Members of Congress Denied Oversight on NSA Surveillance

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | August 4, 2013

Documents provided by two House members demonstrate how they are blocked from exercising any oversight over domestic surveillance.

Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate.

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

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

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

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Documents Show NSA Violated Court Orders on Collection of Phone Records

Dianne Feinstein, member of the United States Senate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ali Watkins and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy | Reader Supported News | August 3, 2013

National Security Agency officials violated secret federal court orders authorizing the daily collection of domestic email and telephone data from hundreds of millions of Americans, according to previously top-secret documents made public Wednesday by the Obama administration.

The documents didn’t disclose specific details of the violations. But they said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court imposed temporary restrictions on the programs after it learned of the violations until it was satisfied the NSA had revamped its procedures to conform to court requirements.

Several senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, when approached about the breaches, said they were aware of them but declined to answer questions about their nature.

“I don’t know why you need to ask me,” said the panel’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

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Senator: FISA Court Is ‘Anachronistic’

U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, of Illinois. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 29, 2013

Dick Durbin joins growing outcry among senators to rein in power of secretive court meant to serve as a check on NSA.

Pressure is building within the US Senate for an overhaul of the secret court that is supposed to act as a check on the National Security Agency’s executive power, with one prominent senator describing the judicial panel as “anachronistic” and outdated.

Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator for Oregon, said discussions were under way about how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, the body entrusted with providing oversight on the NSA and its metadata-collecting activities. He told C-Span’s Newsmaker programme on Sunday that the court, which was set up in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), was ill-equipped to deal with the massive digital dragnet of millions of Americans’ phone records developed by the NSA in recent years.

“In many particulars, the Fisa court is anachronistic – they are using processes that simply don’t fit the times,” Wyden said.

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More Independence for the FISA Court

Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE EDITORIAL BOARD | New York  Times | July 28, 2013

There are so many deeply troubling things about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it is difficult to know where to begin, but a good place might be the method by which the court’s judges are chosen.

All 11 of the current members were assigned to the court by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. In the nearly eight years he has been making his selections, Chief Justice Roberts has leaned about as far right as it is possible to go. Ten of those 11 members were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; the two previous chief justices put Republican-appointed judges on the court 66 percent of the time, as reported by Charlie Savage in The Times.

The FISA court considers government requests for warrants to collect phone and Internet data, among other things, on an enormous scale. The judges hear only the government’s argument. There is no adversary present to represent interests of those whose privacy would be violated — which could well involve millions of Americans. The court’s rulings, some of which include novel interpretations of constitutional law, remain secret.

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Six Ways Congress May Reform NSA Snooping

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Congressman (now U.S. Senator) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kara Brandeisky | ProPublica | Truthout | July 27, 2013

Although the House defeated a measure that would have defunded the bulk phone metadata collection program, the narrow 205-217 vote showed that there is significant support in Congress to reform NSA surveillance programs. Here are six other legislative proposals on the table.

1) Raise the standard for what records are considered “relevant”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reportedly adopted a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act, ruling that all the records in a company’s database could be considered “relevant to an authorized investigation.” The leaked court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all its phone records is just one example of how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has interpreted the statute.

Both Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have introduced bills requiring the government to show “specific and articulable facts” demonstrating how records are relevant.  Similarly, legislation introduced by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., would require any applications to include an explanation of how any records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.

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Roberts’s Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court

Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charlie Savage | The New York Times | July 26, 2013

WASHINGTON — The recent leaks about government spying programs have focused attention on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its role in deciding how intrusive the  government can be in the name of national security. Less mentioned has been the person who has been quietly reshaping the secret court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In making assignments to the court, Chief Justice Roberts, more than his predecessors, has chosen judges with conservative and executive branch backgrounds that critics say make the court more likely to defer to government arguments that domestic spying programs are necessary.

Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials.

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Secret Court Lets NSA Extend Its Trawl of Verizon Customers’ Phone Records

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 20, 2013

Latest revelation an indication of how Obama administration has opened up hidden world of mass communications surveillance.

The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian’s disclosure in June of the NSA‘s indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa).

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This Week in Press Freedoms and Privacy Rights

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 21, 2013

The travesty calling itself “the Bradley Manning court-martial”, the kangaroo tribunal calling itself “the FISA court”, and the emptiness of what the Obama DOJ calls “your constitutional rights.”

I’m on a (much-needed) quick vacation until Sunday, so I’ll just post a few brief items from what has been a busy and important week of events, particularly when it comes to press freedom and privacy:

(1) In the utter travesty known as “the Bradley Manning court-martial proceeding”, the military judge presiding over the proceeding yet again showed her virtually unbreakable loyalty to the US government’s case by refusing to dismiss the most serious charge against the 25-year-old Army Private, one that carries a term of life in prison: “aiding and abetting the enemy”. The government’s theory is that because the documents Manning leaked were interesting to Osama bin Laden, he aided the enemy by disclosing them. Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler explained in the New Republic in March why this theory poses such a profound threat to basic press freedoms as it essentially converts all leaks, no matter the intent, into a form of treason.

At this point, that seems to be the feature, not a bug. Anyone looking for much more serious leaks than the one that Manning produced which ended up attracting the interest of bin Laden should be looking here. The Obama White House yesterday told Russia that it must not persecute “individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption” – as Bradley Manning faces life in prison for alerting the world to the war abuses and other profound acts of wrongdoing he discovered and as the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers rolls on. That lecture to Russia came in the context of White House threats to cancel a long-planned meeting over the Russian government’s refusal to hand over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US to face espionage charges.

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Bush-Cheney Began Illegal NSA Spying Before 9/11

Ralph Lopez a| Digital Journal | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013

Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by Richard Nixon.   Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at a meeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001, he and other QWest officials declined to participate.  AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications records to an NSA database.

In 2007 the Denver Post reported:

“Nacchio suggested that the NSA sought phone, Internet and other customer records from Qwest in early 2001. When he refused to hand over the information, the agency retaliated by not granting lucrative contracts to the Denver-based company, he claimed.”

Other sources corroborate the former CEO’s allegations, which were made in the course of his legal defense against insider trading charges.  Both Slate.com and National Journal have published reports in which sources are quoted which support the former CEO’s claims.

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Yahoo wants to make its NSA PRISM fight against U.S. FISA court public

Image via CrunchBase

Dominic Rushe | The Guardian | Raw Story | July 11, 2013

Company says court papers would show the public it fought strenuously against intelligence agencies accessing its data

Yahoo has called on Fisa, the secretive US surveillance court, to let it publish its legal argument against a case that gave the government “powerful leverage” in persuading tech companies to co-operate with a controversial data-gathering program.

In a court filing first reported by San Jose Mercury News the company argues the release would demonstrate that Yahoo “objected strenuously” in a key 2008 case after the National Security Agency (NSA) demanded Yahoo customers’ information.

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