NSA Dodges; Refuses To Say It Doesn't Spy On Congress

Senator Bernie Sanders,an Independent from Vermont, sent a letter to the NSA Friday, asking whether it has or is "spying" on members of Congress and other elected American officials.

In his letter, Sanders specifically defined "spying" as "gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or e-mails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business."

The NSA didn't answer the Senator's question, but their response was most revealing: "Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons."

In other words, they have none. And of course in the process of hoovering up data on virtually every call, internet customer and e-mail in America, the calls members of Congress and other elected officials are being scooped up as well.

Attorney General Eric Holder pulled the same stunt at a congressional hearing last summer when he responded to Senator Mark Kirk, (R-Illinois) by saying that the NSA had no "intent" to spy on Congress, but that this was something that needed to be discussed privately..and of course, not under oath.

What the Attorney General undoubtedly had in mind was James Clapper, director of National Intelligence being caught in a blatant lie to Senator Ron Wyden(D-Oregon) while testifying to Congress last March that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans:



That was before Edward Snowden's leak on exactly what the NSA was doing, and before the news on how internet and cell providers were being forced to cooperate.

The idea of the NSA recording and storing metadata on the communications of members of Congress and other elected officials gives rise to some interesting possibilities, especially since we're talking about the Obama Administration.

Remember, this is the man who won his senate seat by getting his people to shop for a judge who would unseal the sealed divorce records of his Republican opponent Jack Ryan, which contained some of the usual wild, unproven accusations one finds in a contentious divorce where child custody is involved.

And let's not forget the suspicious timing of the leak on General David Petraeus' extramarital affair...after he testified before Congress backing up the Administration's fairy tale on Benghazi, something he did a 180 on a month later, once the president's re-election was safely in the bag and the leak was used to discredit him.The data used to find out about his affair came from phone records that were used to match up with certain hotel bills.

And dare we mention the way the IRS was used to go after President Obama's perceived political enemies?

The same techniques can be used to sway members of Congress to vote a certain way, or to 'persuade' a popular senator or governor not to run for office.

In spite of what the Obama Administration and tools like Clapper and Holder might say, we do have an expectation of privacy. It's called the Fourth Amendment, something I'm sure President Obama has little familiarity with:

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

Our Founders put this in the Constitution for a good reason, and they would be would be amazed at how tamely we've repeatedly allowed this right to be violated.

Senate Panel Okays Legislation Attacking Bloggers And New Media

 

The senate judiciary committee just cleared the way for legislation defining who a journalist is..and thus who qualifies for protection from warrantless surveillance, having to reveal sources and secret government subpoenas of phone records, e-mails and personal information.

This emerged out of the Obama Administration scandal involving the Associated Press, when the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed almost two months of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press and secretly used a warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist.

The new legislation follows closely on guidelines given to the committee by Attorney General Eric Holder, and they are designed specifically to make it a lot easier to attack bloggers and new media journalists and video makers.

Under these guidelines, a "covered journalist" is defined as an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information. The individual would have been employed for one year within the last 20 or three months within the last five years.

It would apply to student journalists or someone with a considerable amount of freelance work in the last five years.

'Freelance' in this case is defined as paid work.

For example, writing unpaid freelance pieces for internet outlets like American Thinker, or unpaid op-eds for other publications is not does not protect your rights.

The committee later approved the overall bill on a 13-5 vote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a chief proponent of the medial shield legislation, worked with Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., as well as representatives from news organizations, on the compromise.

"I think journalism has a certain tradecraft. It's a profession. I recognize that everyone can think they're a journalist," Feinstein said.

The overall measure would incorporate many of the changes proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder in July. Criticism of the collection of the material without any notice to the news organizations prompted President Barack Obama to order Holder to review the department's policy.

Holder's revised guidelines called for the government to give advance notice to the news media about subpoena requests for reporters' phone records unless the attorney general determines such notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the investigation. Search warrants for a reporter's email would only apply when the individual is the focus of a criminal investigation for conduct not connected to ordinary newsgathering.

The bill makes clear that before the government asks a news organization to divulge sources, it first must go to a judge, who would supervise any subpoenas or court orders for information. Such orders would be limited, if possible, "in purpose, subject matter and period of time covered so as to avoid compelling disclosure of peripheral, nonessential or speculative information."

Holder's revised guidelines do not call for a judge to be involved before the government asks a news organization to divulge sources. However, the guidelines call for a new standing News Media Review Committee to advise the attorney general on such requests.

These protections only apply to the new definition of 'journalist'. If you have a blog or a YouTube channel, no matter how well established or reputable and the writers or videographers are unpaid citizen journalists, it's open season.

First amendment? Huh? Wha?

Call your representatives to broaden this narrow definition if you value your freedom of speech and press.

The Rewards Of 'Cooperation' With The NSA - Verizon Given Huge Federal Contract

 

Yes, selling out your customer's private information to the Feds can pay big dividends.

In a press release, Verizon announced that thecorporation had been selected for a huge new contract with the Department of the Interior:

The U.S. Department of the Interior has selected Verizon to participate in a $10 billion, 10-year contract to provide cloud and hosting services. This is potentially one of Verizon's largest federal cloud contracts to date.

Verizon is one of 10 companies that will compete to offer cloud-based storage, secure file transfer, virtual machine, and database, Web, and development and test environment hosting services. The company is also one of four selected to offer SAP application hosting services.

Each of the 10 agreements awarded under the Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract has a potential maximum value of $1 billion.


According to a court order labeled "TOP SECRET,"  that was outed by Britain's  Guardian, federal judge Roger Vinson ordered Verizon to turn over the phone records of millions of its U.S. customers to the National Security Agency (NSA) in a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The order, issued in April by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court  compels Verizon to provide these records on an “ongoing daily basis” and hand over to the NSA an electronic copy” of “all call detail records created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

That means the phone numbers involved, the electronic identity of the phone or computer used, any calling card numbers ) used in making the calls, and the time and duration of the call. So if you're a
Verizon customer, your detailed phone records were and will continue to be handed over to the  NSA .

To my knowledge, Verizon did not appeal the order or protest in any way .

The Fourth Amendment to the Cnstitution affirms  “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The government isn't even bothering to make a pretense that any of the millions of records seized involves 'probable cause'. Or that anyone is committing any kind of crime. All they're doing is scooping up millions of digital records and storing them on the chance that  maybe, one day something suspicious might be found.

And given this president's use of the IRS, that something might very well be a declaration to run for office, an affiliation, or a bit of criticism the government doesn't like, what have you.

In fairness to Verizon, they're hardly the only ones doing this. All the telecom companies are, and as we see, the rewards for going along can be substantial.

 Nor is the FISA court, which was specifically designed to protect our liberties doing much to prevent this either. In 2012, the feds made  1,789 requests to th eFISA courts to  monitor the electronic communications of American citizens.The court approved every single one of them . 

Our Constituion? Just a piece of outdated paper to these boys.

Breaking: The Feds Want Your E-Mail Passwords

 

Major internet providers are going public - they're receiving increased request from the federal government to turn over massive numbers of private e-mail passwords.

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.

"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"

Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

While some of the major internet providers say they've successfully resisted government orders for passwords and encryption codes, a number of others simply refused to answer. And even the ones that claim they haven't could be lying simply to avoid a massive flood of people dropping their e-mail accounts and use of their search engines and web facilities.

The actual legal rationale is, as the article puts it, 'murky'. My first impulse is to say that this is a clear violation of th4e Fourth Amendment's provisions against unreasonable search and seizure, particularly when is comes to massive scooping up of data from people who are under no suspicion of doing anything to warrant it.

And while the surveillance is troublesome, we've has this kind of surveillance before during wartime.The difference now is that for the first time we have a president and an administration willing to use it as a weapon against their political opponents rather than just for national security purposes:

The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt utility. 

The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment, which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to refuse the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could bring a criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives." 

In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled under the All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba Satellite laptop. 

Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the password holder is the target of an investigation -- and don't address when a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an innocent third party. 

"If you can figure out someone's password, you have the ability to reuse the account," which raises significant privacy concerns, said Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

GOP chairman of House Intelligence Committee Puts His Foot In His Mouth...

Rep.Mike Rogers(R-MI) is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He went public on one of the Sunday shows today, saying that the NSA's surveillance program was just dandy, stopped 'dozens of plots' (which of course no one can recall or name a single one) and that there was a lot of what he called “misleading rhetoric,” including reports that the NSA was listening to phone calls. He called the program a “lockbox” with “lots of protections.”

Too bad for Rep. Rogers that at he wasn't paying attention. Just the day before, the NSA was admitting that they did in fact listen to phone calls..without any warrants whatsoever. And simply on the say so of one 'analyst':

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Whoopsie.

Not only that, but there's little or no oversight over who has access to the private data on American citizens that been stored digitally...perhaps for later use against the Obama regime's political enemies, just as the IRS was.

Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.

William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. "They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's what they record," Binney said.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.