Key officials advocate NSA, Cyber Command leadership be split up

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Ellen Nakashima | The Washington Post | Social Reader | November 30, 2013

Key senior administration officials have advocated splitting the leadership of the nation’s largest spy agency from that of the military’s cyberwarfare command as a final White House decision nears, according to individuals briefed on the discussions.

At a White House meeting of senior national security officials last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said he was in favor of ending the current policy of having one official in charge of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Also, officials appear inclined to install a civilian as director of the NSA for the first time in the agency’s 61-year history. Among those said to be potential successors to the current director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, is his deputy, John C. “Chris” Inglis.

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Official releasing what appears to be original court file authorizing NSA to conduct sweeps

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller | The Washington Post | Social Reader | November 19, 2013

The director of national intelligence on Monday night released what appeared to be the original court document authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct sweeping collections of Americans’ communications records for counterterrorism purposes.

The order, signed by the then-chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was among nearly 1,000 pages of documents being released by James R. Clapper Jr. in response to lawsuits and a directive by President Obama. The documents also describe the NSA’s failure to abide by court-imposed rules to protect Americans’ privacy, and show that the agency was more interested in collecting cell site location data than it had previously acknowledged.

The opinion signed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permitted the NSA to gather in bulk information about e-mail and other forms of Internet communication such as e-mail addresses, but not the content. Its true scope, however, was unclear. Three pages describing the categories of “metadata” that the NSA proposed to collect were redacted.

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Lawmakers Say Lack of Candor on Surveillance Weakens Oversight

Official portrait of Director of National Intelligence . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Peter Wallsten | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | July 11, 2013

Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

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James Clapper, EU Play-Acting and Political Priorities

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 3, 2013

The NSA revelations continue to expose far more than just the ongoing operations of that sprawling and unaccountable spying agency. Let’s examine what we have learned this week about the US political and media class and then certain EU leaders.

The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate – specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs – when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our stories to admit that his statement was, in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.

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If It’s All Kosher, NSA, Why Lie?

William Boardman | Reader Supported News | June 22, 2013

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” 

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: “No, sir.”

 

In March 12, 2013, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) apparently committed perjury in his sworn testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There is little likelihood of his being criminally charged, but we’ll get back to that.

If it doesn’t matter to you (1) that your government can maintain a massive data bank on your life and the lives of everyone you know, and (2) that there is no effective control on how the government uses its data, and (3) that your government lies about its capabilities, then there’s no point in reading further.

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James Clapper Should Be Fired—And Prosecuted

David Sirota | Salon | AlterNet | June 12, 2013

When introducing James Clapper as his Director of National Intelligence in 2010, President Obama specifically  justified the appointment by saying Clapper is someone who “understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress (and) not merely to appear when summoned, but to keep Congress informed.” At the time, it seemed like a wholly uncontroversial statement – it was simply a president making a sacrosanct promise to keep the legislative branch informed, with the insinuation that previous administrations hadn’t.

Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden’s disclosures with the video of Clapper’s Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects “any type of data on millions (of Americans),” Clapper has become American history’s most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

Incredibly (or, alas, maybe not so incredibly anymore) despite the president’s original explicit promises about Clapper, transparency and Congress, the White House is nonetheless responding to this humiliating situation by  proudly expressing its full support for Clapper. Meanwhile, as of today’s announcement by  U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), the demands for Clapper’s resignation are finally being aired on Capitol Hill.

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Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position

SCOTT SHANE and JONATHAN WEISMAN | New York Times | June 11, 2013

WASHINGTON — For years, intelligence officials have tried to debunk what they called a popular myth about the National Security Agency: that its electronic net routinely sweeps up information about millions of Americans. In speeches and Congressional testimony, they have suggested that the agency’s immense power is focused exclusively on terrorists and other foreign targets, and that it does not invade Americans’ privacy.

But since the disclosures last week showing that the agency does indeed routinely collect data on the phone calls of millions of Americans, Obama administration officials have struggled to explain what now appear to have been misleading past statements. Much of the attention has been focused on testimony by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, to the Senate in March that the N.S.A. was not gathering data on millions of Americans.

When lawmakers returned to the Capitol on Tuesday for the first time since the N.S.A. disclosures, however, the criticism was muted.

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Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans

Michael Isikoff | National Investigative Correspondent | NBC News | June 8, 2013

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.

Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.

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10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State

Steven Rosenfeld | AlterNet | June 7, 2013

Americans may be upset about the latest revelations in the government’s ability to spy on citizens via their online lives, but no one should be surprised. We’ve underestimated and overlooked many key aspects of the government’s ability to track our lives for years.

The bottom line, which resonates most strongly among civil liberties advocates on the left and conservative libertarians on the right, is not just the loss of privacy but also the growing power of the state to target and oppress people who it judges to be critics and enemies. That list doesn’t just include foreign terrorists of the al-Qaeda mold, or even the Chinese government that has  stolen the most advanced U.S. weapon plans; it also includes domestic whistleblowers, protesters and journalists—all of whom have been  targeted by the Obama administration Justice Department.

 

Let’s go through 10 points about these latest revelations of domestic spying to better understand what Americans have underestimated and overlooked about electronic eavesdropping.

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Details of secret Internet data collection program declassified

Daniel Strauss and Brendan Sasso | The Hill | June 8, 2013

The head of U.S. intelligence released  new details on Saturday about the federal government’s secretive program to  monitor Internet users.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that the program,  called PRISM, “unilaterally” obtains information from the servers of U.S.  Internet companies.

“PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program,” Clapper said  in a statement. “It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate  the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence  information from electronic communication service providers under court  supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence  Surveillance Act (FISA).”

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