Homeless in Arizona

Don't Google "pressure cooker" unless you love cops

For those of you who have not used pressure cookers they are fantastic machines that cook much faster then a microwave oven.

You put a little water in them, which when heated turns to a gas which pressure cooks the food.

After you put the food in the pressure cooker you seal it up and put it on the stove.

If you only cook small stuff like I do the pressure cooker will get up to full pressure in one or two minutes.

If you slice up your veggies many things will be cooked in 1 or 2 minutes after the cooker is fully pressurized. You can cook fish in 4 or 5 minutes.

You can also cook things like roasts in them much quicker then in a conventional oven, but I have never done that. A beef brisket will cook in 50 to 70 minutes.

And I didn't know this until those nut jobs in Boston used them to kill people but pressure cookers also make great bombs.

Source

Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds

The Atlantic Wire

Philip Bump

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which begs the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security.

Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?

It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen

U.S. issues worldwide travel alert amid terrorism fears

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Source

U.S. issues worldwide travel alert amid terrorism fears

By Billy Kenber, Updated: Friday, August 2, 9:20 AM E-mail the writer

The State Department issued a worldwide travel alert Friday, warning of potential terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the Middle East and North Africa that could target tourists on trains, flights or other forms of public transportation.

The alert follows the decision to close 21 U.S. embassies across the Muslim world on Sunday in response to the same security threat, according to State Department officials.

“Current information suggests that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the State Department said in a statement Friday. It said the potential for attacks was particularly high in the Middle East and North Africa and that it could come from or occur on the Arabian Peninsula.

U.S. citizens traveling abroad were urged to take precautions. The alert warned that “terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests,” notably public transportation systems including “subway and rail systems, as well as aviation and maritime services.”

Speaking at a news briefing Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said a number of embassies were instructed to close on Sunday because of “security considerations.” Sunday is a normal working day in most Muslim countries, and embassies there would typically be open for business.

Harf stressed that officials were acting “out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations.” She did not provide details of the security threat but said that embassies could remain closed into next week.

The last time the department issued a similar warning was on last year’s anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, when militants assaulted two U.S. compounds in Benghazi.

Rep. Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN’s “New Day” program: “It’s my understanding that it is al-Qaeda-linked, all right.”

Among the affected embassies are those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Three consulates will also close — two in Saudi Arabia and one in the United Arab Emirates.

A proven model

A Cheap Spying Tool With a High Creepy Factor

Low tech internet spying - NSA tools for the homeless???

A Cheap Spying Tool With a High Creepy Factor

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

With a handful of plastic boxes and over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters and a USB hub, Brendan O’Connor, a security researcher, was able to monitor all the wireless traffic emitted by nearby wireless devices.Brendan O’Connor With a handful of plastic boxes and over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters and a USB hub, Brendan O’Connor, a security researcher, was able to monitor all the wireless traffic emitted by nearby wireless devices.

Brendan O’Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street – not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?

Mr. O’Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.

Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on – to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi – say at a cafe – and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.

Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.” His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.

“Actually it’s not hard,” he concluded. “It’s terrifyingly easy.”

Also creepy – which is why he called his contraption “creepyDOL.”

“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be,” he said.

You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O’Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them – and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.

Mr. O’Connor says he did none of that – and for a reason. In addition to being a security researcher and founder of a consulting firm called Malice Afterthought, he is also a law student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says he stuck to snooping on himself – and did not, deliberately, seek to scoop up anyone else’s data – because of a federal law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Some of his fellow security researchers have been prosecuted under that law. One of them, Andrew Auernheimer, whose hacker alias is Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting a security hole in the computer system of AT&T, which made e-mail addresses accessible for over 100,000 iPad owners; Mr. Aurnheimer is appealing the case.

“I haven’t done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers,” he contends. “Everyone is terrified.”

He is presenting his findings at two security conferences in Las Vegas this week, including at a session for young people. It is a window into how cheap and easy it is to erect a surveillance apparatus.

“It eliminates the idea of ‘blending into a crowd,’” is how he put it. “If you have a wireless device (phone, iPad, etc.), even if you’re not connected to a network, CreepyDOL will see you, track your movements, and report home.”

Can individual consumers guard against such a prospect? Not really, he concluded. Applications leak more information than they should. And those who care about security and use things like VPN have to connect to their tunneling software after connecting to a Wi-Fi hub, meaning that at least for a few seconds, their Web traffic is known to anyone who cares to know, and VPN does nothing to mask your device identifier.

In addition, every Wi-Fi network that your cellphone has connected to in the past is also stored in the device, meaning that as you wander by every other network, you share details of the Wi-Fi networks you’ve connected to in the past. “These are fundamental design flaws in the way pretty much everything works,” he said.

Obama - No more drone murders (fingers crossed)

Despite Administration Promises, Few Signs of Change in Drone Wars

By MARK MAZZETTI and MARK LANDLER

Published: August 2, 2013

WASHINGTON — There were more drone strikes in Pakistan last month than any month since January. Three missile strikes were carried out in Yemen in the last week alone. And after Secretary of State John Kerry told Pakistanis on Thursday that the United States was winding down the drone wars there, officials back in Washington quickly contradicted him.

More than two months after President Obama signaled a sharp shift in America’s targeted-killing operations, there is little public evidence of change in a strategy that has come to define the administration’s approach to combating terrorism.

Most elements of the drone program remain in place, including a base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia that the Central Intelligence Agency continues to use to carry out drone strikes in Yemen. In late May, administration officials said that the bulk of drone operations would shift to the Pentagon from the C.I.A.

But the C.I.A. continues to run America’s secret air war in Pakistan, where Mr. Kerry’s comments underscored the administration’s haphazard approach to discussing these issues publicly. During a television interview in Pakistan on Thursday, Mr. Kerry said the United States had a “timeline” to end drone strikes in that country’s western mountains, adding, “We hope it’s going to be very, very soon.”

But the Obama administration is expected to carry out drone strikes in Pakistan well into the future. Hours after Mr. Kerry’s interview, the State Department issued a statement saying there was no definite timetable to end the targeted killing program in Pakistan, and a department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said, “In no way would we ever deprive ourselves of a tool to fight a threat if it arises.”

Micah Zenko, a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, who closely follows American drone operations, said Mr. Kerry seemed to have been out of sync with the rest of the Obama administration in talking about the drone program. “There’s nothing that indicates this administration is going to unilaterally end drone strikes in Pakistan,” Mr. Zenko said, “or Yemen for that matter.”

The mixed messages of the past week reveal a deep-seated ambivalence inside the administration about just how much light ought to shine on America’s shadow wars. Even though Mr. Obama pledged a greater transparency and public accountability for drone operations, he and other officials still refuse to discuss specific strikes in public, relying instead on vague statements about “ongoing counterterrorism operations.”

Some of those operations originate from a C.I.A. drone base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia — the continued existence of which encapsulates the hurdles to changing how the United States carries out targeted-killing operations.

The Saudi government allowed the C.I.A. to build the base on the condition that the Obama administration not acknowledge that it was in Saudi Arabia. The base was completed in 2011, and it was first used for the operation that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical preacher based in Yemen who was an American citizen.

Given longstanding sensitivities about American troops operating from Saudi Arabia, American and Middle Eastern officials say that the Saudi government is unlikely to allow the Pentagon to take over operations at the base — or for the United States to speak openly about the base.

Spokesmen for the White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

Similarly, military and intelligence officials in Pakistan initially consented to American drone strikes on the condition that Washington not discuss them publicly — a bargain that became ever harder to honor when the United States significantly expanded American drone operations in the country.

There were three drone strikes in Pakistan last month, the most since January, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which monitors such strikes. At the same time, the number of strikes has declined in each of the last four years, so in that sense Mr. Kerry’s broader characterization of the program was accurate.

But because the drone program remains classified, administration officials are loath to discuss it in any detail, even when it is at the center of policy discussions, as it was during Mr. Obama’s meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen.

After their meeting, Mr. Obama and Mr. Hadi heaped praise on each other for cooperating on counterterrorism, though neither described the nature of that cooperation. Mr. Obama credited the setbacks of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or A.Q.A.P., the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, not to the drone strikes, but to reforms of the Yemeni military that Mr. Hadi undertook after he took office in February 2012.

And Mr. Hadi twice stressed that Yemen was acting in its own interests in working with the United States to root out Al Qaeda, since the group’s terrorist attacks had badly damaged Yemen’s economy.

“Yemen’s development basically came to a halt whereby there is no tourism, and the oil companies, the oil-exploring companies, had to leave the country as a result of the presence of Al Qaeda,” Mr. Hadi said.

Asked specifically about the recent increase in drone strikes in Yemen, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said: “I can tell you that we do cooperate with Yemen in our counterterrorism efforts. And it is an important relationship, an important connection, given what we know about A.Q.A.P. and the danger it represents to the United States and our allies.”

Analysts said the administration was still grappling with the fact that drones remained the crucial instrument for going after terrorists in Yemen and Pakistan — yet speaking about them publicly could generate a backlash in those countries because of issues like civilian casualties.

That fear is especially pronounced in Pakistan, where C.I.A. drones have become a toxic issue domestically and have provoked anti-American fervor. Mr. Kerry’s remarks seemed to reflect those sensitivities.

“Pakistan’s leaders often say things for public consumption which they don’t mean,” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States. “It seems that this was one of those moments where Secretary Kerry got influenced by his Pakistani hosts.”

Congressional pressure for a public accounting of the drone wars has largely receded, another factor allowing the Obama administration to carry out operations from behind a veil of secrecy.

This year, several senators held up the nomination of John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director to get access to Justice Department legal opinions justifying drone operations. During that session, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, delivered a nearly 13-hour filibuster, railing against the Obama administration for killing American citizens overseas without trial.

For all that, though, the White House was able to get Mr. Brennan confirmed by the Senate without having to give lawmakers all the legal memos.

And, in the months since, there has been little public debate on Capitol Hill about drones, targeted killing and the new American way of war.

Postal Service takes photos of all mail

Source

Postal Service takes photos of all mail

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | 8/2/13 10:25 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — The Postal Service takes pictures of every piece of mail processed in the United States — 160 billion last year — and keeps them on hand for up to a month.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the photos of the exterior of mail pieces are used primarily for the sorting process, but they are available for law enforcement, if requested.

The photos have been used "a couple of times" to trace letters in criminal cases, Donahoe told the AP on Thursday, most recently involving ricin-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"We don't snoop on customers," said Donahoe, adding that there's no big database of the images because they are kept on nearly 200 machines at processing facilities across the country. Each machine retains only the images of the mail it processes.

"It's done by machine, so there's no central area where any of this information would be," he said. "It's extremely expensive to keep pictures of billions of pieces of mail. So there's no need for us to do that."

The images are generally stored for between a week and 30 days and then disposed of, he said. Keeping the images for those periods may be necessary to ensure delivery accuracy, for forwarding mail or making sure that the proper postage was paid, he said.

"Law enforcement has requested a couple of times if there's any way we could figure out where something came from," he said. "And we've done a little bit of that in the ricin attacks."

The automated mail tracking program was created after the deadly anthrax attacks in 2001 so the Postal Service could more easily track hazardous substances and keep people safe, Donahoe said.

"We've got a process in place that pretty much outlines, in any specific facility, the path that mail goes through," he said. "So if anything ever happens, God forbid, we would be able very quickly to track back to see what building it was in, what machines it was on, that type of thing. That's the intent of the whole program."

Processing machines take photographs so software can read the images to create a barcode that is stamped on the mail to show where and when it was processed, and where it will be delivered, Donahoe said.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was cited by the FBI on June 7 in an affidavit that was part of the investigation into who was behind threatening, ricin-tainted letters sent to Obama and Bloomberg. The program "photographs and captures an image of every piece of mail that is processed," the affidavit by an FBI agent said.

Mail from the same mailbox tends to get clumped together in the same batch, so that can help investigators track where a particular item was mailed from to possibly identify the sender.

"We've used (the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program) to sort the mail for years," Donahoe said, "and when law enforcement asked us, 'Hey, is there any way you can figure out where this came from?' we were able to use that imaging."

Russia protects Snowden from the USA

Search Warrants required for drone overflights???

"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"

What rubbish. If the government is peeking into your home, property or belonging for any reason looking for reasons to arrest you, that is a search and the government should be required to get a search warrant before doing it. Period!!!!!

Source

Drone Regulations: Spying Concerns Prompt States To Consider Legislation

By LISA CORNWELL 08/04/13 10:16 AM ET EDT AP

CINCINNATI -- Thousands of civilian drones are expected in U.S. skies within a few years and concerns they could be used to spy on Americans are fueling legislative efforts in several states to regulate the unmanned aircraft.

Varied legislation involving drones was introduced this year in more than 40 states, including Ohio. Many of those bills seek to regulate law enforcement's use of information-gathering drones by requiring search warrants. Some bills have stalled or are still pending, but at least six states now require warrants, and Virginia has put a two-year moratorium on drone use by law enforcement to provide more time to develop guidelines.

Domestic drones often resemble the small radio-controlled model airplanes and helicopters flown by hobbyists and can help monitor floods and other emergencies, survey crops and assist search-and-rescue operations. But privacy advocates are worried because the aircraft can also carry cameras and other equipment to capture images of people and property.

"Right now police can't come into your house without a search warrant," said Ohio Rep. Rex Damschroder, who has proposed drone regulations. "But with drones, they can come right over your backyard and take pictures."

Since 2006, the Federal Aviation Administration has approved more than 1,400 requests for drone use from government agencies and public universities wanting to operate the unmanned aircraft for purposes including research and public safety. Since 2008, approval had been granted to at least 80 law enforcement agencies.

But the FAA estimates that as many as 7,500 small commercial unmanned aircraft could be operating domestically within the next few years. A federal law enacted last year requires the FAA to develop a plan for safely integrating the aircraft into U.S. airspace by September 2015.

Damschroder's proposed bill would prohibit law enforcement agencies from using drones to get evidence or other information without a search warrant. Exceptions would include credible risks of terrorist attacks or the need for swift action to prevent imminent harm to life or property or to prevent suspects from escaping or destroying evidence.

The Republican said he isn't against drones but worries they could threaten constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"I don't want the government just going up and down every street snooping," Damschroder said.

The Ohio House speaker's office says it's too soon to comment on the chances for passage. But similar legislation has been enacted in Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, Texas and Oregon.

The sponsor of Tennessee's bill said the law was necessary to ensure that residents can maintain their right to privacy.

"Abuses of privacy rights that we have been seeing from law enforcement recently show a need for this legislation," said Republican Sen. Mae Beavers.

Beavers and Damschroder modeled their bills after one signed into law this year by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who said then that "we shouldn't have unwarranted surveillance."

But the industry's professional association says regulating law enforcement's use of unmanned aircraft is unnecessary and shortsighted. It wants guidelines covering manned aircraft applied to unmanned aircraft.

"We don't support rewriting existing search warrant requirements under the guise of privacy," said Mario Mairena, government relations manager for the Arlington, Va.-based Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

The association predicts unmanned aircraft systems will generate billions of dollars in economic impact in the next few years and says privacy concerns are unwarranted.

In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage vetoed the state's drone-regulating legislation, saying "this bill steps too far" and would lead to lawsuits and harm Maine's opportunities for new aerospace jobs. He plans to establish guidelines allowing legitimate uses while protecting privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union supports legislation to regulate drone use and require search warrants, but it would also like weapons banned from domestic drones and limits on how long drone-collected data could be kept, said Melissa Bilancini, an ACLU of Ohio staff attorney.

In North Dakota, Rep. Rick Becker's bill to ban weapons from drones and require search warrants failed, but the Republican says he plans to try again because "we must address these privacy concerns."

Democratic Rep. Ed Gruchalla, formerly in law enforcement, opposed Becker's bill out of concern it would restrict police from effectively using drones.

"We are familiar with drones in North Dakota, and I don't know of any abuses or complaints," he said.

Drones can be as small as a bird or have a wingspan as large as a Boeing 737, but a program manager with the International Association of Chiefs of Police says most law enforcement agencies considering unmanned aircraft are looking at ones weighing around 2 pounds that only fly for about 15 minutes.

"They can be carried in the back of a car and put up quickly for an aerial view of a situation without putting humans at risk," Mike Fergus said, adding that they aren't suited for surveillance.

Medina County Sheriff Tom Miller in northeast Ohio says his office's 2-pound drone is intended primarily for search-and-rescue operations and wouldn't be used to collect evidence without a warrant.

Cincinnati resident Dwan Stone, 50, doesn't have a problem with some limits.

"But I don't oppose drones if there is a good reason for using them," she said.

Chase Jeffries, 19, also of Cincinnati, opposes them.

"I don't want the government being able to use drones to spy on people," he said.

NSA is giving your phone records to the DEA.

The same is true about arrests made by the TSA when they search airline passengers for contraband. Again over 50 percent of the arrests are made for victimless drug war crimes, with less then 1 percent of the arrests for "terrorist" crimes.

I suspect the data the NSA has been collecting on us when it taps our phones and reads our emails is used mostly to make arrests for victimless drug war crimes, and that very little of the arrests are for the "terrorists" crimes we are told the NSA is protecting us from.

Source

The NSA is giving your phone records to the DEA. And the DEA is covering it up.

By Brian Fung, Published: August 5 at 10:06

A day after we learned of a draining turf battle between the NSA and other law enforcement agencies over bulk surveillance data, it now appears that those same agencies are working together to cover up when that data gets shared.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. The information shared includes “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records,” and it’s problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counter-terrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations.

Because the SOD’s work is classified, DEA cases that began as NSA leads can’t be seen to have originated from a NSA source.

So what does the DEA do? It makes up the story of how the agency really came to the case in a process known as “parallel construction.” Reuters explains:

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

The report makes no explicit connection between the DEA and the earlier NSA bulk phone surveillance uncovered by former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden. In other words, we don’t know for sure if the DEA’s Special Operations Division is getting its tips from the same database that’s been the subject of multiple congressional hearings in recent months. We just know that the NSA sometimes grants DEA access to Section 702 phone records, and also, separately, that a special outfit within DEA sometimes gets tips from the NSA.

There’s another reason the DEA would rather not admit the involvement of NSA data in its investigations: It might lead to a constitutional challenge to the very law that gave rise to the evidence.

Earlier this year, a federal court said that if law enforcement agencies wanted to use Section 702 phone records in court, they had to say so beforehand and give the defendant a chance to contest the legality of the surveillance. Lawyers for Adel Daoud, who was arrested in a federal sting operation and charged with trying to blow up a bomb, suspect that Daoud was identified using Section 702 records but was never told.

Surveys show most people support the NSA’s bulk surveillance program strongly when the words “terrorism” or “courts” are included in the question. When pollsters draw no connection with terrorism, support tends to wane. What’ll happen when the question makes clear that the intelligence not only isn’t being used for terrorism investigations against foreign agents, but is actively being applied to criminal investigations against Americans?

Bradley Manning’s mother: My son is ‘Superman’

Source

Bradley Manning’s mother: My son is ‘Superman’

Associated Press Sun Aug 4, 2013 10:00 AM

LONDON — In a rare interview, the British mother of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning has urged her son not to give up hope, even as he faces up to 136 years in prison for disclosing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents.

In comments published by the Mail on Sunday, Susan Manning said he should know she considered him her “Superman.”

“Never give up hope, son,” she was quoted as saying. “I know I may never see you again, but I know you will be free one day. I pray it is soon.”

Susan Manning, a 59-year-old from Wales, had not given an interview in years.

She is divorced from her son’s father, Brian, and the Mail said she suffered from unspecified health problems. Manning’s parents have largely stayed out of the spotlight since transparency group WikiLeaks began publishing the documents leaked to it by the 25-year-old Army private.

The soldier was convicted last month on a slew of charges, including Espionage Act violations, but was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. Sentencing hearings in his case are expected to resume Monday.

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