Americans Are Still Being Spied On in Ways That Haven’t Been Made Public

Senator Ron Wyden. (photo: Reuters)

Trevor Timm | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | March 15, 2015

he same Senator who warned the public about the NSA’s mass surveillance pre-Snowden said this week that the Obama administration is still keeping more spying programs aimed at Americans secret, and it seems Congress only wants to make it worse.

In a revealing interview, Ron Wyden – often the lone voice in favor of privacy rights on the Senate’s powerful Intelligence Committee – told Buzzfeed’s John Stanton that American citizens are being monitored by intelligence agencies in ways that still have not been made public more than a year and a half after the Snowden revelations and countless promises by the intelligence community to be more transparent. Stanton wrote:

Wyden’s warning is not the first clue about the government’s still-hidden surveillance; it’s just the latest reminder that they refuse to come clean about it. For instance, when the New York Times’ Charlie Savage and Mark Manzetti exposed a secret CIA program “collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union” into and out of the United States in 2013, they also reported that “several government officials said more than one other bulk collection program has yet to come to light.”

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House Intel Committee: Declassify Benghazi report

Ryan Gierach| West Hollywood, California | July 31, 2014

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence moved  today to declassify the report on the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi.

By a voice vote, the committee sent the report to a collective of 17 government agencies which make up the U.S. Intelligence Community. It will now fall on the intelligence heads to finally declassify the report after a declassification procedure.

The committee found no egregious failures or errors in the American preparation for or, response to, extremist Islamist attackers in the far flung and dangerous post, leading to more assertions that the whole investigation was political theater.

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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

Barton Gellman, Ashkan Soltani | The Washington Post | Social Reader | December 4, 2013

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets)

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

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Edward Snowden leaks again: Five takeaways from the ‘black budget’

Seal of the United States National Security Agency, used between 1963 and 1966 before being replaced by the current seal. The NSA was formed in 1955, but did not have its own seal for several years. This seal was first used in February 1963, before being replaced in September 1966 with the seal used today. The NSA has no information on the origin or design of this seal. For more information, see here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Christian Science Monitor | Raw Story | August 30, 2013

Edward Snowden has struck again, this time via The Washington Post. The former National Security Agency data professional leaked a secret-filled 178-page summary of the US intelligence community budget to Post reporters Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, who published online a lengthy story about the document, illustrated with great charts and graphics, on Thursday.

The bottom line, or rather the budget top line, is that all US intelligence agencies combined spent $52.6 billion in fiscal year 2013. That’s about 2.4 percent less than they spent in FY 2012.

That’s not classified, strictly speaking: The US has released its overall intelligence budget since 2007, as Messrs. Gellman and Miller note. But breakdowns as to which agency gets how much and what the money is spent on have been classified, and the Post reveals those things, too.

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Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program

Dana Priest | The Washington Post | August 9, 2013

On the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court place their palms on a biometric hand scanner mounted next to the entrance door. Then the judges and their staff enter a code into door’s electronic cipher lock.

Inside a secure vault — one impenetrable to any sort of technical eavesdropping — the judges review some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive requests for access to private communications information, including the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, a collection that has generated significant criticism since it was disclosed in June.

The court is staffed year-round, and on an emergency basis, to authorize surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Although much attention has been focused on the court’s approval of the NSA’s so-called metadata phone records program, interviews with intelligence officers and experts, public statements and recently declassified documents indicate that the authorization marks the beginning of a long — and, U.S. officials say, carefully regulated — process.

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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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