—I would add that to Bill McRaven’s: Not only should we stop leaks, but we should stop reporting this, not—it’s clearly not right.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Conyers, your response to—that’s the director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, Mr. Alexander told so many whoppers in one statement that it’s hard to recount them all. First of all, this information isn’t available to anybody. We only got it through a person that took it improperly and made it public. So, the whole idea that they’re not doing this, I hope that—well, I don’t suppose he can announce a way to modify what he said, but it’s clearly untruthful from beginning to end.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Massie, I’d like you also to respond. And also, just as the Obama administration brought out the heavy hitters to defeat any kind of curtailing of the NSA’s spying mechanism last week, the establishment Republicans almost came out. You’re a new congressmember; you were elected in 2012. You have, for example, Senator McCain hitting the lot of you very hard who are saying that the NSA has to be—what they are doing has to be modified and surveilled itself.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, let me go back to whether these people should keep their jobs or not. You could probably parse General Keith Alexander’s words, and somebody could argue that he wasn’t lying, but I would say that he was definitely misleading the public on that issue. But the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, was here in March and unambiguously lied to Congress. And I believe he was under oath. And it really sets a bad precedent for the whole organization to let him keep his post. I think he should be relieved of his post for lying to Congress. He could have picked other words to say. He could have said that "I can’t comment on that." Instead, he chose to lie to us in a hearing.

AMY GOODMAN: Could he be brought up on charges of perjury?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, look, if this were any American citizen or civilian, they would certainly be prosecuted for what he just did. At a minimum, he should lose his post.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you agree with that, Congressmember Conyers?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Yes, ma’am, I do, completely. And I think we’re now at the point of having a more honest disclosure of what’s going on in our intelligence community, which we now find was very deliberately ignoring parts of the law that they knew perfectly well they were violating.

AMY GOODMAN: Just a point of history, Roger Clemens was brought up on perjury charges for lying to Congress in 2008 around steroids. I mean, this seems to be a key area. In fact, Clapper himself admitted that he did not tell the truth.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Look, if we accept the premise that it’s OK for government to lie to us or for one branch of the government to lie to the other branch of the government in order to protect our public safety, then we’ve crossed the threshold. We cannot accept that it’s OK for government to lie to us to protect us.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Yes. We can’t turn into a surveillance state trying to protect these kinds of conduct that we all know is improper and probably illegal.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense something very different than we’re getting in the media, that there is a bipartisan convergence now that’s happening that isn’t getting reported, that the Obama administration is deeply concerned about? And do you have a sense that they are shifting here, that they’re feeling the pressure?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I think that they might be, because I was in the White House yesterday—full disclosure—and the president of the United States said that he was going to give me a call. And I’ll be looking forward to that call. And it’s—they know that things are happening. But, you know, we frequently work together on issues, but they don’t get reported or disclosed. There is bipartisanship at times. We’re trying to improve it. And I think—I think that we’re moving into a better environment in the House of Representatives.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I agree. And I can also say that yesterday we were briefed in a classified briefing by General Keith Alexander, and his tone seemed to be a lot more conciliatory and a lot more open, because they realize, if they’re going to keep these programs around, or some form of these programs, they’ve got a public relations problem to deal with and a relations problem with Congress, both parties of Congress.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Congressmember Conyers, I wanted to ask you about Detroit and the declaration of bankruptcy. Do you feel the federal government—do you feel the federal government should bail out Detroit now?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, I don’t—I don’t know if we’re in a position to do that. What we’re doing in the Michigan congressional delegation, Democratic, is looking at a whole list of programs that would assist Detroit, and what we’re trying to determine is whether we have received—whether we have applied for them, first, and secondly, whether there’s any possibility of benefiting from them. And the thing that we’re most concerned about is protecting the pensions of those people who have worked 30, 40 years for the city. And, fortunately, pensions are constitutionally protected in the Michigan constitution. And, again, we have bipartisan support. The attorney general of Michigan, a Republican, has come out in support of protecting the pensions. So we’re down, but we’re not out, and we’re going to rise again.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie of Kentucky, elected in 2012; Democratic Congressmember John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. And we will certainly continue to follow the legislation that you are introducing. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

[justdrew]

What we need is a court case, where someone contends that a deleted e-mail unrestorable by the commercial service, or some such thing, will prove their innocence. Then hit up the NSA for it.

We need to turn around and go the other direction on this... Mawr Spying Please!

There's ALL KINDS of PROOF of criminal conspiracy and other crimes locked up in that data.

I DEMAND it ALL be opened up for full criminal investigation.

How many confessions to criminal activity are contained therein? Proof enough to lock up some say... Rating Agency people, bankers, etc?

Demand full access and a nationally elected Tribune Special Prosecutor Office be established to investigate an array of suspected crimes committed over the last 15 years or so.

This shit is enough to raise some holy hell with, let's demand it's USE not it's end.

They've got a lot more to hide than "us"

NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst
AIR DATE: Aug. 1, 2013

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we pick up on the continuing fallout from the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the government's requests to gather intelligence information on Americans.

Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA officials, a former inspector general and two NSA veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the secret government intelligence agency.

William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in 2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection to whistle-blowers.

He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago.

RUSSELL TICE, former National Security Agency analyst: The United States were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of senior military people and industrial types.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is the early 2000s.

RUSSELL TICE: This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?

WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn't aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually -- there wasn't anybody who wasn't a part of this collection of information.

So, virtually, you could target anybody in this country you wanted.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both Binney and Tice suspect that today, the NSA is doing more than just collecting metadata on calls made in the U.S. They both point to this CNN interview by former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente days after the Boston Marathon bombing. Clemente was asked if the government had a way to get the recordings of the calls between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife.

TIM CLEMENTE, former FBI counterterrorism agent: On the national security side of the house, in the federal government, you know, we have assets. There are lots of assets at our disposal throughout the intelligence community and also not just domestically, but overseas. Those assets allow us to gain information, intelligence on things that we can't use ordinarily in a criminal investigation.

All digital communications are -- there's a way to look at digital communications in the past. And I can't go into detail of how that's done or what's done. But I can tell you that no digital communication is secure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tice says after he saw this interview on television, he called some former workmates at the NSA.

RUSSELL TICE: Well, two months ago, I contacted some colleagues at NSA. We had a little meeting, and the question came up, was NSA collecting everything now? Because we kind of figured that was the goal all along. And the answer came back. It was, yes, they are collecting everything, contents word for word, everything of every domestic communication in this country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both of you know what the government says is that we're collecting this -- we're collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we're not listening to them.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don't believe that for a minute. OK?

I mean, that's why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world's communications here. That's for content storage. That's not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That's all the space you need. You don't need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what does that say, Russell Tice, about what the government -- you're saying -- your understanding is of what the government does once these conversations take place, is it your understanding they're recorded and kept?

RUSSELL TICE: Yes, digitized and recorded and archived in a facility that is now online. And they're kind of fibbing about that as well, because Bluffdale is online right now.

And that's where the information is going. Now, as far as being able to have an analyst look at all that, that's impossible, of course. And I think, semantically, they're trying to say that their definition of collection is having literally a physical analyst look or listen, which would be disingenuous.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But the government vehemently denies it is recording all telephone calls. Robert Litt is the general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He recently spoke at the Brookings Institution.

ROBERT LITT, NSA general counsel: We do not indiscriminately sweep up and store the contents of the communications of Americans or of the citizenry of any country. We do collect metadata, information about communications, more broadly than we collect the actual content of communications, but that's because it is less intrusive than collecting content and in fact can provide us information that helps us more narrowly focus our collection of content on appropriate foreign intelligence targets.

But it simply is not true that the United States government is listening to everything said by the citizens of any country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Joel Brenner, who was the NSA's inspector general and then senior legal counsel, says the intelligence agency obeys the law and the directions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.

JOEL BRENNER, former NSA inspector general: It's really important to understand that the NSA hasn't done anything, as I understand it and from all I know, that goes one inch beyond what it's been authorized to do by a court.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, tell us, how extensive is the NSA's collection of data on American citizens, on their phone calls, on their e-mails, on their use of the Internet?

JOEL BRENNER: This the program only involves telephony metadata, not e-mails, not geographic location information.

The idea that NSA is keeping files on Americans, as a general rule, just isn't true. There's no basis for believing that. The idea that NSA is compiling dossiers on people the way J. Edgar Hoover did in the '40s and '50s or the way the East German police did, as some people allege, that's just not true.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we have been talking to a couple of former NSA employees and one of the allegations they make is that it's not just collecting this metadata on telephone conversations; it's recording those conversations and it's storing them and keeping them for possible future use.

JOEL BRENNER: I think you're talking about Mr. Tice and Mr. Binney.

Mr. Binney hasn't been at the agency since 2001. Mr. Tice hasn't been at the agency since 2005. They don't know what's going on inside the agency.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Another allegation we heard from them, from Mr. Tice, is that back as of the time before he left the NSA in the early 2000s, that there was spying going on, on news organizations, on Supreme Court justices, on presidential candidates, then Senator Barack Obama, on military leaders, top generals in the army.

JOEL BRENNER: Mr. Tice made the allegations you have just indicated having to do with the period before 2005, eight years ago. They're just coming out now. I wonder why.

The farther he gets from the period when he could have known what he was talking about, the more fanciful his allegations have become.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Brenner claims that oversight of information gathering has actually improved.

JOEL BRENNER: We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a way that none of our allies, even in Europe, have done.

We have all three branches of government now involved in overseeing the activities of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and our other intelligence apparatus. This is an enormous achievement.

MAN: Government has gone too far in the name of security, that the Fourth Amendment has been bruised.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Last week, one oversight proposal in Congress aimed at preventing the NSA from collecting date on phone calls was narrowly defeated, but some members are vowing to press for additional restrictions on the investigative agency.

[fruhmenschen]

One of the strongest components of the taxpayer funded death squad called the FBI is the Psych Ops Department.
FBI agents rely heavily on classical and operant conditioning to modify human behaviour.
Fear is used by FBI agents as a negative re-enforcer with the desired goal of having the voters and taxpayers see
FBI agents/NSA as the good guys and allow them to tap your phones, open your mail, collect your cell phone and bank records
and look at your emails and web site visits . FBI agents will also periodically gratuitously kill someone to remind you
what will happen if you think of shutting them down

The reenforcement schedule used by FBI agents on you is called a variable schedule
because the negative reenforcers, in this case fear, are used at random intervals because they are the strongest form of reenforcement because you can never predict when they will happen.

As always FBI agents are funded by your tax dime to do this to you.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
see https://www.boundless.com/psychology/le ... forcement/


Operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) is a type of learning in which an individual's behavior is modified by its consequences; the behaviour may change in form, frequency, or strength. Operant conditioning is a term that was coined by B. F. Skinner in 1937.[1] The word operant can be described as, "an item of behavior that is initially spontaneous, rather than a response to a prior stimulus, but whose consequences may reinforce or inhibit recurrence of that behavior".[2]

Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning (or respondent conditioning) in that operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behaviour" or operant behaviour. Operant behavior operates on the environment and is maintained by its consequences, while classical conditioning deals with the conditioning of reflexive (reflex) behaviours which are elicited by antecedent conditions. Behaviours conditioned via a classical conditioning procedure are not maintained by consequences.[3]

[seemslikeadream]

Published on Aug 4, 2013

Glenn Greenwald appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos to decry what he describes as the difficulty legislators have been experiencing in gaining details about NSA surveillance programs, telling guest host Martha Raddatz that far from being able to apply strict congressional oversight to the programs, some lawmakers have been getting their information about them from his articles.

"Members from both political parties came to us and showed us all kinds of letters and emails they've been exchanging, in which they're trying to get the most basic information about what the NSA is doing, in spying on American citizens, and what the FISA court has been doing in terms fo declaring some of this illegal, some of it legal," Greenwald said. "They've being blocked from getting it."

"We keep hearing that there's all kinds of robust oversight by Congress, and need not worry," Greenwald continued, but alleged that the lawmakers who have contacted him "have said that they're being forced to learn about what the NSA is doing from what they learn about in our reporting."

Greenwald also referenced a secret FISA court opinion that called the expansive reach of the NSA's data mining programs unconstitutional and illegal. The Guardian journalist said that the FISA court has no objection to releasing the decision, but that the Obama administration is keeping it classified.

"That's extraordinary, to have a court opinion ruling that our government violated the constitution and the law, and not only can't we read it, but neither can our representatives in Congress," Greenwald said.

Watch the full interview here, via ABC News:

[seemslikeadream]

Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA
Documents provided by two House members demonstrate how they are blocked from exercising any oversight over domestic surveillance

• Morgan Griffith's requests for NSA information
• Alan Grayson's requests for NSA information

Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Sunday 4 August 2013 08.26 EDT
Jump to comments (888)

Members of Congress are increasingly frustrated at their inability to obtain even basic information about the NSA and FISA court. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate.

From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up."

But members of Congress, including those in Obama's party, have flatly denied knowing about them. On MSNBC on Wednesday night, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct) was asked by host Chris Hayes: "How much are you learning about what the government that you are charged with overseeing and holding accountable is doing from the newspaper and how much of this do you know?" The Senator's reply:

The revelations about the magnitude, the scope and scale of these surveillances, the metadata and the invasive actions surveillance of social media Web sites were indeed revelations to me."


But it is not merely that members of Congress are unaware of the very existence of these programs, let alone their capabilities. Beyond that, members who seek out basic information - including about NSA programs they are required to vote on and FISA court (FISC) rulings on the legality of those programs - find that they are unable to obtain it.

Two House members, GOP Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia and Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, have provided the Guardian with numerous letters and emails documenting their persistent, and unsuccessful, efforts to learn about NSA programs and relevant FISA court rulings.

"If I can't get basic information about these programs, then I'm not able to do my job", Rep. Griffith told me. A practicing lawyer before being elected to Congress, he said that his job includes "making decisions about whether these programs should be funded, but also an oath to safeguard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which includes the Fourth Amendment."

Rep. Griffith requested information about the NSA from the House Intelligence Committee six weeks ago, on June 25. He asked for "access to the classified FISA court order(s) referenced on Meet the Press this past weekend": a reference to my raising with host David Gregory the still-secret 2011 86-page ruling from the FISA court that found substantial parts of NSA domestic spying to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as governing surveillance statutes.

In that same June 25 letter, Rep. Griffith also requested the semi-annual FISC "reviews and critiques" of the NSA. He stated the rationale for his request: "I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution, and I intend to do so."

Almost three weeks later, on July 12, Rep. Griffith requested additional information from the Intelligence Committee based on press accounts he had read about Yahoo's unsuccessful efforts in court to resist joining the NSA's PRISM program. He specifically wanted to review the arguments made by Yahoo and the DOJ, as well as the FISC's ruling requiring Yahoo to participate in PRISM.

On July 22, he wrote another letter to the Committee seeking information. This time, it was prompted by press reports that that the FISA court had renewed its order compelling Verizon to turn over all phone records to the NSA. Rep. Griffith requested access to that court ruling.

The Congressman received no response to any of his requests. With a House vote looming on whether to defund the NSA's bulk collection program - it was scheduled for July 25 - he felt he needed the information more urgently than ever. He recounted his thinking to me: "How can I responsibly vote on a program I know very little about?"

On July 23, he wrote another letter to the Committee, noting that it had been four weeks since his original request, and several weeks since his subsequent ones. To date, six weeks since he first asked, he still has received no response to any of his requests (the letters sent by Rep. Griffith can be seen here).

"I know many of my constituents will ask about this when I go home," he said, referring to the August recess when many members of Congress meet with those they represent. "Now that I won't get anything until at least September, what am I supposed to tell them? How can I talk about NSA actions I can't learn anything about except from press accounts?"

Congressman Grayson has had very similar experiences, except that he sometimes did receive responses to his requests: negative ones.

On June 19, Grayson wrote to the House Intelligence Committee requesting several documents relating to media accounts about the NSA. Included among them were FISA court opinions directing the collection of telephone records for Americans, as well as documents relating to the PRISM program.

But just over four weeks later, the Chairman of the Committee, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, wrote to Grayson informing him that his requests had been denied by a Committee "voice vote".

In a follow-up email exchange, a staff member for Grayson wrote to the Chairman, advising him that Congressman Grayson had "discussed the committee's decision with Ranking Member [Dutch] Ruppersberger on the floor last night, and he told the Congressman that he was unaware of any committee action on this matter." Grayson wanted to know how a voice vote denying him access to these documents could have taken place without the knowledge of the ranking member on the Committee, and asked: "can you please share with us the recorded vote, Member-by-Member?" The reply from this Committee was as follows:


Thanks for your inquiry. The full Committee attends Business Meetings. At our July 18, 2013 Business Meeting, there were seven Democrat Members and nine Republican Members in attendance. The transcript is classified."

To date, neither Griffith nor Grayson has received any of the documents they requested. Correspondence between Grayson and the Committee - with names of staff members and email addresses redacted - can be read here.

Denial of access for members of Congress to basic information about the NSA and the FISC appears to be common. Justin Amash, the GOP representative who, along with Democratic Rep. John Conyers, co-sponsored the amendment to ban the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records, told CNN on July 31: "I, as a member of Congress, can't get access to the court opinions. I have to beg for access, and I'm denied it if I - if I make that request."

It is the Intelligence Committees of both the House and Senate that exercise primary oversight over the NSA. But as I noted last week, both Committees are, with the exception of a handful of members, notoriously beholden to the NSA and the intelligence community generally.

Its members typically receive much larger contributions from the defense and surveillance industries than non-Committee members. And the two Committee Chairs - Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House - are two of the most steadfast NSA loyalists in Congress. The senior Democrat on the House Committee is ardent NSA defender Dutch Ruppersberger, whose district not only includes NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, but who is also himself the second-largest recipient of defense/intelligence industry cash.

Moreover, even when members of the Intelligence Committee learn of what they believe to be serious abuses by the NSA, they are barred by law from informing the public. Two Democratic Committee members in the Senate, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, spent years warning Americans that they would be "stunned to learn" of the radical interpretations of secret law the Obama administration had adopted in the secret FISA court to vest themselves with extremist surveillance powers.

Yet the two Senators, prohibited by law from talking about it, concealed what they had discovered. It took Edward Snowden's whistleblowing for Americans to learn what those two Intelligence Committee members were so dramatically warning them about.

Finally, all members of Congress - not just those on the Intelligence Committees - are responsible for making choices about the NSA and for protecting the privacy rights and other Constitutional guarantees of Americans. "I did not take an oath to defer to the Intelligence Committee," Rep. Griffith told me. "My oath is to make informed decisions, and I can't do my job when I can't get even the most basic information about these programs."

In early July, Grayson had staffers distribute to House members several slides published by the Guardian about NSA programs as part of Grayson's efforts to trigger debate in Congress. But, according to one staff member, Grayson's office was quickly told by the House Intelligence Committee that those slides were still classified, despite having been published and discussed in the media, and directed Grayson to cease distribution or discussion of those materials in the House, warning that he could face sanctions if he continued.

It has been widely noted that the supremely rubber-stamping FISA court constitutes NSA "oversight" in name only, and that the Intelligence Committees are captured by the agency and constrained to act even if they were inclined to. Whatever else is true, members of Congress in general clearly know next to nothing about the NSA and the FISA court beyond what they read in the media, and those who try to rectify that are being actively blocked from finding out.

[justdrew]

the reason it's so secret and sensitive is because they know they're holding evidence. Evidence that could solve lord knows how many crimes.

Open up access to the data.

Let us elect a National Special Prosecutor to head the new office and setup open standards and such. I nominate Nate Silver. They're holding the evidence that could include multiple smoking guns revealing the truth about A LOT of suspicious activities.

We need an immediate law prohibiting anything from being scrubbed from the data set. Audited commit logs for every storage system. Redundant storage sites. Exact details of the scope and time frames included in any and every data storage system. Funds found to have been used to support any data system not reported on and Opened are to be considered ILLEGAL and grounds for dismissal and prosecution. etc...

All such data systems will be operated exclusively by the Office of Public Data, overseen by it's head the Special Prosecutor for Crimes against the Citizenry, and the three member elected governing council.

[justdrew]

FYI...

"The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA. In a crackdown the FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network have been compromised, including the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail. The FBI has also embedded a 0-day Javascript attack against Firefox 17 on Freedom Hosting's server. It appears to install a tracking cookie and a payload that phones home to the FBI when the victim resumes non-TOR browsing. Interesting implications for The Silk Road and the value of Bitcoin stemming from this. The attack relies on two extremely unsafe practices when using TOR: Enabled Javascript, and using the same browser for TOR and non-TOR browsing. Any users accessing a Freedom Hosting hosted site since 8/2 with javascript enabled are potentially compromised."

[seemslikeadream]

Coping: With the Reality of XKeyscore
Posted on August 1, 2013 by George Ure
It’s not very often that we nail use-case and software development as accurately as this, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote up for www.peoplenomics.com readers [SUBSCRIBE] how to develop a scoring algorithm for electronic surveillance of an entire country.

After you go here and read how “NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet‘ come back here and read how such systems, even using meta data, can pose a serious risk to personal freedom.

In the interest of wider public discussion, here’s the “How it could work” part of that Peoplenomics report from July 20th:

— Peoplenomics extract —

“Let me run through an example of how this can work. As a practical matter, the first thing you’ll need will be a huge government data center. As luck would have it, exactly such a center is now under construction in Utah. In terms of what will feed into this megalithic computer empire, we already know that bank and credit card transaction information is likely to be there, metadata about cell phone calls and possibly landline communications as well.
As long as we’re at it, let’s also toss in a real-time feed from Google which can be traced back to your Internet protocol numerical address. That could give government keen insight into the kinds of websites we’re visiting, which in turn will reflect our personal tastes and philosophies of life. Sexual peccadilloes, too, if any.

In the book I begin with the example of a John Doe who wakes up to the sound of a colleague from work calling him on the phone.

“Hello, this is John, who’s this?”

“Hi John, this is Abu and services in IT at the office, and I wanted to talk to you about your computer. You know, I have been working on it and I would like to have your permission to backup your hard drive over the Internet because you’ve apparently had a head crash at some point and you’re experiencing errors. Would that be okay with you John?”

“Well, sure Abu of course you can and thanks for calling. I have some pictures of my wife on their from her birthday party and I wouldn’t want those to get lost, but you guys in the IT department do what you need to do. I’ll be in early on Monday in case anything needs attention that. Hey! Thanks for calling to I really appreciate that.”

It all seems like such a simple transaction to occur: a guy from the IT department on work calls on Saturday morning, there in doing some computer work, he wants to do something your hard drive, he has enough respect for you that he calls you up on the phone, and you tell him he can backup your computer.

Except for one ugly fact. Abu happens to be on a government watch list because he is not from America, and as a result, his cell phone is subject to more or less constant surveillance. This means that at 9:17 AM on Saturday July 20th you received a phone call from someone under surveillance.

As a result, now your telephone number, which is keyed back to you and your spouse, is about to get wrapped around the axle of a wider government operation.

The way to envision this type of algorithmic surveillance program working is quite simple: we will use a simple scoring system because it’s very compact, numerical in nature, easy to score, and incredibly powerful.

In the development of our hypothetical scoring technique will give everyone in America – hypothetically about 230 million individual dossiers – an initial score at a very low level. Let’s call this level 10.

Obviously, someone who doesn’t understand how the security elite place themselves above the people being surveilled might be somewhat confused.

“Why not simply start everybody gets zero?”

It’s a reasonable thing to ask. However, the people who are in the surveillance business would never like the messiness of becoming involved in their own machinations, so they would devise a system where negative scoring (special status) would be granted to them, exempting them (and their families).

The alternative approach, would be for them to simply be exempted from having a dossier collected on them completely, but everyone has a boss who wants to keep an eye on things, so a low (or even negative score) but still being in the system would be how to build it.

Either way, those in the spy business get to behave separately and distinctly – without review – from the general population under surveillance.


So back to our Saturday morning: Let’s further suppose that on your way home Friday afternoon you heard a story about how terrorists were targeting the Internet’s soft underbelly. Maybe you had read something or heard something about how IT platforms that controls data operations could be hacked by enemies of America.
Having a few minutes before the coffee since Abu’s call, you decide to pop online and do some searches, not realizing that your initial score of 10 initially granted to you because you’re just an average guy (or gal) has already been bumped up to a score of 14 by virtue of having received that called from the foreign – named fellow in the IT department.

As you go through your search, and the search engine feeds your queries back up to the Big Black Box center, you begin to get off the beaten track a bit. Maybe you wander into a government website where there is a discussion or a PDF file related to attacking America’s infrastructure online.

Unbeknownst to you, once you cross a specific search trip-wire, your IP address may be noted.

This is clearly stated on many government websites such as the U.S. Army’s Internet portal available for civilians who have been granted access. However, when it comes to matters of national security, the government likely feels no compulsion to tell anyone (except our big security database scoring system) about the visit of your IP address (your computer, right?).

All of a sudden, but again with no notification to you, your Current Threat Score (CTS we’ll call it), has now been bumped up to 23.

Ah, at last: that first cup of coffee is ready. And as you sit there, idly wondering how all this terrorism stuff works, you seem to remember from the old days in school and oddly titled book titled “The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”

What the hell? Wasn’t Friday payday?

“I wonder if I could find that book on Amazon,” you ask yourself with that, you hit the world’s largest online retailer, login not realizing that you are now traceable back to our big security Center database, and you begin trying to find that book.

Silently, your current threat score has just increased to 37.

“Hey honey, could you run to the store for me? I almost ran out of gas coming in the driveway last night, so the car needs gas and as long as you’re out we’re out of gas for the lawnmower and the edger, and don’t forget Billy Sue needs some gasoline for his go kart to.”

“No problem dear I’ll get to it right away. I need to get a few things at the grocery store to so is there anything you need there?”

“Well, gosh, as long as you’re going there, why don’t you pick me up a couple of boxes of laundry detergent. I like to have several boxes on hand if we can get them on sale.”

Being the good spouse you are, you trundle off to the store and noticed that laundry soap is on sale.

Not only is it on sale, but this is the best price you’ve seen in probably five years. We did say yesterday was payday, right? Let’s load up on half a dozen boxes of this as long as were here. Happily loaded to the gills with groceries and six big jumbo sized boxes of laundry detergent we now go to the gas station.

Let’s see now, your car takes 21 gallons of gas when the tank is absolutely empty, you have a 5 gallon jug of gas that you give your son for his thinking around with the go kart, so that’s what 26 gallons? And there’s that other 5 gallon jug which you make premix and for the chainsaw and the two cycle weed Whacker. That comes up to 31 gallons of gas.

Once again, halfway across the country, the terrorism suspect scoring algorithm notices the following: first you bought six boxes of laundry soap which is an unusual amount for you because you have a family of 3.2. Oh, the system knows it was you who bought the laundry soap because you wrote a check and it was confirmed with your use of your super-duper discount card at the grocery store.

That got the attention and an escalation to 52 on your threat index because large quantity purchases may indicate hoarding, which in turn may indicate a month which in turn may insinuate an antigovernment or at least a noncompliant kind of attitude.

Not exactly the kind of person to be trusted.

But now it got worse, when you filled up the car because the system already knows that your license plate number is XXX123 and that is tied to you and your spouse. What’s more, yet another SQL table has informed the indexing code that the maximum amount of gasoline that should never be purchased by you should be in the vicinity of 25 gallons.

This act in and of itself further increases your score to 61 in the threat index. But suddenly, another subroutine kicks in, and all of a sudden the score reflected in your dossier climbs to a remarkable 65.

What happened? In George’s fantastic algorithm for terrorism surveillance, all goods are coded as to their applicable in the to make terrorism, subversion, and sabotage devices.

Obviously, since napalm is built out of gasoline and the detergent, your score jumped quickly even though your specific purchases may have been done innocently. On the way home, you seal your fate: a visit from officials of the government who wish to interview you about your recent activities.

Your final straw that got you over a visit threshold score of 75?

You stopped at RadioShack and bought a few electronic parts as well as some batteries and although these may show up on your receipt as incidental household items, they could also be timer chips, circuit boards, diodes, relays, capacitors, and maybe even an altimeter sensing switch.

You go home, oblivious to the fact that sometime in the next week you may have an official visit. Or, more subtle means may be applied such as regressive software which will look more into your personal background and purchase history.

Say, what’s this 640 round canister of Russian military 7.62X 39 MM ammunition that was purchased five years ago from the online ammunition store? It doesn’t take very much work by a competent investigator (or back-testing software) to determine if you are likely to be an antigovernment agitator, saboteur, or terrorist.

— end Peoplenomics extract —

So that seems, indeed, to be roughly how it works. Not a bad approach and simple to implement from a software perspective. It is, after all, just a “use case” and some high speed SQL indexing. Toss in a $2-billion data center in Utah, a government massive load-balancing project and you’d have it all.

All, except for a tiny nit of a problem: The Fourth Amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

With the Second Amendment already circumvented through ammunition purchases, the 5th Amendment in trouble, I doubt that many in Washington will have the mental acuity to see how the corporate coup is taking down another Amendment, now playing in a country near you.

Under the new regime, being a tax slave is now probable cause, it seems. And today’s big whoopdy at the White House on topic will undoubtedly be more platitudes and pandering on top of lies and diversions.

Why the Federal Trade Commission can’t enforce “truth in advertising” laws against politicians is beyond my feeble mind’s ability. But the oath does demand protection of the Constitution from “…all enemies, foreign and domestic.“

[DrEvil]

FYI...

"The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA. In a crackdown the FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network have been compromised, including the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail. The FBI has also embedded a 0-day Javascript attack against Firefox 17 on Freedom Hosting's server. It appears to install a tracking cookie and a payload that phones home to the FBI when the victim resumes non-TOR browsing. Interesting implications for The Silk Road and the value of Bitcoin stemming from this. The attack relies on two extremely unsafe practices when using TOR: Enabled Javascript, and using the same browser for TOR and non-TOR browsing. Any users accessing a Freedom Hosting hosted site since 8/2 with javascript enabled are potentially compromised."

Looks like it's phoning home to the NSA (or possibly SAIC):

Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA
JavaScript attack had a hard-coded IP address that traced back to NSA address block.

...

Initial investigations traced the address to defense contractor SAIC, which provides a wide range of information technology and C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) support to the Department of Defense. The geolocation of the IP address corresponds to an SAIC facility in Arlington, Virginia.

Further analysis using a DNS record tool from Robotex found that the address was actually part of several blocks of IP addresses allocated by SAIC to the NSA. This immediately spooked the researchers.

"One researcher contacted us and said, 'Here's the Robotex info. Forget that you heard it from me,'" said a member of Baneki who requested he not be identified.

The use of a hard-coded IP address traceable back to the NSA is either a strange and epic screw-up on the part of someone associated with the agency (possibly a contractor at SAIC) or an intentional calling card as some analyzing the attack have suggested. One poster on Cryptocloud's discussion board wrote, "It's psyops—a fear campaign... They want to scare folks off Tor, scare folks off all privacy services."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... me-to-nsa/

[DrEvil]

US drug agency gets intel from NSA, then lies about its origins to build cases
Meet the Drug Enforcement Administration's “Special Operations Division."

...

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... ild-cases/

The original Reuters piece:
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-direc ... 43729.html