Stonewalled by the NSA, Members of Congress Ask Really Basic Question Again

NSA computers. (photo: Paul J. Richards/Getty Images)

 

Dan Froomkin | The Intercept | Reader Supported News | April 23, 2016

bipartisan group of lawmakers is none too happy that the executive branch is asking them to reauthorize two key surveillance programs next year without answering the single most important question about them.

The programs, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are called PRISM and Upstream. PRISM collects hundreds of millions of internet communications of “targeted individuals” from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype. Upstream takes communications straight from the major U.S. internet backbones run by telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon and harvests data that involves selectors related to foreign targets.

But both programs, though nominally targeted at foreigners overseas, inevitably sweep up massive amounts of data involving innocent Americans.

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Is Google an arm of the NSA?

John Poindexter, former Navy admiral and National Security Advisor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gaius Publius | America Blog | August 6, 2013

Looking back on the NSA revelations, starting with the PRISM program, I’ve found a lot of slide-analysis that makes a number of good points.

But one slide keeps jumping out at me — very much a not-in-the-weeds slide, which makes a not-in-the-weeds point.

It’s this one. See if you can figure out why I think it’s remarkable. And see if you can guess where this discussion is going.

Remember, NSA = the Pentagon. It’s not some free-floating agency within the Executive Branch (like the staff of the National Security Advisor or something). It’s the Pentagon pure and simple, the military.

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Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

CLAIRE CAIN MILLER | New York Times | June 13, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.       

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

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Connecting the Dots on PRISM

James Bamford | Wired Magazine | Reader Supported News | June 12, 2013

Physically, the NSA has always been well protected by miles of high fences and electrified wire, thousands of cameras, and gun-toting guards. But that was to protect the agency from those on the outside trying to get in to steal secrets. Now it is confronting a new challenge: those on the inside going out and giving the secrets away.

While the agency has had its share of spies, employees who have sold top-secret documents to foreign governments for cash, until the last few years it has never had to deal with whistleblowers passing top-secret information and documents to the press because their conscience demanded it. This in a place where no employee has ever written a book about the agency (unlike the prolific CIA, where it seems that a book contract is included in every exit package).

As someone who has written many books and articles about the agency, I have seldom seen the NSA in such a state. Like a night prowler with a bag of stolen goods suddenly caught in a powerful Klieg light, it now finds itself under the glare of nonstop press coverage, accused of robbing the public of its right to privacy. Despite the standard denials from the agency’s public relations office, the documents outline a massive operation to secretly keep track of everyone’s phone calls on a daily basis – billions upon billions of private records; and another to reroute the pipes going in and out of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and the other Internet giants through Fort Meade – figuratively if not literally.

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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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PRISM: NSA Just As Guilty As Manning

Juan Cole | Informed Comment | Reader Supported News | June 8, 2013

Bradley Manning, who spilled the beans on the US blowing away of unarmed Iraqi journalists and overlooking war crimes by the US military and allied Iraqi troops, released thousands of low-level cable messages. He has been charged by the US government with thereby being a traitor, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is not clear which enemy benefited from the catty remarks in some embassy cables, or how exactly their revelation harmed national security. What did happen was that millions of people in the US and around the world discovered some of the more egregious sins of commission and omission of the US government, especially with regard to Iraq. The treason charge against Manning is outrageous, and has been pursued because otherwise what he did is not obviously very serious and even a military judge might not return a severe sentence. While the scatter shot character of his revelations may be troubling, some of what he revealed was government crimes, for which Americans should thank him.

It turns out that Manning, in making government correspondence available for us to read, was just turning the tables on the US government, which The Guardian and the Washington Post today reveal has a back door called PRISM into all our internet communications (emails, over-the-internet phone calls, browser search history, etc.) with 9 major companies, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! (but not, interestingly, Twitter). The program is detailed in a Powerpoint slide presentation for initiating new NSA employees into its workings.

The sordid police states that have a paltry few tens of thousands of domestic spies monitoring the activities of ordinary citizens turn out to be minor players in this game compared to the home of the brave and the land of the free. Eat your hearts out, North Korean secret police and Baathist mukhabarat in Syria!

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