The Criminal N.S.A.

[seemslikeadream]

but don't you know David Icke is the REAL problem and we all must face that fact

[seemslikeadream]

Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document

Critics demand answers from chairman Mike Rogers after claims that committee failed to share document before key vote


Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Wednesday 14 August 2013 10.30 EDT

Mike Rogers of Michigan
Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent, chairs the House intelligence committee. Critics have accused the committee of being too close to the NSA. Photograph: AP

The leadership of the House intelligence committee is under growing pressure to explain whether it withheld surveillance information from members of Congress before a key vote to renew the Patriot Act.

A Republican congressman and government ethics watchdogs are demanding that the powerful panel's chairman, Mike Rogers of Michigan, responds to charges that the panel's leadership failed to share a document prepared by the justice department and intelligence community.

The document was explicitly created to inform non-committee members about bulk collection of Americans' phone records ahead of the vote in 2011. Michigan Republican Justin Amash alleged that the committee kept it from non-committee members – the majority of the House.

Now Morgan Griffith, a Republican who represents Virginia's ninth district, is calling for answers. "I certainly think leadership needs to figure out what's going on. We're trying to get information so we can do our jobs as congressmen," he told the Guardian. "If we're not able to get that information, it's inappropriate."

"Obviously, this is of concern," he added.

Griffith has been been critical of the committee for blocking attempts by non-members to obtain information about classified programs. On August 4, the Guardian published a series of letters he had written to the committee requesting more details, all of which had gone unanswered.

The accusations broaden the focus of the surveillance controversy from the National Security Agency to one of the congressional committees charged with exercising oversight of it – and the panel's closeness to the NSA it is supposed to oversee.

Amash told the Guardian on Monday that he had confirmed with the House intelligence committee that the committee did not make non-committee members aware of the classified overview from 2011 of the bulk phone records collection program first revealed by the Guardian thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden. The document was expressly designed to be shared with legislators who did not serve on the panel; it appears that a corresponding document for the Senate in 2011 was made available to all senators.

"Nobody I've spoken to in my legislative class remembers seeing any such document," Amash said.

Amash speculated that the House intelligence committee withheld the document in order to ensure the Patriot Act would win congressional reauthorization, as it ultimately did.

For the second consecutive day, the House intelligence committee's spokeswoman, Susan Phelan, did not respond to the Guardian's queries about the accuracy of Amash's allegation. Phelan, however, told The Hill newspaper that the committee held pre-vote briefings for all House members ahead of the Patriot vote. She did not deny Amash's claim.

Amash countered that members who attend classified briefings conducted by the panel, formally known as the House permanent select committee on intelligence or HPSCI, often receive fragmentary information.

"The presenters rarely volunteer the critically important information and it becomes a game of 20 Questions," Amash told the Guardian.

Government ethics experts accused the committee of betraying its oversight mandate.

"If the HPSCI leadership withheld a document, intended by the administration for release to non-committee members – a document that could have led to a different outcome when the Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2011 – this is tantamount to subversion of the democratic process," said Bea Edwards, the executive director of the Government Accountability Project.

"Americans have the right to know exactly who made this decision and who carried it out."

"There is clearly a loss of confidence in HPSCI leadership among some House members, notably including members of the majority party," added Steve Aftergood, an intelligence and secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists.

"This can manifest itself in a reduction of trust and comity, and increased skepticism toward committee actions. It can be remedied, perhaps, by permitting greater allowance for dissenting views in the committee's deliberations."

Ever since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s, Congress has struck an institutional deal with the intelligence agencies: to balance the needs for protecting government secrets and informing the public, oversight is the responsibility of two committees, one in the House and one in the Senate, that conduct most of their business in secret.

Members who do not sit on the committees have little recourse but to rely on their colleagues on the secret panels to accurately inform them about complex and often controversial intelligence programs.

Yet over decades, the relationship between the intelligence committees and the intelligence agencies has become more often collegial than adversarial. When the House intelligence committee held its first public hearing into the ongoing NSA bulk collection of Americans' phone records, it titled the hearing 'How Disclosed NSA Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids our Adversaries'.

The panel's chairman, Mike Rogers, is a former FBI agent. Its ranking Democrat, Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, received over $220,000 in campaign contributions during his past term from the defense and intelligence industries, according to David Kravets of Wired. Both are staunch advocates of the NSA bulk surveillance programs.

"The congressional committees charged with oversight of the intelligence community have long been captive to, and protective of, the intelligence agencies," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight.

"Many of the congressional staff, in fact, come from those agencies. This latest revelation demonstrates the harm caused by that conflict of interest. When the congressional oversight committee is more loyal to the agency it oversees than to the legislative chamber its members were elected to serve in, the public's interest is seriously compromised."

Aftergood made a similar institutional point.

"There is a deeper failure here by the intelligence oversight committees to accurately represent the range of opinions on intelligence policy," he said.

"Even post-Snowden, HPSCI held one open hearing on surveillance policy with no witness providing a critical perspective. Over in the Senate, the [Senate intelligence committee] has held no open hearings on the subject.

"Meanwhile, both the House and Senate judiciary committees have held useful, interesting and informative hearings presenting diverse views on intelligence surveillance. The performance of those committees highlights the intelligence committees' lack of critical perspective."

A representative for House speaker John Boehner did not return a message seeking comment on the Amash-HPSCI clash.

Thus far, no legislator has recommended the House ethics committee, with its broad mandate to investigate violations of House rules or the law, to examine Rogers, Ruppersberger or other committee members. It is unclear if withholding information from fellow legislators ahead of a vote actually violates those rules or any relevant statute.

A former staff director of both the House and Senate ethics committees, said it was unlikely the ethics committee would get involved.

"It doesn't strike me that this is a violation of any rule or standard within the ethics committee's jurisdiction," said Robert Walker, now with the law firm Wiley Rein. "I can understand why there may be strong feelings on both sides of this. But if there's a dispute on this, I don't see this as falling within the ethics committee's jurisdiction."

Griffith has been critical of the NSA's bulk phone-records collection, voting for Amash's effort on July 24 to end it and calling the program akin to a "general warrant" in an interview. He conceded a difference in perspective with Rogers "on how you best protect America and our Constitutional freedoms, but I think he's a good guy," Griffith said.

Still, Griffith said, it is not the prerogative of the House intelligence committee to keep information about surveillance programs from other legislators ahead of important votes.

"The constitution doesn't just say 12 members or 24 or whatever it is [on the House intelligence committee]: it says all of us have to protect the constitution," Griffith said. "It's one of our prime duties."

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Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 2h

The first line is *so funny: poor NSA has nobody defending it: just POTUS, generals, Pentagon, top Senators, Dems

kade ‏@onekade 1h

@ggreenwald This reads like Tony Perkins telling the public about The Other Side of Homosexual Relationships in 1920.

The other side of the surveillance story
By Walter Pincus, Published: August 14

It’s time for the intelligence community to have its side of the debate over the National Security Agency’s collection programs explained.

Critics of the NSA collection of all U.S. telephone toll records and five-year storage of them under Section 215 of the Patriot Act say it is an unnecessary invasion of privacy. They also worry that the information could be used to harass or track innocent people.

The intelligence community believes, as President Obama put it in his Aug. 9 news conference, that “repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way.”

Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of the CIA and NSA, put it more bluntly Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Asked by host Bob Schieffer whether he thought “the public understands what it is the NSA is doing,” Hayden replied: “No.”

Whose fault is that?

As he has said before, Obama told reporters Friday that he has “directed my national security team to be more transparent.” That very day, the Justice Department released a 23-page “white paper” describing in considerable detail the legal basis for the metadata program.

At the same time, the NSA released a seven-page paper outlining the Section 215 activity, as well as the other program under Section 702, which targets groups outside the United States. With approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, it collects content from the Internet and telephones for foreign intelligence and terrorist information.

Such transparency is useless if the news media do not pass it on to the public. Few, if any, major news outlets carried any of the details from the Justice and NSA papers.

The Justice paper details the toll record search process. It explains how a query of the broad database starts after a previously identified phone number associated with a foreign terrorist group has been detected calling a U.S.-based number.

That so-called first hop brings up five years of calls made to and from that number. Investigators take all those numbers and do the same query for five years. That’s the second hop. From that second hop, they launch a third search of records.

It shows a vast number of phones being searched, which is why some critics are concerned. On the other hand, what the NSA looks for among that data are recurring calls that may lead back to the known terrorist organization, referred to by some analysts as a number “turning back on itself.”

As the NSA document points out, the search helps map communications between terrorists and their associates.

The NSA document notes that of 54 terrorist events discussed publicly, 13 had a U.S. connection, and in 12 of them, the phone metadata played a role.

Intelligence officials say that if the U.S. media do not provide what the government claims are the facts underlying what critics and supporters say, the public cannot understand the issue.

Hayden said directly what many in the intelligence community say privately about the critics.

“They don’t want a little more transparency with regard to the metadata program,” he told Schieffer. “They want the program stopped.”

What also angers many former senior intelligence officials is the complaint by members of Congress and particularly some on the intelligence oversight committees that they were never told about the extent of the phone metadata program.

As the Justice paper notes, the Senate and House Intelligence and Judiciary committees “by December 2008 . . . had received the initial application and primary order authorizing the telephone metadata collection. Thereafter, all pleadings and orders reflecting significant legal developments regarding the program were produced to all four committees.”

Remember “connecting the dots”? That’s what CIA, NSA and FBI personnel heard post-Sept. 11, 2001, as congressional and executive branch investigators over two years interviewed analysts and plowed through records trying to suggest reforms and find fault for failure to anticipate the al-Qaeda attacks.

The roots of today’s programs began as an almost-immediate response to those attacks.

Three days after 9/11, then-NSA director Hayden determined with other agency officials that there was a need for the authority to target U.S. telephone numbers linked to foreign terrorists or their countries of origin.

Intelligence officials later pieced together — and have remembered ever since — that 9/11 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar resided in California in early 2000 and that while some of his conversations with an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen were picked up, the NSA did not have that U.S. phone number or any indication that he was located in San Diego.

Had the current program existed then, they might have had a chance to disrupt the 9/11 plot.

There are two more issues intelligence officials want noted.

As the Justice Department paper puts it, the NSA programs provide tools “for discovering and thwarting terrorist plots and other national security threats that may not be known to the government at the outset.” The efforts are not like most civil or criminal discovery or investigations, Justice notes, and not originally [emphasis added] aimed at finding people guilty or innocent, or having liability for some past action.

Another point they note is that over the length of these NSA programs, and similar ones that date to the late 1960s, there have been layers of oversight by the NSA, the Justice and Defense departments, Congress and the judiciary.

As Obama put it Friday: “You’re not reading about . . . the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s e-mails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused.”

For previous Fine Print columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 1h

You won't learn this from Walter Pincus' stenography, but the NSA claim of stopping Terror attacks is dubious at best

Senators challenge NSA's claim to have foiled 'dozens' of terror attacks

Mark Udall and Ron Wyden – critics of NSA's surveillance – say they want proof that programs have disrupted plots against US

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Thursday 13 June 2013 12.58 EDT
Jump to comments (163)

nsa keith alexander
Keith Alexander testified that maintaining a database of Americans' phone records was critical to thwarting "dozens" of plots. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Two prominent Senate critics of the NSA's dragnet surveillance have challenged the agency's assertion that the spy efforts helped stop "dozens" of terror attacks.

Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, said they were not convinced by the testimony of the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, who claimed that evidence gleaned from surveillance helped thwart attacks in the US.

"We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA's dragnet collection of Americans' phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence," they said in a statement released on Thursday ahead of a widely anticipated briefing for US senators about the National Security Agency's activities.

"When you're talking about important liberties that the American people feel strongly about, and you want to have an intelligence program, you've got to make a case for why it provides unique value to the [intelligence] community atop what they can already have," Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told the Guardian in an interview on Thursday.

Alexander testified before the Senate appropriations committee that maintaining a database of millions of Americans' phone records was critical to thwarting "dozens" of plots. One of the examples Alexander mentioned, the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, appears to have been prevented by conventional police surveillance, including efforts by UK investigators.

"Gen Alexander's testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA's bulk phone records collection program helped thwart 'dozens' of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collection methods," Wyden and Udall said in a statement. "The public deserves a clear explanation."

Alexander testified that the efficacy of the phone-records program could not be independently analysed from that of another NSA program disclosed by the Guardian, an effort called Prism that monitors the internet communications of people believed to be outside the US. In an interview with the Guardian, Wyden challenged that assertion as well.

"I have real reservations that the argument that they can't be evaluated separately," Wyden said. "If a program provides unique value, the people running it ought to explain it. I'm certainly open to doing that in a classified setting, and I know of a program where they haven't done it."

Wyden said he could not elaborate on what that program is, citing its classified nature.

Alexander also testified that the databases of Americans' phones records contains safeguards governing its searchability to prevent the NSA from abusing it. But there is ambiguity about whether a court or any outside body must grant the NSA permission to search it.

"If they claim that this program has lots of safeguards, wouldn't you expect they would detail them – 'Here are the procedures for following up on an individual'?" Wyden said. "This is certainly an issue I have a strong interest in."
James Clapper NSA Wyden had earlier challenged the truthfulness of Alexander's nominal boss, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The direct challenge to the NSA's veracity comes ahead of a closed-door session in the Capitol for senators to hear from Alexander directly about the details and the effects of the program. And it follows on an earlier challenge by Wyden to the truthfulness of Alexander's nominal boss, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

In March, Clapper responded "no" and "not wittingly" to a question from Wyden about whether the NSA collects "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." Clapper has since admitted that was the "least untruthful" answer he could have given.

Wyden pointed out that the reason he asked that question was because of an assertion Alexander made publicly at a hacker conference in July. Alexander said at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas that the NSA only collected data on Americans "incidentally, in targeting a bad guy" and that "the story we have millions or hundreds of dossiers on people is absolutely false".

"In the last day I've been struck by many people who don't want a vigorous debate, saying that somehow this discussion started on Capitol Hill," Wyden said. "This was started by General Alexander's comment in a public forum. That's why I think now we're going to have some public hearings."

Other senators who have been critical of the NSA looked forward to Thursday afternoon's closed-door briefings.

"Sen Udall is planning on attending the briefing as long as it does not conflict with markup/votes on the Senate armed services committee," Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said in an email to the Guardian.

"Sen Udall hopes he and his colleagues get specific answers out of Gen Alexander on what appears to be a discrepancy between what he told the appropriations committee yesterday [Wednesday] and the information previously provided to the intelligence committee."

Jamal Raad, a spokesman for senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said: "Senator Merkley wants a clear answer to his question on how the Fisa court has interpreted the language of the law. The administration should then commit to release those interpretations to the American public in order to have a full debate."

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USA vs. NSA: Legislative Efforts to Curtail Spying
Wednesday, 14 August 2013 00:00
By Shahid Buttar, Truthout | Report

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)
In the wake of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, members of Congress have proposed a litany of bills to put an end to domestic spying. Rather than creating bills that support each other, Congressional members' multiple bills now have to compete against each other, and have clouded the debate.
The sustained grass-roots uproar over domestic surveillance has reached the ear of Congress, which is considering more than a dozen legislative measures to curtail the National Security Agency's various programs that spy on Americans en masse. While most address merely the pieces of the problem, one in particular would address the many facets hidden even in the wake of the Snowden leaks.
Strange bedfellows have coalesced in Congress to restore fundamental rights, including representatives of each of the major political parties. With a bipartisan establishment facing off against populists in each party responding to the outrage among their constituents, rarely has Washington presented so fascinating a drama.
While the controversy surrounding dragnet domestic spying portends the inevitability of fundamental reforms, the only bill commensurate with mounting transpartisan outrage remains politically marginal. Meanwhile, meager proposals proliferate, skewing the debate and potentially undermining the possibilities of meaningful restrictions on NSA spying.
Rather than coalesce around shared proposals, members of Congress have instead clouded the debate by introducing a growing litany of bills that could potentially compete with, rather than support, each other.
Transparency without substantive reforms
Several bills present relatively weak alternatives by merely expanding transparency at the margins. For instance, the "Ending Secret Law Act" (SB 1130 and HR 2475) sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, would require the disclosure (of at least summaries) of the secret FISA court's classified opinions that currently remain hidden from Congress and the public. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, introduced an essentially identical measure in HR 2440 , the "FISA Court in the Sunshine Act of 2013."
Revealing the substance of FISA court opinions to the public is crucial, given the court's modus operandi of undermining constitutional principles in secret. Disclosure alone, however, does not restore any of the legal principles eroded over the past decade. And while these proposals would at least require summaries of even classified opinions, they leave the decision over what level of disclosure to the executive branch, which has proven its unreliability.
Other proposals also aim to expand transparency, not by revealing secret judicial opinions but rather by requiring additional disclosures from the executive branch. While helpful, like the disclosure bills, none of these suffice, either.
Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Washington, introduced the "Government Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013" (HR 2736), which would require corporations and government agencies to disclose aggregate data about their surveillance practices. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, has introduced a bill (SB 1452) to require greater disclosure and allow voluntary disclosure by private entities.
Like the "Ending Secret Law Act," the Larsen and Franken bills would claw at the margins of NSA secrecy, without doing anything to actually restrain its abuses.
Transparency with some minimal substantive reforms
Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Massachusetts, introduced the "Telephone Surveillance Accountability Act of 2013" (HR 2684) to force disclosure, as well as minimal judicial oversight. In particular, the bill requires the FBI director to compile a report for the Senate and House intelligence committees about searches of telephone metadata. It also requires the government to demonstrate that its metadata search requests are justified by reasonable suspicion of material facts specifically relevant to an authorized investigation.
The Lynch bill, however, is underinclusive: It regards only telephony metadata and does nothing to curtail internet spying under the PRISM or XKeyScore programs, for instance. It apparently was drafted in response to the particular problems revealed in the first of the now several memos disclosed by journalist Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower Edward Snowden but fails to address the vast remainder of other NSA's domestic spying activities.
Second, even the reasonable suspicion standard can be abused. Just ask New Yorkers, who for years have challenged an abusive stop-and-frisk search program by the NYPD. The Supreme Court empowered police to stop and frisk pedestrians for weapons in 1968, but even the Terry v. Ohio decision maintained the need to demonstrate reasonable suspicion before doing so. The NYPD's answer to that limitation has been to consistently claim that its targets (overwhelmingly people of color) make "furtive movements" justifying police intrusions.
The "Restore Our Privacy Act," (SB 1168) introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, goes several steps farther. First, it requires the government to provide "specific and articulable facts" supporting each and every object of a Section 215 order, which currently address multiple sources. For instance, the single court order disclosed by Greenwald authorized the government to monitor every Verizon business customer across the country, including the organization I lead, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (which is why we're represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a lawsuit challenging NSA programs).
The Sanders bill also would limit the purposes of surveillance to specific FBI investigations of international terrorism, preventing intelligence powers from being used by law enforcement agencies.
Reforming the rubber-stamp secret FISA court
Other proposed bills would reform the appointment process for judges to the secret FISA court. Imposing fundamental changes to constitutional principles in secret, while hearing only one side of each case, the so-called "court" has endured well-deserved criticism for failing its constitutional responsibility to check and balance the executive branch, instead becoming a rubber stamp that ultimately has eroded judicial legitimacy.
The court's predilection for favoring the government is predictable: the judges are appointed unilaterally by the notoriously conservative chief justice, whose history of service in the executive branch predisposes him, and the judges he hand picks, to favor the government. Chief Justice John Roberts has voted time and again to insulate intelligence and police agencies from constitutional limits, such as in Clapper v. Amnesty International, which this spring turned the court's blind eye to precisely the issues raised by the Snowden leaks.
The Alliance for Justice has criticized both the unilateral appointment power of the chief justice and the pro-government bias of the particular judges who serve on the court. Its new report explains why "this concentration of power is unlike anything else in our democratic system of checks and balances."
Accordingly, several proposed bills would reform the process for appointing judges to the secret FISA court, including SB 1460, introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, the "FISA Court Accountability Act" (HR 2586), introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee, and HR 2761, introduced by Schiff.
The Cohen bill would disperse the power to appoint the various judges on the FISA Court across several congressional leaders. The Schiff bill, in contrast, would give the president power to appoint FISA court judges,
Finally, a separate bill by Blumenthal (SB 1467) would take an additional step of allowing the Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board (which sat dormant for a decade after its creation was recommended by the 9/11 Commission until President Barack Obama finally appointed members last year) to send privacy advocates into FISA court proceedings to challenge the government's view.
Schiff also supports Blumenthal's approach, saying "this court operates in secret and doesn't have the benefit of contrary views," whereas his and Blumenthal's proposed reforms "would provide for some adversarial process on key FISA court decisions, so the court would have the benefit of a well-informed view of the case law."
Addressing the iceberg
In contrast to these helpful - but alone, inadequate - protections, two particular proposals promise fundamental reform that actually would restore parts of the fundamental rights eroded by the expansion of domestic surveillance during the past decade. A third would unwind the domestic surveillance state entirely.
The first two enjoy bipartisan support: the "FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act" (SB 1215), introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, as well as the Libert-E Act (HR 2399), co-sponsored by Reps. John Conyers, D-MI, and Justin Amash, R-MI. Both bills would curtail powers extended in the FISA amendments of 2008, as well as portions of the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act and the 2008 FISA amendments were controversial when they passed, presaging the widespread outrage that has erupted since the revelation this summer of some (but still not all) of the abuses they enabled.
In the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign, the largest affinity group on www.MyBarackObama.com called itself Get FISA Right. Of course, then-Sen. Obama did not get FISA right and instead wrote to the group with a weak defense of his vote, hanging his hat on the notion that "an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people." He went on to write that the FISA Amendment Act "assures that the FISA court has that responsibility." As we now know, his faith in the FISA court was misplaced.
Reflecting even more widespread dissent, the Patriot Act prompted grass-roots coalitions to pursue and enact resolutions defending the Bill of Rights in more than 400 cities and towns across America. Eight states also followed suit, reflecting a diverse array of political cultures as progressive as California and conservative as Montana, as western as Alaska and Hawaii, alongside states as eastern as Maine.
Even relative to the Leahy and Conyers-Amash proposals, the widest-ranging bill among those pending in Congress is the "Surveillance State Repeal Act" (HR 2818) introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, a former Princeton physics professor and former leader of the House Intelligence Committee. The Holt bill, unlike any of the other measures proposed, would fully repeal the Patriot Act and the 2008 FISA amendments in their entirety, essentially restoring limits on executive power and unwinding the surveillance abuses of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations at once.
Even though the Holt bill lacks the widespread support of more conciliatory congressional alternatives, it is crucial for concerned Americans to champion the broad spectrum remedies that it entails. In the absence of a grass-roots clamor calling for dramatic fundamental reforms, the congressional debate likely will slide in an authoritarian direction this fall, once executive agencies and officials regroup from the political drubbing they endured during the summer and flood Congress with armies of corporate and military lobbyists weaving tangled skeins, claiming that dragnet domestic surveillance is a national security imperative.
In fact, the only sectors of American society to which surveillance is necessary are the corporate and military interests that depend on it. Despite claims that national security would be undermined were constitutional rights restored, the only security at risk should Congress finally limit NSA abuses is the job security of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of contractors and government employees whose careers are built on a fundamentally authoritarian premise.
If only because of the sheer size and existential commitment of that lobbying base, the agencies always have enjoyed an upper hand in Congress. That is why grass-roots support for the Holt bill is so critical: it alone would shift the debate from one about long overdue limitations on government agencies toward, in contrast, the illusory justification for those powers to exist in the first place.
Don't Let NSA's 4th Amendment Violation Center Open.

[seemslikeadream]

Report: NSA spying broke privacy rules numerous times

WASHINGTON The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, the Post said, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents provided it earlier this summer from NSA leaker Edward Snowden, a former systems analyst with the agency.

In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Post cited a 2008 example of the interception of a "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a "quality assurance" review that was not distributed to the NSA's oversight staff.


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Obama administration: Snowden committed felonies
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The NSA audit obtained by the Post dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

In a statement to the newspaper, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems "at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible and drive the numbers down."

"We're a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line," a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking to the newspaper with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds

By Barton Gellman, Thursday, August 15, 7:48 PM E-mail the writer
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

Read the documents

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”

There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.

Read the documents


The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.

But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other ­facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak­ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.

One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.

In what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.

The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.

In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.

Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

Read the documents


Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.

The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”

Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.

“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.

The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.

One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”

Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006. Those records include the telephone numbers of the parties and the times and durations of conversations, among other details, but not their content or the names of callers.

The NSA’s authoritative def­inition of data includes those call records. “Signals Intelligence Management Directive 421,” which is quoted in secret oversight and auditing guidelines, states that “raw SIGINT data . . . includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and/or unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and some forms of computer-generated data, such as call event records and other Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata as well as DNI message text.”

In the case of the collection effort that confused calls placed from Washington with those placed from Egypt, it is unclear what the NSA meant by a “large number” of intercepted calls. A spokesman declined to discuss the matter.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.

The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.


In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.

The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.

In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.

Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.

“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”


Julie Tate and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.

[seemslikeadream]

Wyden considered disclosing National Security Agency secrets on Senate floor
By Brendan Sasso - 08/15/13 05:01 PM ET

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance programs, told Rolling Stone that he considered disclosing classified information on the Senate floor prior to the leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution shields members of Congress from prosecution for statements that they enter into the Congressional Record.

In a Rolling Stone interview published on Thursday, Wyden explained that he was frustrated with the NSA's refusal to publicly reveal the scope of its surveillance programs.

"There are very significant limits [on what you can and cannot say], and they are very cumbersome and unwieldy. If you want to play a watchdog role, you try to work within the rules. This is a sensitive subject," Wyden told the magazine.

"A lot of people have just said to me, 'Well, you feel so strongly about [these issues] — when you knew this, why didn't you just go to the floor of the United States Senate and just, you know, read it all [into the record]?' And, of course, anybody who does this kind of work thinks a lot about that. You think about it all the time," he said.

"I can see why plenty of people would criticize me — progressives and others. I can understand why plenty of people who have views similar to mine would say they would have done it differently."

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden has access to classified national security information.

For years, he and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) tried to raise the alarm about how the NSA was using its power under the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to gather information, including on people in the United States. But because they were unable to disclose details of the programs, their warnings garnered little attention.

The Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause states that members of Congress “shall not be questioned ... for any Speech or Debate in either House."

Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the clause would have almost certainly protected Wyden from prosecution for revealing classified information about NSA spying on the Senate floor.

"I can't say anything about what the Justice Department might have tried to do," Adler said. "But I think that would be extremely difficult [to prosecute]."

Last year, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) entered details of a sealed wiretap application related to the "Fast and Furious" probe into the Congressional Record. The action would have likely been a criminal offense if not for the Speech or Debate Clause.

[seemslikeadream]

Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board Cleaned Out Ahead of NSA Scandal
Panel Only Has Four Members Left
by Jason Ditz, August 15, 2013

The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) has a history dating back to the Eisenhower Administration, and has for that time provided key advice to presidents time and again. With President Obama embroiled in a huge scandal with the NSA, one would think the board would be right in the thick of things.

Except not so much. In the months leading up to the scandals, President Obama has slashed the panel’s membership to virtually nothing. Usually a panel of 14-16 people, and 14 even last year, the PIAB now stands at just four members.

“They kicked me off,” noted former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who had served on the panel under Bush and Obama, and who says he has no idea why he was asked to resign.

He’s one of 10 members who were recently “asked” to resign from the PIAB, since May, the same time Edward Snowden’s leaks started going public. Just when the administration seemingly needed them the most, the president had cleaned house on advisors and left the panel to rot on the vine.

[elfismiles]

When you’re in a Fourth Estate situation

As things stand today, the Fourth Estate is a state of mind. Some in the press have it, some do not. Some who have it are part of the institutional press. Some, like Ladar Levison and Edward Snowden, are not.

“I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui3KpztUzVg

http://pressthink.org/2013/08/when-your ... situation/

Encrypted email service shuts down due to surveillance efforts.

http://lavabit.com/

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.

[seemslikeadream]

Time for Answers from the NSA
After a report of 2,776 privacy violations, even NSA defenders are getting fed up.
By John Fund

It’s time to ask tough questions about the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities — even for conservatives who have given the NSA the benefit of every doubt up until now.

The Washington Post opened a can of worms last Friday when it reported that, in 2012, an internal NSA audit found that the agency had violated privacy rules 2,776 times within just one year. The audit counted only violations at NSA’s Washington facilities — nearly 20 other NSA facilities were not included. In the wake of the Post’s report, the NSA insisted that the violations were “inadvertent,” but it failed to explain why it had not shared the report with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein or other congressional oversight authorities.

Yet some NSA defenders continue to insist that nothing is wrong. Back in July, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers claimed that there have been “zero privacy violations” on the part of NSA. After the leaked audit made news on Friday, he retreated to saying that “there was no intentional and willful violation of the law.”

Other NSA stalwarts have even decided to go on the attack against critics. Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.” That’s reminiscent of former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein’s 2004 defense of the forged George W. Bush National Guard memos that ultimately cost Dan Rather his anchor chair at the network. Klein lashed out at the bloggers who broke the news that the documents had been forged by contrasting CBS’s “multiple layers of checks and balances” with “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.”

The fact is that we need to double-check all those “checks and balances” the NSA assures us will prevent abuse of its surveillance powers. Similarly, the media should inject some balance into how they treat President Obama’s assurances that nothing is wrong at the NSA.

Consider the record. Last week, President Obama told reporters: “I’m comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, they would say, ‘You know what? These folks are following the law and doing what they say they’re doing.’”

But the NSA audit found that in at least one instance, the agency decided it didn’t need to follow the law and report the unintended surveillance of U.S. citizens. In another case, the FISA court was in the dark about a new NSA collection method for months. When it did learn about it, it promptly declared it unconstitutional.

President Obama has also insisted that our intelligence gathering is transparent. In June, he claimed in a statement that the FISA court is “empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.” But writing to the Washington Post, the chief of the FISA court, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, emphasized that his court “does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that regard the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.” In other words, the view over the government’s shoulder is often blocked.

A veteran intelligence official with decades of experience at various agencies identified to me what he sees as the real problem with the current NSA: “It’s increasingly become a culture of arrogance. They tell Congress what they want to tell them. Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein at the Intelligence Committees don’t know what they don’t know about the programs.” He himself was asked to skew the data an intelligence agency submitted to Congress, in an effort to get a bigger piece of the intelligence budget. He refused and was promptly replaced in his job, presumably by someone who would do as told.

The response to all of this by some NSA supporters is to point out that the nation hasn’t been attacked in the dozen years since 9/11. As someone who stood on the street across from the World Trade Center as it collapsed on 9/11, I can appreciate how we must strive to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

But steadfastness must be accompanied by a clear understanding of the role of bureaucracies. General Keith Alexander, the current head of the NSA, told Congress in June that data “gathered from these programs provided government with critical leads to prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.” But my veteran intelligence-agency source says that no one can be sure if that’s the case: “The NSA grades its own report card, and it wouldn’t be the first bureaucracy to exaggerate its effectiveness.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a moderate Democrat who has been on the Intelligence Committee since 2001, said in a speech last month: “I have not seen any indication that the bulk phone-records program yielded any unique intelligence that was not also available to the government through less intrusive means.” Presumably, NSA would have shared such positive evidence with the intelligence committees.

It was Senator Wyden who famously asked Director of Intelligence James Clapper last March, before the Snowden revelations, whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s response was pretty clear: “No, Sir.” When pressed, Clapper amended his answer to “not wittingly.” He later told NBC News that he had given the “least untruthful” answer he could think of. He should have done what previous officials have long done and said he could fully respond only in a closed session. At least one of our top intelligence officials doesn’t display intelligence as often as he should.

Other top officials have made such a hash of explaining each new NSA revelation that even staunch national-security conservatives are beginning to wonder what else we don’t know. “The proper response to the latest revelation is not panic but deep frustration and a demand for data that does more than get the NSA through a news cycle,” writes Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s conservative blogger. “It must be more forthcoming, or it will lose its mandate.”

In 1999, then-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote Secrecy: The American Experience, in which he analyzed the parallel growth of secrecy and bureaucracy in the U.S. “Secrecy is a form of regulation,” he warned. “At times, in the name of national security, secrecy has put that very security in harm’s way.” He observed that although secrecy is absolutely necessary for our protection, it all too often serves as the first refuge of incompetents or those drunk with arrogance. We should not give these groups the ability to cloak their operations — no matter how virtuous the goal.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

[seemslikeadream]

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Abolish The NSA And Give Snowden A Parade
from the taking-a-stand dept
There was a showing of the new documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply late last week in Washington DC, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich stopped by and made some very pointed remarks while discussing the NSA's surveillance activities. The (well-timed) documentary, of course, looks at how companies and the government use and abuse everyone's digital data. Kucinich's remarks are well worth listening to, as he suggests that Congress should abolish the NSA, while also saying that Ed Snowden deserves a ticker-tape parade.
The key quotes come in response to the film's director, Cullen Hoback, asking what would it take for Congress to hold James Clapper accountable for lying to Congress:

Well, you know it's illegal to lie to Congress, but everyone lies to Congress. As soon as they raise their right hand, watch out! Clapper should be held responsible, but he won't be, because that's the condition we're in right now. In a just world, Snowden, we'd be having ticker tape parades for him. But that's not what's going to happen.

[....] We have the CIA, the FBI, a dozen other intelligence infrastructures. Frankly -- and I'm saying this with a lifetime's experience in government here -- it's time to punch the NSA's ticket here. They've ruined the brand. They've destroyed the idea of privacy. We need some kind of symbolic and profound approach here, that says, 'look, you've violated something that's very dear to the American people -- you don't get to do that.' We talk about the death penalty for individuals, which I oppose, but I think there needs to be for government agencies that so broadly betray the public interest, there needs to be a measure of responsibility. And if they go beyond the pale, which the NSA has, they just ought to be abolished. We don't need the spying.

There have been a lot of strong words about all of this coming from some members of Congress, but these may be the strongest yet.

[elfismiles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvVWnp7fQmU
http://www.infowars.com/kucinich-everyb ... e-snowden/

[seemslikeadream]

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” ~ Senator Frank Church (1975)

The NSA: ‘The Abyss from Which There Is No Return’
by John W. Whitehead, August 20, 2013

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” ~ Senator Frank Church (1975)

We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.

Indeed, as I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government’s Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA’s vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and a depository for every imaginable kind of information – whether innocent or not, private or public – including communications, transactions and the like. In fact, anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning – phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc. – will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for “innocent” reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options – denies freedom of choice – and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.

If this is the new “normal” in the United States, it is not friendly to freedom. Frankly, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed. These are no longer experiments on our freedoms. These are acts of aggression.

Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the National Security Agency in the 1970s, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

Unfortunately, we have long since crossed over into that abyss, first under George W. Bush, who, among other things, authorized the NSA to listen in on the domestic phone calls of American citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and now under President Obama, whose administration has done more to undermine the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy and bodily integrity than any prior administration. Incredibly, many of those who were the most vocal in criticizing Bush for attempting to sidestep the Constitution have gone curiously silent in the face of Obama’s repeated violations.

Whether he intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape. Yet none of this could have been possible without the NSA, which is able to operate outside the constitutional system of checks and balances because Congress has never passed a law defining its responsibilities and obligations.

The constitutional accountability clause found in Article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution demands that government agencies function within the bounds of the Constitution. It does so by empowering the people’s representatives in Congress to know what governmental agencies are actually doing by way of an accounting of their spending and also requiring full disclosure of their activities. However, because agencies such as the NSA operate with “black ops” (or secret) budgets, they are not accountable to Congress.

In his book Body of Secrets, the second installment of the most extensively researched inquiry into the NSA, author James Bamford describes the NSA as “a strange and invisible city unlike any on earth” that lies beyond a specially constructed and perpetually guarded exit ramp off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. “It contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created.”

Bamford’s use of the word “probably” is significant since the size of the NSA’s staff, budget and buildings is kept secret from the public. Intelligence experts estimate that the agency employs around 38,000 people, with a starting salary of $50,000 for its entry-level mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. Its role in the intelligence enterprise and its massive budget dwarf those of its better-known counterpart, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The NSA’s website provides its own benchmarks:

"Neither the number of employees nor the size of the Agency’s budget can be publicly disclosed. However, if the NSA/CSS were considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies."

If the NSA’s size seems daunting, its scope is disconcerting, especially as it pertains to surveillance activities domestically. The first inkling of this came in December 2005 when the New York Times reported that President Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to monitor international phone calls and email messages initiated by individuals (including American citizens) in the United States. Bush signed the executive order in 2002, under the pretext of needing to act quickly and secretly to detect communication among terrorists and their contacts and to quell future attacks in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times story forced President Bush to admit that he had secretly instructed the NSA to wiretap Americans’ domestic communications with international parties without seeking a FISA warrant or congressional approval. The New York Times had already sat on its story for a full year due to White House pressure not to publish its findings. It would be another six months before USA Today delivered the second and most significant piece of the puzzle, namely that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans who used the national “private” networks AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

It would be another seven years before Americans were given undeniable proof – thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – that the NSA had not only broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times every year but was actively working to flout attempts at oversight and accountability, aided and abetted in this subterfuge by the Obama administration.

Then again, all Snowden really did was confirm what we already suspected was happening. We already knew the NSA was technologically capable of spying on us. We also knew that the agency had, since the 1960s, routinely spied on various political groups and dissidents.

So if we already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?

The big deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen – the employer – the master. And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution.

As for those who are not worried about the government filming you when you drive, listening to your phone calls, using satellites to track your movements and drones to further spy on you, you’d better start worrying. At a time when the average American breaks at least three laws a day without knowing it thanks to the glut of laws being added to the books every year, there’s a pretty good chance that if the government chose to target you for breaking the law, they’d be able to come up with something without much effort.

Then again, for those who insist they’re not doing anything wrong, per se, perhaps they should be. Because if you’re not doing anything wrong, it just might mean that you’re not doing anything at all, which is how we got into this mess in the first place.

[seemslikeadream]

Published on Wednesday, August 21, 2013 by Common Dreams
NSA-Corporate Collusion Built Network to Reach 75% of Internet Traffic
System is built on relationships between internet and phone providers working together and 'policing themselves'
- Jon Queally, staff writer

As one expert explained, the involved telecommunications companies and the government are really left "policing the system themselves." (File)
In a fresh angle on the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance grip on domestic internet communications, the Wall Street Journal—citing current and former officials with "direct knowledge of the work"—reports that the agency has built a much more robust spy network than the agency has previously admitted, powerful enough to reach into "roughly 75% of all U.S. internet traffic" in its hunt for pertinent information.

"In some cases," the WSJ reports, "[the NSA] retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology."

What the reporting also reveals are new details about the close relationship between the government's surveillance apparatus and private telecommunications companies that have given the NSA access to "major internet junctions" within the U.S. "The surveillance system is built on relationships with telecommunications carriers," writes the WSJ, describing how those companies "must hand over what the NSA asks for under orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

But, as one expert explained, the involved telecommunications companies and the government are really left "policing the system themselves." According to him and despite repeated assurances from officials that only "the bad guys" are targeted, "There's technically and physically nothing preventing a much broader surveillance."

Though the new reporting includes references to programs made known to the U.S. and global public via classified documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the WSJ interviewed unnamed government officials to confirm aspects of how specific programs fit into a broader framework.



As the WSJ reports:

The NSA's filtering, carried out with telecom companies, is designed to look for communications that either originate or end abroad, or are entirely foreign but happen to be passing through the U.S. But officials say the system's broad reach makes it more likely that purely domestic communications will be incidentally intercepted and collected in the hunt for foreign ones.

The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Blarney, for instance, was established with AT&T Inc., former officials say. AT&T declined to comment.

This filtering takes place at more than a dozen locations at major Internet junctions in the U.S., officials say. Previously, any NSA filtering of this kind was largely believed to be happening near points where undersea or other foreign cables enter the country.

[seemslikeadream]

NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court struck down program


By Ellen Nakashima, Updated: Wednesday, August 21, 2:07 PM E-mail the writer

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the collection method unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that the government had “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.”

Barton Gellman, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, first reported for the The Washington Post on the National Security Agency's extensive surveillance programs. Nia-Malika Henderson sits down with Gellman On Background about reporting on the controversial activities.


Spy court chief judge says it must rely on government to say when it improperly spies on Americans.

Under the program, the NSA for three years diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and for the selection of foreign communications, rather than domestic ones. But in practice, the NSA was unable to filter out the communications between Americans.

According to NSA estimates, the agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.

A month after the FISA court learned of the program in 2011 and ruled it unconstitutional, the NSA revised its collection procedures to segregate the transactions most likely to contain the communications of Americans. In 2012, the agency also purged the domestic communications that it had collected.

“This was not in any respect an intentional or wholesale breach of privacy of American persons,” Robert S. Litt III, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence, said Wednesday.

Officials stressed that it was the NSA that brought the collection method to the court’s attention as part of its regular reporting process.

The Washington Post reported last week that the court had ruled the program unconstitutional. But the newly declassified opinion sheds new light on the volume of Americans’ communications that were obtained by the NSA, as well as the FISA court’s interpretation of the program.

In addition to the October 2011 court ruling, which was heavily redacted, U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday released other documents, including a follow-up order about the NSA’s revised collection methods.

The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

From Spying on "Terrorists Abroad" to Suppressing Domestic Dissent: When We Become the Hunted
Wednesday, 21 August 2013 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

Heidi Beghosian, executive director of the National Lawyer's Guild. (Photo: City Light Books)Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyer's Guild. (Photo: City Lights Books)If you're wondering why the ongoing revelations about the development and use of a massive public and private surveillance complex should be of concern to you, read what Michael German, senior policy counsel for the ACLU (and former FBI agent), says about the new book, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance:

Heidi Boghosian's 'Spying on Democracy' is the answer to the question, 'If you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone's watching you?' It's chock full of stories about how innocent people's lives were turned upside-down by public and private-sector surveillance programs. But more importantly, it shows how this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.

Truthout recently spoke with Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, about the ever-expanding government/corporate surveillance state.

You can receive the book and help support Truthout with a minimum contribution. Just click here to order.

Mark Karlin: Aren't we at a juncture in history where we've arrived at a perfect storm for nearly unrestricted surveillance in the United States? We have the political cover of keeping America "safe from terrorism" to justify the surveillance state. We have technology so advanced that few people cannot be monitored and tracked unless they are hermits hidden in caves. We have a corporate sector that increasingly depends on data mining for marketing and increasing profitability. And we have a rising tide of rebellion against the financial status quo, which the state has an interest in suppressing on behalf of the economic elites.

Heidi Boghosian: The confluence of circumstances enabling mass surveillance has the potential to permanently imperil Americans' civil liberties. How we respond will determine whether we continue to function as a democracy.

Several other factors add to the urgency of this challenge: The Obama administration is on the defensive after Edward Snowden's disclosures and will likely invest even more resources to protect its perpetual "war on terror" campaign and the corporate partners that profit from this manufactured war. As the public, and certain legislators, express apprehension about mass surveillance, the executive branch and the NSA may enact more stringent measures to fortify and safeguard their highly sophisticated spying infrastructure.

On top of that, CEOs of telecommunications and defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon and Microsoft are allied with the administration, guiding telecommunications and anti-terrorism policies through the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. And in addition to the lucrative business of data mining, corporations continue to adapt and refine technologies of war, from laser microphones to motion sensing capabilities, with which to monitor civilians.

Mark Karlin: Of course, we also have the "feed the beast" phenomenon that we have with the military-industrial complex. There are now so many US agencies and private contractors with a financial interest in the surveillance industry that it has the lobbying power to grow exponentially. How many individuals are approximately employed in the government-corporate surveillance behemoth? How important and approximately how many private companies have a stake in surveillance dollars?

Heidi Boghosian: We have created an entire new class of society that gathers and has access to classified information - an elite class that promises to grow as private companies seek increased revenue and as the government operates in unparalleled secrecy.

The majority of national intelligence, an astonishing 70 percent, is carried out by contractors. That translates into tens of thousands of analysts from more than 1,900 private firms who have performed intelligence functions over the past few years. Large contractors conduct most of the work, including Booz Allen Hamilton (which according to The New York Times, derived $1.3 billion in revenue from intelligence contracts), Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (with 39,600 employees, a reported $11.17 billion in revenue as of 2013, and a recent $6.6 billion contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency).

In 2012, an estimated 1.1 million private contractors had security clearance. The number of federal employees with security clearance is 2.6 million.

Mark Karlin: Historically, the U.S. government and local and state governments have used law enforcement agencies to suppress dissent. We have seen this in almost every era: Those who challenge the established financial order, in particular, are subject to surveillance. We are seeing the increased criminalization of protesting, whether it be the Occupy Movement, environmental protests, animal abuse protesters (you cover spying on critical mass bicyclists in NYC), etc. How easy is it to shift the surveillance data and information that the US and its contractors are assembling into focusing it on those who exercise First Amendment rights to challenge the status quo?

Heidi Boghosian: Not only is it easy for the US and its contractors to focus on activists, it is imperative that they do so. They must target social advocates in order to justify maintaining their budgets and their livelihoods. There are simply not enough "terrorists" in existence for the government to warrant the current level of intelligence spending. As a result, enormous federal resources are devoted to identifying and tracking activists who are portrayed as "extremists." Individuals who have helped bring about changes in corporate policies, such as animal rights or environmental advocates, are labeled domestic terrorist threats by the FBI.

The more individuals the security industry can identify as posing a national security threat - often based on tenuous, inaccurate or misleading information - the more it becomes possible to secure sizable government contracts.

The catch-all "anarchist extremist" can describe many individuals who challenge the status quo. Law enforcement circulated a list with photographs of "known anarchists" in 2004 before the Republican National Convention in New York. An unclassified DHS-FBI Intelligence Bulletin received much media coverage during the 2012 political conventions; it warned of possible increased risk of violence and property damage by anarchist extremists, arousing fear among local residents and businesses. FBI agents persist in circulating lists of alleged anarchists and visiting their friends, families and colleagues to frighten and harass politically active individuals and to create threats where none exist.

Mark Karlin: Explain the significance of the recent revelation that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was using secret surveillance data supplied to it by other agencies and not informing defendants or their counsel of the existence of the secret monitoring or information as the origin of the DEA charges.

Heidi Boghosian: This is precisely why we cannot trust the administration when officials say they are only using data for specific reasons. Secrecy is not compatible with the rule of law or with democracy.

The DEA's Special Operations Division's routine use of NSA information to initiate cases (and then backtracking and lying about how cases began) illustrates just one of the many possible ways that information gathered covertly may be used to contravene the laws of this nation. Hiding evidence gathered secretly violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable government searches and seizures and also impugns due process requirements of a fair trial. This shows how secrecy inherently corrupts a fair judicial process. And there are many other ways that covertly gathered personal data may be misused.

Mark Karlin: Much has been made by the Obama administration of alleging Edward Snowden has done great damage to the surveillance state by revealing its illegal and Foreign Intelligence Service Act-authorized activities and massive information database. But if such a large number of people allegedly are involved in surveillance activities, isn't data kept on us and those around the world at risk of leaking to foreign governments and private global corporations? Isn't this "top secret" information vulnerable to being obtained in parts or whole by parties other than the government for uses that have nothing to with "preventing terrorism"?

Heidi Boghosian: As more individuals are entrusted with access to and oversight of vast troves of personal data, this information necessarily becomes more vulnerable to misuse, whether by the parties gathering and analyzing it or by foreign governments and private multinational corporations. Because this data literally contains information related to people's entire lives, it is ripe for bullying, blackmail, threats or other improper uses.

But this "top secret" information is already being used by our own government for reasons that have little to do with combating threats to national security. Ownership of this information affords the administration unlimited power to suppress dissent, inhibit free speech and intimidate would-be critics into adhering to the status quo.

Stored data is vulnerable in the future as well. We cannot know now what activities the government may elect to stigmatize or criminalize years from now. Having access to stored data means that currently benign information may be assigned sinister meaning long after it was collected.

Recall that J. Edgar Hoover wielded enormous powerful because his FBI agents gathered information that he stored in secret dossiers on key politicians for nearly five decades. Presidents despised him but wouldn't fire him because he knew the intimate details of their personal and political lives and could use it to ruin their careers.

Mark Karlin: Just continuing on this concept of inherent vulnerability built into the NSA and the other government and private agencies doing US authorized surveillance work, doesn't the alleged hacking into the Pentagon database and other sites by the Chinese government generate serious implications that the US cannot protect its data, given rapid advances in technology?

Heidi Boghosian: No system is completely secure. There is only one surefire way to safeguard data, and that's by not collecting and storing it in the first place. The more data that the NSA and other government and private intelligence agencies amass about us, the more vulnerable we are, as individuals and as a nation. This underscores the dangers of secrecy. If there was a massive data breach, corporations and the government would not inform the public. They would hide it. We would be none the wiser, and our overall security would be greatly compromised. The less data that private security companies collect, the less money they make. The current dynamic is to sustain and grow the private surveillance industry; as a result, mistakes will be covered up.

Mark Karlin: Given the fascination of US consumers with new technology, isn't technological surveillance going to continue to have new products that will enable it to tighten its grip even further on monitoring individuals?

Heidi Boghosian: Technology cuts both ways: that which protects privacy and that which destroys privacy. Edward Snowden's disclosures will hopefully spark a public backlash against the model pioneered by Google, Apple and other corporations, namely, personal data in exchange for free services. People should start to recognize that when something is offered for free, the customer/user becomes the product.

Mark Karlin: What are the threats to a free press, even the mainstream media, in recent Obama administration use of surveillance information to threaten prosecution and to intimidate journalists?

Heidi Boghosian: Radical changes in media ownership, coupled with the Obama administration's penchant for secrecy and control of information, pose a formidable threat to the possibility of a free press - the ability of the media to be independent of the government.

The administration's unprecedented attacks on whistleblowers and members of the media have impeded the ability of investigative journalists to cultivate new sources, causing Jane Mayer of The New Yorker to proclaim that "investigative reporting has come to a standstill."

Those writers who do engage in investigative journalism, such as Associated Press reporters or James Rosen from Fox News, are spied on and may be accused of being co-conspirators in felonies for communicating with confidential sources. New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen was monitored and subpoenaed after exposing President George W. Bush's domestic wiretapping program and publishing State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

The mainstream press is now part of the corporate-government system. Anyone who doubts the alignment between the media and government should be reminded that Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, bought The Washington Post, was awarded a 10-year, $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA.

With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security came more ways for the government to collect and retain personal information about members of the press. The DHS Office of Operations Coordination and Planning and the Media Monitoring Initiative of the DHS National Operations Center are authorized to gather and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors and others who use traditional or social media in real time.

These examples are part of a history of threatening journalists and the independent press. From 1971 to 1978, the FBI's COINTELPRO targeted alternative newspapers with the goal of shutting them down. Banks routinely handed over financial records for these papers and their subscribers; from 1971 to 1978, the number of alternative publications declined from more than 400 to 65, as a direct result of customer and printer harassment, infiltration, wiretaps and even bomb threats.

Mark Karlin: Is there a chance that the surveillance-state story that has evolved is so massive that people won't be able to comprehend the extent of how the government is amassing information that can be used to control its citizens? There are so many forms of surveillance - and such obfuscation from the White House and the surveillance industry - that it's hard to get one's hands around the specifics. On top of that, let's not forget that we - as citizens - know only what we know. We don't know what is still secret.

Heidi Boghosian: We can never know the true extent to which the government is amassing information, given that the nature of intelligence gathering is covert, but we can begin to surmise the scope. Knowing what we do know, we have a duty to reign in an overreaching government and its corporate partners. Frank Church, chairman of the Church Committee that investigated surveillance abuses in the 1970s, predicted that the NSA could be used to control the citizenry: "The [National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, andno American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

Mark Karlin: Given the history of the National Lawyers Guild in defending protesters exercising their constitutional rights against a government that historically suppresses dissent that threatens the elite status quo, are you in any way optimistic that the surveillance state can be slowed down or rolled back?

Heidi Boghosian: The power of the people united against government and corporate abuse is the most resilient power in the world. Revolutions rippling across the globe, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to protests in Turkey, make clear that the vast majority of people are dissatisfied with the global system and are ready, and able, to resist. Because of this, I am optimistic that we can curtail the surveillance state.

To do so we must first end the war-on-terror campaign. James Madison noted that "no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare," and it is apparent that the current perpetual war on terror is indeed thinning our lifeblood, namely our freedoms. This perpetual war is as much a failure as the government's ill-conceived and costly war on drugs, initiated during the Nixon administration.

We must also restore transparency to government.

At the bleakest moments in our past, whether in the labor or civil rights movements, people persevered against overwhelming odds. The challenges facing us now are: will we, the people, elect to harness our collective power to curb a mass surveillance state that infringes on our privacy and our constitutional rights? Will we demand transparency and accountability from government agencies? Will we respect the Supreme Court decisions affording corporations the same rights as people, or will we demand that the law protect human rights and not the property interests of an elite few?

I hope we will do all this and more - people power is limited only by one's imagination, and history has proven humanity to be eminently resourceful, creative and persistent in the face of injustice.

[seemslikeadream]

Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposalCass Sunstein wants the government to "cognitively infiltrate" anti-government groups
By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.” In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.” Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
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There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked. Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote. This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class. All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.

* * * * *

Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates. The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon. Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts. In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens. In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda. Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens:

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.” By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves. His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise. Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.

Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself. He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples: the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters). Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements? Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama:

Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so.

But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous. Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim. More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture: when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes. That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.

* * * * *

Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan. With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority. Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed. This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).

In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned. Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.” What is one key difference? Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.” In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.” In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.

In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber: covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line. Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different. Why? Because, as Sunstein puts it: we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.” Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.

* * * * *

What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world. That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.

It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.

Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation? And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government? The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.



UPDATE: I don’t want to make this primarily about the Gruber scandal — I cited that only as an example of the type of mischief that this mindset produces — but just to respond quickly to the typical Gruber defenses already appearing in comments: (1) Gruber’s work was only for HHS and had nothing to do with the White House (false); (2) he should have disclosed his payments, but the White House did nothing wrong (false: it repeatedly described him as “independent” and “objective” and constantly cited allied media stories based in Gruber’s work); (3) Gruber advocated views he would have advocated anyway in the absence of payment (probably true, but wasn’t that also true for life-long conservative Armstrong Williams, life-long social conservative Maggie Gallagher, and the pro-war Pentagon Generals, all of whom mounted the same defense?); and (4) Williams/Gallagher were explicitly paid to advocate particular views while Gruber wasn’t (true: that’s exactly the arrangement Sunstein advocates to avoid ”embarrassment” in the event of disclosure, and it’s absurd to suggest that someone being paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars is unaware of what their paymasters want said; that’s why disclosure is so imperative).

The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means. It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are.



UPDATE II: Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.” Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin). Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”



UPDATE III: Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:



So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.” I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.” That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment. Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.



UPDATE IV: Paul Krugman has replied to the part of this post which pertains to him and Jonathan Gruber; my response to that is here.