Homeless in Arizona

Google petitions FISA court for ability to disclose NSA user-data requests

OK, technically Google is right and the Patriot Act is unconstitutional, but don't expect that silly FISA court to understand that.

Source

Google petitions FISA court for ability to disclose NSA user-data requests on First Amendment basis

By Brandon Bailey and Jeremy C. Owens

Staff writers

Posted: 06/19/2013 06:06:31 AM PDT

MOUNTAIN VIEW -- Citing a constitutional right to free speech, Google (GOOG) asked the secretive U.S. foreign intelligence court Tuesday for permission to tell the public how many national security data requests the company receives from federal authorities, separate from routine law enforcement requests.

"Google's reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media" about government data-gathering, "and Google's users are concerned by the allegations," the company said in a court filing. "Google must respond to such claims with more than generalities."

Civil liberties groups applauded the legal motion from the Internet giant, which has balked at the government's restrictions on disclosing national security requests.

"Other companies should follow suit," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a Twitter post Tuesday afternoon. But other companies' reaction was muted. A source at one Internet company suggested that a lawsuit might be cumbersome and slow down the disclosure process.

Google and other Internet companies have said they want to provide more information in part to dispel the impression that government agencies have broad access to Internet users' online activities. That notion was raised by initial news reports in The Washington Post and the British newspaper the Guardian about a government surveillance program known as Prism, which suggested that the National Security Agency is able to tap directly into the servers of Google and other leading Internet companies.

Internet companies have denied that the government has direct access to their servers, but Google and the other companies have acknowledged that they provide information when they are legally required to comply with government requests.

"We have long pushed for transparency so users can better understand the extent to which governments request their data," Google said Tuesday, noting that it was the first company to win permission to report how many requests it receives under one national security law, the Patriot Act.

But companies have not been allowed to report on a second type of request, made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Prism program operates under FISA authority. Federal authorities only agreed last week that companies could report on FISA requests if they were included in a broad total of all requests from local police and other government agencies.

In recent days, Yahoo (YHOO), Apple (AAPL), Facebook and Microsoft have issued reports that complied with that requirement, even though critics have said the gross numbers do not provide a clear picture of what kinds of requests the government is making.

"Greater transparency is needed," Google said Tuesday, "so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures," separately from other types of requests such as those coming from local police.

The Washington, D.C.-based court has jurisdiction over government intelligence programs and operates mostly in secret.

But in its filing, Google argued: "These matters are of significant weight and importance, and transparency is critical to advancing public debate in a thoughtful and democratic manner."

Contact Brandon Bailey at bbailey@mercurynews.com; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Edward Snowden detalla actos de ciberespionaje

Edward Snowden detalla actos de ciberespionaje

El exagente de la CIA, ha revelado que Estados Unidos ha estado llevando a cabo actos de ciberespionaje contra Hong Kong y contra China, según la agencia Europa Press.

Un reciente informe publicado por el diario South China Morning Post reseña que Snowden les facilitó información durante una entrevista tienen documentos en los que aparecen fechas específicas y las direcciones de IP de ordendores tanto en Hong Kong como en China que fueron ‘hackeados’ por la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional (NSA) durante cuatro años.

El diario South China Morning Post refirió que estos documentos también incluyen información sobre si el ataque contra un ordenador seguía o se había completado, así como detalles más específicos de la operación.

"No sé qué información específica estaban buscando en estas máquinas, sólo que usando herramientas técnicas para conseguir acceso no autorizado a ordenadores civiles es una violación de la ley, además de ser algo éticamente dudoso", subrayó el exagente de la CIA, según el diario South China Morning Post.

Un popular periódico respaldado por el Partido Comunista exhortó el viernes a los dirigentes chinos a obtener más información de un contratista estadounidense en lugar de repatriarlo, ya que, dijo, sus revelaciones sobre los programas de vigilancia de Estados Unidos son de relevancia para China, según un artículo publicado por la agencia AP.

El editorial del Global Times se publicó después de que Snowden afirmara en una entrevista que la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional de Estados Unidos hackeó 61 mil blancos, incluyendo cientos en Hong Kong y China.

La entrevista se publicó en el diario South China Morning Post, de Hong Kong.

Snowden reveló el fin de semana que él era la fuente de una filtración de información ultrasecreta sobre las operaciones de espionaje de la NSA, alegando que estaba revelando atropellos.

Habló con reporteros desde una ubicación secreta en el territorio chino semiautónomo de Hong Kong, una elección que generó dudas sobre si Washington pediría su repatriación para procesarlo.

El Global Times dijo en su editorial, que se publicó en las ediciones en chino e inglés, que Snowden podría brindar datos de inteligencia que ayudarían a China a actualizar su comprensión del ciberespacio y mejorar su posición en negociaciones con Washington.

"Snowden tomó la iniciativa para exponer los ataques del gobierno de Estados Unidos contra las redes informáticas de Hong Kong y China continental. Esto es de relevancia para los intereses nacionales de China", dice el comentario. "Quizá tiene más evidencia. El gobierno chino debería dejarlo hablar y, de acuerdo a si la información es pública, usarla como evidencia para negociar con Estados Unidos de manera abierta o en privado".

El diario dijo que el gobierno chino no sólo debería considerar las relaciones de Beijing con Estados Unidos, sino también la opinión pública nacional, la cual de acuerdo con el diario estaría descontenta si Snowden es repatriado, publicó AP.

Benefició programa de espionaje

Benefició programa de espionaje

Se pudieron evitar más de 50 ataques terroristas en 20 países tras los atentados del 11S, según la NSA.

Los programas de vigilancia con los que el Gobierno de EU., recopila registros de llamadas y datos de usuarios de internet que evitaron más de 50 ataques terroristas en 20 países tras los atentados del 11S, incluido uno contra la Bolsa de Valores de Nueva York.

Así lo reveló el director de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional (NSA) de Estados Unidos, el general Keith Alexander.

En una audiencia ante el Comité de Inteligencia de la Cámara de Representantes, Alexander sugirió que algunas de las herramientas de esos programas podrían haber ayudado a evitar los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001.

Alexander prevé dar detalles de los más de 50 ataques terroristas abortados a los miembros del Congreso en una sesión a puerta cerrada este miércoles.

El director adjunto de la Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (FBI), Sean Joyce, dio algunos detalles y afirmó que entre los ataques evitados figura uno contra un periódico danés y otro para poner una bomba en la Bolsa de Valores de Nueva York.

El supuesto complot para atentar contra la bolsa neoyorquina implicó a un "extremista" localizado en Yemen y a otra persona ubicada en Kansas que intercambiaron varias llamadas telefónicas.

El director de la NSA defendió la efectividad de los programas de su agencia, que eran secretos hasta que Edward Snowden reveló su existencia, y alertó de que desclasificarlos por completo causaría "un daño irreversible" a la seguridad de EU. y de sus aliados.

Snowden, extécnico de la CIA y de la NSA, filtró a los diarios The Guardian y The Washington Post la existencia de los programas secretos mediante los que EU recopila registros telefónicos y datos digitales de millones de usuarios.

Scrapping equipment key to Afghan drawdown

Scrapping equipment key to Afghan drawdown

By Ernesto Londoño, Published: June 19 E-mail the writer

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — Facing a tight withdrawal deadline and tough terrain, the U.S. military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to wind down its role in the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014.

The massive disposal effort, which U.S. military officials call unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight amid an ongoing debate inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won’t be returning home. Military planners have determined that they will not ship back more than $7 billion worth of equipment — about 20 percent of what the U.S. military has in Afghanistan — because it is no longer needed or would be too costly to ship back home.

That has left the Pentagon in a quandary about what to do with the items. Bequeathing a large share to the Afghan government would be challenging because of complicated rules governing equipment donations to other countries, and there is concern that Afghanistan’s fledgling forces would be unable to maintain it. Some gear may be sold or donated to allied nations, but few are likely to be able to retrieve it from the war zone.

Therefore, much of it will continue to be shredded, cut and crushed to be sold for pennies per pound on the Afghan scrap market — a process that reflects a presumptive end to an era of protracted ground wars. The destruction of tons of equipment is all but certain to raise sharp questions in Afghanistan and the United States about whether the Pentagon’s approach is fiscally responsible and whether it should find ways to leave a greater share to the Afghans.

“We’re making history doing what we’re doing here,” said Maj. Gen. Kurt J. Stein, head of the 1st Sustainment Command, who is overseeing the drawdown in Afghanistan. “This is the largest retrograde mission in history.”

The most contentious and closely watched part of the effort involves the disposal of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, the hulking beige personnel carriers that the Pentagon raced to build starting in 2007 to counter the threat of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The massive trucks, known as MRAPs, came to symbolize the bloody evolution of wars that were meant to be short conflicts but turned into quagmires.

The Pentagon has determined that it will no longer have use for about 12,300 of its 25,500 MRAPs scattered at bases worldwide, officials said. In Afghanistan, the military has labeled about 2,000 of its roughly 11,000 MRAPs “excess.” About 9,000 will be shipped to the United States and U.S. military bases in Kuwait and elsewhere, but the majority of the unwanted vehicles — which cost about $1 million each — will probably be shredded, officials said, because they are unlikely to find clients willing to come pick them up.

“MRAPs have served us well in the current war, but we will not need all that we bought for Iraq and Afghanistan in the future,” Alan Estevez, the assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, said in a statement. “It is cost prohibitive to retrograde and reset MRAPs that we do not need for the future.”

‘Gold dust’

Those MRAPs that the Pentagon has deemed unnecessary have been arriving by the dozen at scrap yards at four U.S. military bases in Afghanistan in recent months. Toiling under the searing sun last week at this vast base in southern Kandahar province, contract workers from Nepal and other countries in the region wore fireproof suits and masks as they used special blowtorches to dismantle vehicles built to withstand deadly blasts. It takes about 12 hours to tear apart each MRAP.

In another section of the scrap yard, a massive grinder gobbled slabs of steel, turning them into small scraps. The debris is packed into U.S.-owned shipping containers that also have been deemed unfit to return home.

Last month, the Kandahar yard produced 11 million pounds of scrap that was sold to Afghan contractors for a few cents per pound, said Morgan Gunn, a Defense Logistics Agency employee who runs the site. Afghans use the scrap mainly for construction and as makeshift spare parts.

“Gold dust is what they call it,” Gunn said.

Military officials have drawn little attention to the scrapping operations, mindful that the endeavor might appear wasteful in an era of contracting defense budgets and misguided at a time when Afghan troops are being killed at a record rate. But officials argue that the effort is part of a withdrawal operation that is being carried out in a fiscally responsible, carefully planned manner.

“One might ask: Why not give it to the Afghans?” Stein said as he toured the Kandahar yard. “It’s such a fast-paced operation, and most of it is trash. We don’t want to leave this in the battlefield.”

As they have debated how much excess equipment to shred or sell, officials have considered whether the defense industry would suffer if the Pentagon unloaded tons of used equipment on the market at vastly reduced prices. Additionally, Pentagon policy requires that allied nations seeking to take ownership of excess U.S. equipment travel to Afghanistan to pick it up — an onerous task that few nations are likely to take on.

When the U.S. military withdrew from Iraq, it donated much of its equipment to the Iraqis, who had access to cheap fuel, a robust defense budget and more sophisticated mechanics. The Pentagon also shipped a significant share to Afghanistan, where a troop surge was underway. But donating MRAPs to the Afghans would be more complicated and potentially counterproductive, military officials said.

“Frankly, in a lot of ways, the Afghan economy and military can’t absorb some of the things the Iraqis did,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond V. Mason, the Army deputy chief of staff for logistics. “We don’t want to give [the Afghans] a lot of equipment that they can’t handle and could compound their challenges.”

Military officials said they have spent billions of dollars equipping and building up Afghanistan’s security forces over the past decade, outfitting them with lighter tactical vehicles that are a better fit for the country’s rudimentary road networks.

A situation unlike in Iraq

The U.S. Army owns the lion’s share of the military equipment currently in Afghanistan. As of May, Mason said, $25 billion worth of equipment was deployed with Army personnel. After an analysis of needs and costs, it has decided to ship back no more than 76 percent. Transporting that much will cost $2 billion to $3 billion, the Army estimates. And repairing the gear that comes back will cost $8 billion to $9 billion.

Stein, the general overseeing the Afghanistan drawdown, headed the same process in Iraq, which turned out to be a far easier mission. For starters, the U.S. military had a relatively well- organized system in place to hand over bases and equipment to the Iraqi government 21 / 2 years before American troops pulled out entirely. Security was more permissive. And, crucially, the U.S. military could use its large bases in next-door Kuwait as a staging ground for items driven out of Iraq.

“Kuwait was a lifesaver,” Stein said, noting that there are no neighboring U.S. bases where equipment leaving Afghanistan could be easily stored. “It’s very hard to get our stuff out of Afghanistan. In Iraq, we could drive it out to Kuwait, and it sat there for a year or two until the Army decided its disposition.”

As the U.S. military reduces its footprint in Afghanistan from 150 bases to 50 by February, Stein’s teams are ramping up their efforts, finding more efficient ways of sorting through equipment to be shipped and drawing from lessons learned in Iraq.

Until a few months ago, the military flew out the vast majority of the equipment it was sending back to the United States.

In recent months, after Pakistan, a neighbor of landlocked Afghanistan, agreed to let the U.S. military use its roads to ship materiel out through its ports, most containers that don’t include sensitive materials or weapons are being trucked out by land. Shipping through Pakistan is by no means trouble-free — and officials recognize that the route could get shut down in the event of a new spat between Islamabad and Washington.

“We continue to get delays. There’s still corruption, taxes, tariffs,” Stein said. “But our equipment is getting through.”

BP jobs program???

We are adding 20,000 BP cops to prevent unskilled Mexicans from sneaking into the USA and working as migrant farm labors, gardeners, dishwashers, maids, hamburger flippers at McDonald's, construction grunts and a whole slew of other minimum wage jobs.

And remember that many of these jobs Americans refuse to do.

Last we are doubling the 350 miles of fences to 700 miles of fences. Of course these new 350 miles of fences won't prevent these low paid dishwashers and burger flippers from sneaking into the country any more then the current 350 miles of fences do.

Source

U.S. senators reach deal on border-security proposals

By Erin Kelly and Dan Nowicki Gannett Washington Bureau Thu Jun 20, 2013 12:09 PM

Supporters of a sweeping immigration reform bill reached a tentative deal today to super-size the bill’s border security provisions by doubling the number of Border Patrol agents to 40,000, building 700 miles of fencing along the Southwest border, and increasing aerial drones and surveillance equipment used to detect illegal border crossings.

The so-called “border surge” amendment, crafted by Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota in consultation with the authors of the main bill, would spend roughly $30 billion just to hire the additional Border Patrol agents, Senate aides said.

The border security requirements would have to be met before undocumented immigrants could move from a provisional legal status to earn “green cards” that make them legal permanent residents. However, some farm workers and young immigrants brought to the United States as children would not have to wait for the border requirements to be met. The larger bill already offers them an expedited pathway to citizenship.

The development won bipartisan praise Thursday as a breakthrough. The goal of the change is to attract more Republicans to the reform bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight.” The group includes Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake. Both Arizona senators have signed on as co-sponsors of the Corker-Hoeven amendment.

The compromise “would substantially, and I mean substantially, increase the border-security elements” in terms of “triggers,” Flake said Thursday during a conference call with national media.

“The bill already had 350 miles of fencing — this would require 700 miles of fencing, so this is a substantial difference and we believe it will bring a number of votes as well,” Flake said.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the Gang of Eight’s chief Democratic negotiator, also hailed the deal.

“The idea that broke the logjam is the so-called ‘border surge’ plan,” Schumer said Thursday, on the Senate floor. “The border surge is breathtaking in its size and scope. This deal will employ an unprecedented number of boots on the ground and drones in the air. It would double the size of the Border Patrol, from its current level to over 40,000. It will finish the job of completing the fence along the entire 700-mile stretch of the Southwest border.”

Conservatives have attacked the larger bill on the Senate floor during the past two weeks, saying it is too weak on border security. Supporters hope the new amendment will persuade more Republicans to vote for the legislation, allowing it to pass with a large majority that could have an impact on the willingness of House leaders to agree to comprehensive reform. GOP backers of the bill hope it can pass the Senate with at least 70 votes.

“We must secure the border first,” Hoeven said Thursday on the Senate floor. “It’s what Americans demand, and that’s what we must do to get comprehensive immigration reform right.”

Hoeven said the amendment would be filed later today.

On the floor, McCain called the emerging measure “a very tough bill” and asked Corker if critics could still argue against the legislation “by saying that it does not give us a secure border?”

Corker responded: “If this amendment passes, which I hope that it will, I don’t know how anybody could argue that the reason they’re not supporting this legislation is because we haven’t addressed securing the border. We have addressed that — we’ve addressed that in spades in this legislation.”

Uncertain future for border prosecution program

Of course this also makes my point in that the drug war is a jobs program for cops, prosecutors and judges in this case where cities, counties and state governments are sucking up Federal cash which is used to prosecute local people for Federal drug war crimes.

Source

Uncertain future for border prosecution program

Associated Press Wed Jun 19, 2013 1:07 PM

FALFURRIAS, Texas — On an October afternoon in 2009, a Dallas man arrived at a highway checkpoint about an hour north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Inside the gas tank of his pickup truck, agents found 99 pounds of marijuana.

When the Border Patrol called the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency said it was not interested because the bust wasn’t big enough. So the 32-year-old suspect was passed to the local sheriff and pleaded guilty to drug possession in state court. He got a suspended sentence and paid a fine.

If the same incident happened again today at the checkpoint south of Falfurrias, the man would lose his drugs but probably not be charged at all.

Since the fall of 2010, prosecutors in tiny Brooks County, population 7,223, have refused to take such cases because of a debt dispute with the Justice Department involving a long-running program that reimburses border-state prosecutors for the cost of pursuing some drug offenders. Other border counties are frustrated too, because the government has proposed eliminating the reimbursements.

Now prosecutors from Texas to California fear the lack of federal help could allow many drug suspects to go free.

The reimbursement program was supposed to allow local prosecutors to help federal authorities go after suspected criminals without squeezing their offices financially.

In fiscal year 2009, the Justice Department reimbursed prosecutors in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California for more than 10,000 cases through what was then called the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative. But the money stopped coming for Brooks County after an audit showed the county was overpaid by nearly $2 million. The funding for all other border prosecutors could dry up as well.

Armando Barrera, the former Brooks County district attorney who first stopped accepting the cases, once questioned the federal prosecutor in charge of the government’s Corpus Christi office about the cases he used to take.

“I asked him, ‘Well, what are you guys doing with the checkpoint cases?’ and he said, ‘Well, we’re just turning them loose,’” Barrera recalled.

That doesn’t sit well with John Hubert, district attorney in neighboring Kenedy County, which is home to a similar Border Patrol highway checkpoint.

“If the feds cut them loose … the first thing that is going to happen is the drug dealers are going to know ‘Hey, guess what? If you go through there with less than 250 pounds, you get cut loose,’” Hubert said.

Hubert estimated his office gets about 245 cases a year from the checkpoint. The Falfurrias checkpoint generated 158 cases for the Brooks County district attorney in 2009, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Poor, rural counties can’t afford to subsidize the federal government’s prosecution efforts by paying for the cases themselves, Hubert said. But at the same time, he worries about the message sent by letting suspects go.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Kenneth Magidson, said all the cases brought to his office from the Falfurrias checkpoint are reviewed. Last month, his office won another conviction against a drug-trafficking ring that had tons of marijuana seized at that checkpoint.

Will Glaspy, who oversees the DEA’s operations in an area of South Texas that includes the checkpoint, said the DEA continues to process those cases even if suspects are not charged. And if any of the smugglers are arrested again, they could be prosecuted for the cumulative amounts.

The cooperative arrangement dates back to 1994, when border district attorneys and federal prosecutors agreed to share some of the drug caseload.

In San Diego County, home to the Border Patrol’s busiest checkpoints, an agreement was signed that year. Local authorities would pursue low-level “mules” without criminal records who were caught by the feds with smaller drug amounts.

“Those were the cases the U.S. attorney was not prosecuting,” said Rachel Cano, now an assistant chief for the San Diego County district attorney. Ninety percent pleaded guilty and got probation, she said.

But by 1998, local prosecutors on the border had banded together to tell the federal government that they couldn’t continue accepting the cases without compensation.

Eventually, Congress budgeted money for reimbursement. Last year, San Diego County received nearly $2.7 million from the program for handling 1,335 cases, more than any other local prosecutor’s office.

One of those who pushed for the reimbursement program was longtime El Paso District Attorney Jaime Esparza. If reimbursement were halted, Esparza said, he and other border prosecutors would have to stop accepting cases from federal authorities.

“The best part of the program is it allows the federal government to prosecute the more complex, the more serious cases” and still provides for the prosecution of lesser drug offenders in state court, Esparza said.

Getting money for the reimbursement program has been an annual fight. The funding reached $31 million in 2011 but fell to $10 million in 2012 combined with similar efforts along the northern border. The program was left out of the White House’s 2013 budget request.

However, a comprehensive immigration reform bill being debated in the Senate calls for funding through 2018.

Brooks County District Judge Richard Terrell handled the Dallas man’s case and every other checkpoint matter that came through the county courthouse during his years on the bench. He said the practice that county commissioners once saw as an easy revenue source became a financial burden.

Costs such as transporting probation violators back to the county or tracking down fugitives swamped the system. An early promise by federal authorities to send only first-time offenders who would be eligible for probation was repeatedly compromised, he said.

“This is a poor county,” Terrell said. “They do not have the resources, and it’s completely unrealistic to think that this county can handle those things.”

Looming in the background is the $1.9 million overpayment revealed by a 2007 federal audit. The Justice Department does not seem willing to forgive the debt, and the county has held firm that it needs the money.

Carlos Garcia, who just began serving as Brooks County district attorney in January, says the reimbursement issue must be solved before he can resume taking checkpoint cases, but unlike Terrell, he wants them.

“People need to be held accountable for whatever crimes they commit,” Garcia said. If the county had an arrangement with the federal government to handle some cases, then “at least they’re getting justice in one of the courts, the state side or the federal side.”

FBI uses drones inside U.S. for spying, director says

Source

FBI uses drones inside U.S. for spying, director says

By Richard A. Serrano and Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau

June 19, 2013, 6:18 p.m.

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified Wednesday that the controversial National Security Agency surveillance program "has been a contributing factor, one dot among many dots" for tracking terrorist plots, and he admitted for the first time that the bureau had used surveillance drones inside the U.S.

The FBI uses drones "in a very, very minimal way and very seldom," said Mueller, adding that "we have very few."

Mueller's comments were the first time an FBI official publicly acknowledged that the bureau used remotely piloted aircraft, though the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have both tested drones for use in investigations.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, asked Mueller to detail what protections the FBI had put in place to limit how video and other information collected by drones was used by federal investigators. She called drones "the greatest threat to the privacy of Americans."

"I will have to go back and check in terms of what we keep in terms of the images and the like. But it is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized needs, and that is the principal privacy limitations we have," Mueller said.

Mueller said the FBI was in the "initial stages" of writing policies to limit the effect on the privacy of American citizens. "We're exploring not only the use but also the necessary guidelines for that use," he added.

In what is probably his last appearance before Congress before he leaves office, Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the NSA's use of telephone logs and Internet records was especially crucial in learning which home-grown suspects or foreign immigrants are in contact with Al Qaeda or other terrorist networks overseas.

"You never know which dot is going to be the key," he said. "But you want as many dots as you can. And if you close down a program like this, there will be ... fewer dots to connect."

Mueller, the sixth FBI director, said the bureau already was making transition plans for his successor, even though President Obama had not yet sent the name of a nominee to the Senate for confirmation.

Mueller said he had met with Obama to discuss his replacement, but would not detail their conversation. The White House, meanwhile, has indicated the president plans to nominate James B. Comey, a former deputy attorney general, to the post.

But, Mueller said, no matter how much the FBI prepares and who is ultimately installed to succeed him, some unexpected crime event probably will change everything. Just a week after Mueller took office, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks instantly morphed the FBI from a traditional anti-crime organization fighting gangs and bank robberies into one with terrorism and national security as its top priority.

"It will take I would say a month to really get one's feet on the ground," Mueller said. "But in that month, I can tell you something's going to happen. So whatever you planned in terms of sitting down and looking at something, something else will come up and your attention will be diverted."

Committee members from both political parties were generous in their compliments to the outgoing director, thanking him for his 12 years of running the bureau. Some proclaimed his success in upgrading the FBI into a more sophisticated, highly technological organization to deal with an emerging world of cyber-crime, international terrorism and complex Wall Street money schemes.

But several Republicans appeared frustrated over a number of issues, including why Mueller's FBI had not made arrests in the Internal Revenue Service political controversy, in which tea party and other conservative groups were targeted for special scrutiny.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pressed Mueller to divulge the scope and goal of the FBI's investigation into the IRS matter, but the director provided only minimal details. He said a dozen agents were assigned to the case and that it was being directed out of the Washington field office.

"There is a sense of urgency with the investigation," he said. "It is not languishing."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Obscure untested oversight board will protect our rights

Source

Obama relying on untested oversight board

Associated Press Tue Jun 18, 2013 11:55 PM

WASHINGTON — The obscure oversight board that President Barack Obama wants to scrutinize the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance system is little known for good reason. The U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has operated fitfully during its eight years of low-profile existence, stymied by congressional infighting and, at times, censorship by government lawyers.

The privacy board was to meet Wednesday, its first meeting since revelations that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. The meeting will be closed to the public.

The board has existed since 2004, first as part of the executive branch, then after a legislative overhaul that took effect in 2008, as an independent board of presidential appointees reporting to Congress. But hindered by Obama administration delays and then resistance from Republicans in Congress, the new board was not fully functional until May, when its chairman, David Medine, finally was confirmed.

Obama’s sudden leaning on the board as a civil libertarian counterweight to the government’s elaborate secret surveillance program places trust in an organization that is untested and whose authority at times still defers to Congress and government censors.

“They’ve been in startup mode a long time,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, a senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan civil liberties watchdog group. “With all the concerns about the need for a debate on the issue of surveillance, this is a great opportunity for them to get involved.”

It was not clear how much classified information would be discussed at Wednesday’s meeting. As late as April 2012, the board’s incoming chairman did not have a security clearance and the board did not have the classified, secure meeting area that is necessary to review and discuss classified government material.

The board’s five appointees recently got security clearances, said Franklin, who attended the new group’s first two meetings in October and March. “The first thing they can do is push for more disclosure and a more well-rounded picture of the surveillance programs,” she said.

In an interview with television talk show host Charlie Rose, Obama said he wanted the group to spearhead a national conversation not only on the surveillance programs recently disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, but also “about the general problem of these big data sets because this is not going to be restricted to government entities.”

The board’s mandate includes privacy as well as national security concerns, so, in theory, it could veer into questions about how Internet companies like Google and Facebook as well as hundreds of other data-mining firms deal with privacy and how government might regulate those entities. But as Franklin and other civil liberties experts said, the board’s role is largely advisory, setting out problems and suggesting possible options.

“They have statutory authority in two main areas,” Franklin said. “One is evaluating whether safeguards on civil liberties are adequate and the other is in transparency — informing the public and ensuring the government is more transparent.”

But there are still limits on the group’s independence when it comes to the public disclosure of classified material. While the board has leeway in scrutinizing classified material and referencing top secret documents, it can only make those materials public if they are first declassified by the government, said Lanny Davis, who was one of the board’s first five members.

“They can say anything they want short of putting out classified information,” said Davis, a former senior counselor to President Bill Clinton who has worked as a consultant, commentator and representative for several foreign governments.

Davis ran into that brick wall in 2007 when the board was preparing a draft of its report for Congress on government national security programs. One passage in the draft described anti-terrorism programs that represented “potentially problematic” intrusions on civil liberties, but it was deleted at the direction of the President George W. Bush’s White House. Bush administration lawyers made more than 200 other revisions in the report, and while the board accepted most of the changes, Davis quit. Going public with his decision, Davis said he was not reacting to censorship of any classified material but instead the board’s structural ties to the executive branch that allowed White House lawyers to heavily edit the report.

“The law as it was then made the board a functional equivalent of White House staff,” Davis said. “Congress corrected that by making the board independent. If they have a problem with classified material, they still can’t release it on their own. But they can go out and have a press conference complaining about it. Before, they had to defer to the White House.”

Congress’ revision of the legal authority that set up the board gave Obama the ability to appoint a new group of appointees when he came into office in January 2009. But Obama did not forward his first nominations until December 2010, and they languished among dozens of other nominations in Congress.

The current board is a mix of civil libertarians and former government lawyers. Medine, the chairman, most recently worked as a Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer. James X. Dempsey is a vice president of public policy with the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet civil liberties group. Elisebeth Collins Cook and Rachel Brand both worked as Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration and are now in private practice. Patricia M. Wald is a former federal judge appointed by President Jimmy Carter.

Three members — Medine, Cook and Brand — have worked as lawyers at WilmerHale, a top legal and lobbying shop in Washington. Medine lobbied for several years for data security groups, including Iron Mountain and the National Association for Information Destruction, a trade association for shredding and other information disposal companies. Brand lobbied for Google, T-Mobile and a pharmaceutical association.

Feds charge freedom fighter Snowden with treason!!!!

Source

No word from China on NSA leaker’s possible return

By Pete Yost Associated Press Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:49 AM

WASHINGTON — Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who says he revealed that the National Security Agency collects Americans’ phone records and Internet data from U.S. communication companies, now faces charges of espionage and theft of government property.

Snowden is believed to be in Hong Kong, which could complicate efforts to bring him to a U.S. federal court to answer charges that he engaged in unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information.

In addition to those charges, both brought under the Espionage Act, the government charged Snowden with theft of government property. Each crime carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Hong Kong was silent Saturday on whether Snowden should be extradited to the United States now that he has been charged, but some of China’s legislators said the decision should be up to the Chinese government.

The one-page criminal complaint against Snowden was unsealed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., part of the Eastern District of Virginia where his former employer, government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered, in McLean.

The complaint is dated June 14, five days after Snowden’s name first surfaced as the person who had leaked to the news media that the NSA, in two highly classified surveillance programs, gathered telephone and Internet records to ferret out terror plots.

It was unclear Friday whether the U.S. had yet to begin an effort to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong. He could contest extradition on grounds of political persecution. In general, the extradition agreement between the U.S. and Hong Kong excepts political offenses from the obligation to turn over a person.

Hong Kong had no immediate reaction to word of the charges against Snowden.

The Espionage Act arguably is a political offense. The Obama administration has now used the act in seven criminal cases in an unprecedented effort to stem leaks. In one of them, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning acknowledged he sent more than 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and other materials to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. His military trial is underway.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, welcomed the charges against Snowden.

“I’ve always thought this was a treasonous act,” he said in a statement. “I hope Hong Kong’s government will take him into custody and extradite him to the U.S.”

But the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower advocacy group, said Snowden should be shielded from prosecution by whistle-blower protection laws.

“He disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal, and his actions alone brought about the long-overdue national debate about the proper balance between privacy and civil liberties, on the one hand, and national security on the other,” the group said in a statement.

Michael di Pretoro, a retired 30-year veteran with the FBI who served from 1990 to 1994 as the legal liaison officer at the American consulate in Hong Kong, said “relations between U.S. and Hong Kong law enforcement personnel are historically quite good.”

“In my time, I felt the degree of cooperation was outstanding to the extent that I almost felt I was in an FBI field office,” di Pretoro said.

The U.S. and Hong Kong have a standing agreement on the surrender of fugitives. However, Snowden’s appeal rights could drag out any extradition proceeding.

The success or failure of any extradition proceeding depends on what the suspect is charged with under U.S. law and how it corresponds to Hong Kong law under the treaty. In order for Hong Kong officials to honor the extradition request, they have to have some applicable statute under their law that corresponds with a violation of U.S. law.

Hong Kong lawmakers said Saturday that the Chinese government should make the final decision on whether Snowden should be extradited to the United States.

Outspoken legislator Leung Kwok-hung said Beijing should instruct Hong Kong to protect Snowden from extradition before his case gets dragged through the court system.

Leung urged the people of Hong Kong to “take to the streets to protect Snowden.”

In Iceland, a business executive said Friday that a private plane was on standby to transport Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland, although Iceland’s government says it has not received an asylum request from Snowden.

Business executive Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said he has been in contact with someone representing Snowden and has not spoken to the American himself. Private donations are being collected to pay for the flight, he said.

“There are a number of people that are interested in freedom of speech and recognize the importance of knowing who is spying on us,” Sigurvinsson said. “We are people that care about privacy.”

Disclosure of the criminal complaint came as President Barack Obama held his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board and as his intelligence chief sought ways to help Americans understand more about sweeping government surveillance efforts exposed by Snowden.

The five members of the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board met with Obama for an hour in the White House Situation Room, questioning the president on the two NSA programs that have stoked controversy.

One program collects billions of U.S. phone records. The second gathers audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas, and probably some Americans in the process, who use major Internet service providers, such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

Snowden background check may have been flawed

Source

Official: Snowden background check may have been flawed

USA Today Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:01 PM

A 2011 re-investigation of Edward Snowden's background check may have been faulty, Office of Personnel Management Inspector General Patrick McFarland told Congress on Thursday. Snowden is a former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked details of a top-secret spying program at NSA.

"We do believe that there may be some problems" with the re-investigation, McFarland said when Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., asked him whether he had concerns about whether Snowden's reinvestigation may not have been carried out in an appropriate or thorough manner. McFarland was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on the federal workforce, which Tester chairs.

McFarland said that U.S. Investigative Services, a company that handles 45% of the federal government's contracted background checks, conducted the 2011 re-investigation into Snowden. Later that year, McFarland's office began investigating USIS for contract fraud. That investigation is still ongoing.

In a statement, USIS said it received a subpoena for records from McFarland's office in January 2012, with which it complied. USIS said it has cooperated fully with the government's civil investigation, but said it has not been told it is under criminal investigation.

USIS would not confirm or deny whether it had conducted any investigations into Snowden, saying those investigations are confidential.

McFarland told the subcommittee that 18 background investigators and record searchers — 11 federal employees and seven contractors — have been convicted for falsifying background investigation reports since the IG began investigating so-called fabrication cases in 2006. The abuses included interviews that never occurred, answers to questions that were never asked, and record checks that were never conducted, McFarland said.

A 19th investigator pled guilty last month, McFarland said, and a 20th is expected to plead guilty this week. Both investigators are contractors, he said.

Snowden was fired from his job as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor after revealing NSA programs that collect private online communications from companies such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google, and phone records and metadata from Verizon.

The numbers game muddies NSA surveillance debate

Source

The numbers game muddies NSA surveillance debate

Associated PressBy EILEEN SULLIVAN and LARA JAKES | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to win over public trust, the Obama administration has been throwing around a lot of numbers as it tries to describe — in as much detail as possible without jeopardizing national security — the terror plots it says were thwarted by the government's sweeping surveillance of U.S. communications.

There's 50, 12, 10 and four. You also hear 20 and 90 in statements and official testimony, and even 702 and 215, though those aren't for estimates of plots.

The numbers game is just part of the effort to convince skeptical Americans that the recently disclosed National Security Agency spy programs are vital in detecting and stopping extremist plots. But the approach has produced relatively limited, often vague information, and it has ended up confusing many in Congress as lawmakers grapple with how to assure people that their privacy rights are protected along with their security.

There are questions about effectiveness that still lack answers, "and we've gotten some answers that need further clarity," House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Thursday. He was referring to the so-called 215 program, which refers to the section of the anti-terror Patriot Act that authorizes the NSA to collect Americans' phone records.

And, he added, "we also should ask in those cases where it was successful, how dated were the records."

Another NSA program — known as 702 — authorizes the agency to sweep up Internet usage data from all over the world that goes through nine major U.S.-based providers.

Officials have used the rest of the numbers in Capitol Hill testimony over the past week as they have sought to allay Americans' concerns that the programs violate their privacy.

Top officials told Congress that the programs have been key in thwarting at least 50 terror plots across 20 countries. And, they said, an estimated 10 to 12 of those plots were directed at the U.S. They publicly offered four examples among the 50-plus cases:

—An NSA-provided phone record led authorities to identify a terrorist financier in San Diego who was arrested in 2007.

—The NSA's surveillance of Internet usage in 2009 revealed that a Chicago man, David Headley, was plotting to bomb a Danish newspaper that had published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce said. The FBI had been tipped off that Headley was involved in the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

—Information from the NSA's Internet usage surveillance of overseas operatives helped thwart a 2009 plot to blow up the New York City subway system. NSA Director General Keith Alexander said this information led investigators to Najibullah Zazi in Colorado. And the phone records collection gave investigators the connections between Zazi and his associates. Zazi ultimately pleaded guilty and provided information that helped send two of his friends to prison.

—A plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange was thwarted in its early planning stages because the NSA was able identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with Khalid Ouazzani in Kansas City, Mo., Joyce said. This enabled investigators to identify co-conspirators and prevent the attack he said. Ouazzani pleaded guilty in May 2010 in federal court in Missouri to charges of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, bank fraud and money laundering. Ouazzani was not charged with the alleged plot against the stock exchange.

The administration has yet to provide firm numbers of precisely how many plots have been stopped worldwide because of these programs — in part because intelligence officials are still trying to figure that out.

"The reason I'm not giving you a specific number is we want the rest of the community to actually beat those up and make sure that everything we have there is exactly right," Alexander said Tuesday during a House intelligence committee hearing. "I'd give you the number 50-X, but if somebody says, 'Well, not this one. Actually, what we're finding out is there's more. They said you missed these three or four.'"

Alexander said, "These programs are immensely valuable for protecting our nation and securing the security of our allies." And the NSA's authorization to sweep up Internet usage data has contributed to 90 percent of the information used to thwart at least 50 terror plots Alexander and his deputy told lawmakers.

On Wednesday, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there are 10 to 12 cases in which the phone records surveillance program, authorized in the Patriot Act, contributed to breaking up terror plots.

He said that "of those, domestically, I think there will be anywhere from 10 or 12 where 215 was important in some way, shape or form."

But later in the same hearing, Mueller said he's not actually sure if it was the phone records authorization that helped thwart terror attacks in the 10 to 12 cases.

"I'm not sure whether all of them are 215. They're a combination or the other," Mueller said, referring to the phone records program and Internet usage programs.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson referred requests for clarification to the NSA and National Counterterrorism Center. He said Mueller "was obviously unclear on the breakdown" since the FBI is not compiling the list of cases.

The confusion has, predictably, given rise to demands for more transparency by the intelligence agencies.

A growing number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are pushing plans to open secret court orders authorizing the surveillance. Schiff, who filed House legislation on Thursday to match a similar Senate proposal, said it aimed at "allowing Americans to know how the court has interpreted the legal authorities" to ensure they are not being overly or improperly intrusive.

Additionally, a group of mostly Democratic senators are seeking to amend the Patriot Act to require the government to cite specific suspected links to terrorism or espionage before asking the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve the collection of Americans' phone records.

But the legislation isn't likely to be approved quickly, and confusion continues to hang over Congress and its constituents.

Noting frustration, Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said trying to balance support for classified intelligence programs against a transparent democracy is always a challenge. But all concerned agree the current situation has fueled public skepticism.

"The public trusts their government to protect the country from another 9/11-type attack," Rogers said this week, "but that trust can start to wane when they are faced with inaccuracies, half-truths and outright lies about the way the intelligence programs are being run."

___

Associated Press writers Kimberly Dozier and Donna Cassata contributed to this report.

Follow Eileen Sullivan on Twitter at https://twitter.com/esullivanap and Lara Jakes at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

Source

Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

By JAMES RISEN and NICK WINGFIELD

Published: June 19, 2013

WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Spy agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Max Kelly.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.

Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly.

“We are all in these Big Data business models,” said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.”

Although Silicon Valley has sold equipment to the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies for a generation, the interests of the two began to converge in new ways in the last few years as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data — at the same time that the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise. “These worlds overlap,” said Philipp S. Krüger, chief executive of Explorist, an Internet start-up in New York.

The sums the N.S.A. spends in Silicon Valley are classified, as is the agency’s total budget, which independent analysts say is $8 billion to $10 billion a year.

Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.

A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.

Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped. Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.

In its recruiting in Silicon Valley, the N.S.A. sends some of its most senior officials to lure the best of the best. No less than Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency’s director and the chief of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, showed up at one of the world’s largest hacker conferences in Las Vegas last summer, looking stiff in an uncharacteristic T-shirt and jeans, to give the keynote speech. His main purpose at Defcon, the conference, was to recruit hackers for his spy agency.

N.S.A. badges are often seen on the lapels of officials at other technology and information security conferences. “They’re very open about their interest in recruiting from the hacker community,” said Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

But perhaps no one embodies the tightening relationship between the N.S.A. and the valley more than Kenneth A. Minihan.

A career Air Force intelligence officer, Mr. Minihan was the director of the N.S.A. during the Clinton administration until his retirement in the late 1990s, and then he ran the agency’s outside professional networking organization. Today he is managing director of Paladin Capital Group, a venture capital firm based in Washington that in part specializes in financing start-ups that offer high-tech solutions for the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies. In effect, Mr. Minihan is an advanced scout for the N.S.A. as it tries to capitalize on the latest technology to analyze and exploit the vast amounts of data flowing around the world and inside the United States.

The members of Paladin’s strategic advisory board include Richard C. Schaeffer Jr., a former N.S.A. executive. While Paladin is a private firm, the American intelligence community has its own in-house venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, financed by the Central Intelligence Agency to invest in high-tech start-ups.

Many software technology firms involved in data analytics are open about their connections to intelligence agencies. Gary King, a co-founder and chief scientist at Crimson Hexagon, a start-up in Boston, said in an interview that he had given talks at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., about his company’s social media analytics tools.

The future holds the prospect of ever greater cooperation between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. because data storage is expected to increase at an annual compound rate of 53 percent through 2016, according to the International Data Corporation.

“We reached a tipping point, where the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it,” said Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. “Now we have an incentive to keep it forever.”

Social media sites in the meantime are growing as voluntary data mining operations on a scale that rivals or exceeds anything the government could attempt on its own. “You willingly hand over data to Facebook that you would never give voluntarily to the government,” said Bruce Schneier, a technologist and an author.

James Risen reported from Washington, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Court lets NSA use data snagged 'inadvertently'

Source

Report: Court lets NSA use data snagged 'inadvertently'

USA Today Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Rules governing a recently disclosed surveillance program targeting non-U.S. citizens abroad appear to give National Security Agency analysts broad discretion in determining who qualifies for such scrutiny, according to two new classified documents published Thursday by The Guardian.

Without "specific information'' about whether the target is an American, and if the person's location is unknown, the target will be "presumed a non-U.S. citizen'' and subject to surveillance, according to one of the documents.

The White House declined to comment on the new disclosures. And the NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A second document outlines authority for government officials to retain communications by U.S. citizens that are inadvertently intercepted if the material contains "foreign intelligence'' or "evidence of crime.''

The Guardian report suggested that the retention provision contradicts recent assertions by government officials who claim that all such inadvertent communications are routinely destroyed.

But Deputy Attorney General James Cole, in testimony Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, specifically referred to the government's "limited'' authority to keep communications involving Americans. "If it has to do with foreign intelligence ... or evidence of a crime or threat of serious bodily injury, we can respond to that,'' Cole told lawmakers. "Other than that, we have to get rid of it. We have to purge it, and we can't use it.''

Both documents published by the London newspaper are dated July 29, 2009, and carry the signature of Attorney General Eric Holder. The Justice Department also declined comment Thursday.

The Guardian's disclosures are the first since the newspaper and The Washington Post revealed details of the formerly secret program and a separate operation that collects the telephone records of U.S. citizens for use in terror investigations.

Since then, President Obama and congressional leaders have defended the practices, asserting they were vital to national security.

But civil liberties advocates maintain that the operations are serious breaches of privacy and lack adequate controls.

"Collectively, these documents show ... that the legal framework under which the NSA operates is far too feeble, that existing oversight mechanisms are ineffective, and that the government's surveillance policies now present a serious and ongoing threat to our constitutional rights,'' ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo said. "The release of these documents will help inform a crucial public debate that should have taken place years ago."

NSA surveillance may be legal

Source

NSA surveillance may be legal — but it’s unconstitutional [now ain't that an oxymoron!!!!]

By Laura K. Donohue, Published: June 21

Laura K. Donohue is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law.

The National Security Agency’s recently revealed surveillance programs undermine the purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was established to prevent this kind of overreach. They violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. And they underscore the dangers of growing executive power.

The intelligence community has a history of overreaching in the name of national security. In the mid-1970s, it came to light that, since the 1940s, the NSA had been collecting international telegraphic traffic from companies, in the process obtaining millions of Americans’ telegrams that were unrelated to foreign targets. From 1940 to 1973, the CIA and the FBI engaged in covert mail-opening programs that violated laws prohibiting the interception or opening of mail. The agencies also conducted warrantless “surreptitious entries,” breaking into targets’ offices and homes to photocopy or steal business records and personal documents. The Army Security Agency intercepted domestic radio communications. And the Army’s CONUS program placed more than 100,000 people under surveillance, including lawmakers and civil rights leaders.

After an extensive investigation of the agencies’ actions, Congress passed the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to limit sweeping collection of intelligence and create rigorous oversight. But 35 years later, the NSA is using this law and its subsequent amendments as legal grounds to run even more invasive programs than those that gave rise to the statute.

We’ve learned that in April, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered Verizon to provide information on calls made by each subscriber over a three-month period. Over the past seven years, similar orders have been served continuously on AT&T, Sprint and other telecommunications providers.

Another program, PRISM, disclosed by the Guardian and The Washington Post, allows the NSA and the FBI to obtain online data including e-mails, photographs, documents and connection logs. The information that can be assembledabout any one person — much less organizations, social networks and entire communities — is staggering: What we do, think and believe.

The government defends the programs’ legality, saying they comply with FISA and its amendments. It may be right, but only because FISA has ceased to provide a meaningful constraint.

Under the traditional FISA, if the government wants to conduct electronic surveillance, it must make a classified application to a special court, identitying or describing the target. It must demonstrate probable cause that the target is a foreign power or an agent thereof, and that the facilities to be monitored will be used by the target.

In 2008, Congress added section 702 to the statute, allowing the government to use electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence on non-U.S. persons it reasonably believes are abroad, without a court order for each target. A U.S. citizen may not intentionally be targeted.

To the extent that the FISC sanctioned PRISM, it may be consistent with the law. But it is disingenuous to suggest that millions of Americans’ e-mails, photographs and documents are “incidental” to an investigation targeting foreigners overseas.

The telephony metadata program raises similar concerns. FISA did not originally envision the government accessing records. Following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Congress allowed applications for obtaining records from certain kinds of businesses. In 2001, lawmakers further expanded FISA to give the government access to any business or personal records. Under section 215 of the Patriot Act, the government no longer has to prove that the target is a foreign power. It need only state that the records are sought as part of an investigation to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence.

This means that FISA can now be used to gather records concerning individuals who are neither the target of any investigation nor an agent of a foreign power. Entire databases — such as telephony metadata — can be obtained, as long as an authorized investigation exists.

Congress didn’t pass Section 215 to allow for the wholesale collection of information. As Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who helped draft the statute, wrote in the Guardian: “Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?”

As a constitutional matter, the Supreme Court has long held that, where an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, search and seizure may occur only once the government has obtained a warrant, supported by probable cause and issued by a judge. The warrant must specify the places to be searched and items to be seized.

There are exceptions to the warrant requirement. In 1979 the court held that the use of a pen register to record numbers dialed from someone’s home was not a search. The court suggested that people who disclose their communications to others assume the risk that law enforcement may obtain the information.

More than three decades later, digitization and the explosion of social-network technology have changed the calculus. In the ordinary course of life, third parties obtain massive amounts of information about us that, when analyzed, have much deeper implications for our privacy than before.

As for Section 702 of FISA, the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect foreigners from searches conducted abroad. But it has never recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement when foreign-targeted searches result in the collection of vast stores of citizens’ communications.

Americans reasonably expect that their movements, communications and decisions will not be recorded and analyzed by the government. A majority of the Supreme Court seems to agree. Last year, the court considered a case involving 28-day GPS surveillance. Justice Samuel Alito suggested that in most criminal investigations, long-term monitoring “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized that following a person’s movements “reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The FISC is supposed to operate as a check. But it is a secret court, notorious for its low rate of denial. From 1979 to 2002, it did not reject a single application. Over the past five years, out of nearly 8,600 applications, only two have been denied.

Congress has an opportunity to create more effective checks on executive power. It could withdraw Sections 215 and 702 and introduce new measures to regulate intelligence collection and analysis. There are many options.

James Madison put it best: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

lkdonohue@law.georgetown.edu

Obama meeting with privacy board about government surveillance

Source

Obama meeting with privacy board about government surveillance

By Julie Pace

Associated Press

Posted: 06/21/2013 09:07:13 AM PDT

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is holding his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board Friday as he seeks to make good on his pledge to have a public discussion about secretive government surveillance programs.

Obama has said the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will play a key role in that effort. The federal oversight board reviews terrorism programs enacted by the executive branch to ensure that privacy concerns are taken into account.

The president is also tasking the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to consider declassifying more details about the government's collection of U.S. phone and Internet records. Obama is specifically asking Clapper to review possible declassification of opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the data-mining efforts.

The government has already lifted some of the secrecy surrounding the programs following disclosures earlier this month about their existence by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. But the legal opinions from the highly secretive court remain private.

The privacy board was created in 2004 but has operated fitfully ever since, given congressional infighting and at times, censorship by government lawyers. The board was dormant during Obama's first term and only became fully functional in May, before the NSA programs became public.

The board's chairman, David Medine, said the five-member group has a "broad range of questions" to ask about the NSA's widespread collection programs. The board was given a classified briefing on the programs last week and plans to release a report eventually with recommendations for the government.

------

Follow Julie Pace at on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Obama & NSA lied about not listening to our phone calls???

Source

New documents reveal parameters of NSA’s secret surveillance programs

By Ellen Nakashima, Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, Published: June 20

The National Security Agency may keep the e-mails and telephone calls of citizens and legal residents if the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence” or evidence of a crime, according to classified documents that lay out procedures for targeting foreigners and for guarding Americans’ privacy.

Newly disclosed documents describe a series of steps the world’s largest spy agency is supposed to take to keep Americans from being caught in its massive surveillance net. They suggest that the NSA has latitude to keep and use citizens’ communications under certain conditions.

President Obama said the National Security Agency’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens and...people living in the United States.”

President Obama said the National Security Agency’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens and...people living in the United States.”

The papers, made available to The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, are the first public written documentation of procedures governing a far-reaching NSA surveillance program authorized by Congress in 2008 to gather the e-mails and phone calls of targets who are supposed to be foreigners located overseas.

In recent days, the Obama administration has defended the program as critical to national security, saying it has helped foil more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad.

President Obama said after the disclosures that NSA domestic activities “do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court, that is entirely consistent with what we would do, for example, in a criminal investigation.”

The new documents show that the NSA collects, processes, retains and disseminates the contents of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails under a wide range of circumstances.

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander described the program as “limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight.” Testifying before Congress, he said “the disciplined operation” of this and a related surveillance program “protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.”

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the documents Thursday.

Privacy advocates expressed concern about what they viewed as rules that leave much wiggle room for NSA analysts to monitor Americans’ communications.

“These documents confirm what we have feared all along, that the NSA believes it can collect Americans’ international communications with little, if any, restriction,” said Alex Abdo, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Its procedures allow it to target for surveillance essentially any foreigner located abroad — whether or not they’re suspected of any wrongdoing, let alone terrorism.”

Administration officials say the surveillance program does not target Americans anywhere without a warrant. Still, said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, “there’s a lot of leeway to use ‘inadvertently’ acquired domestic communications,” for instance, for criminal inquiries.

And the rules show that the communications of lawyers and their clients may be retained if they contain foreign intelligence information, although dissemination must be approved by the NSA general counsel.

Congress authorized the collection program amid a great debate about the degree to which the government was expanding its surveillance authority without sufficient protection for Americans’ privacy.

Authorized by Section 702 of the amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the program did away with the traditional individual warrant for each foreign suspect whose communications would be collected in the United States. In its place, the FISA court, which oversees domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes and whose proceedings are secret, would certify the government’s procedures to target people overseas and ensure citizens’ privacy.

President Obama said the National Security Agency’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens and...people living in the United States.”

It issues a certificate, good for one year, that allows the NSA to order a U.S. Internet or phone company to turn over over e-mails, phone calls and other communications related to a series of foreign targets, none of which the court approved individually.

“What’s most striking about the targeting procedures is the discretion they confer on the NSA,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program.

In figuring out whether a target is “reasonably believed” to be located overseas, for example, the agency looks at the “totality of the circumstances” relating to a person’s location. In the absence of that specific information, “a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person,” according to rules on the targeting of suspects.

Nonetheless, the documents contain a series of steps the NSA may take to determine a foreigner’s location. Agency analysts examine leads that may come from other agencies, including from human sources. They conduct research in NSA databases, scrutinize Internet protocol addresses and target “Internet links that terminate in a foreign country.”

“When NSA proposes to direct surveillance at a target, it does so because NSA has already learned something about the target,” according to the targeting rules. Often, that lead comes from the CIA or a law enforcement agency.

The NSA uses whatever details are contained in that lead to make an initial assessment of whether it is being asked to eavesdrop on an overseas target. But the agency then takes other steps depending on the circumstances, such as scanning databases “to which NSA has access but did not originate” for clues about location.

To prevent U.S. citizens and legal residents from being targeted, NSA keeps a database of phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with people thought to be living in the country. New requests are compared to records on the list. Matches are signals to put the surveillance on hold.

The NSA then goes through a sequence of potential additional checks, according to the document. It may look at area codes and the ordinary data packets that accompany e-mails as they cross the Internet. And it may check contact lists associated with e-mail accounts, as well as massive “knowledge databases” that contain CIA intelligence reports.

After it begins intercepting calls or e-mails, the NSA is supposed to continue to look for signs that the person it is monitoring has entered the United States, which would prompt a halt in surveillance and possibly a notification to the FBI.

The document on “minimization” spells out rules for protecting privacy, some of which have been described publicly. The rules protect not just citizens, but foreigners in the United States.

If domestic communications lack significant foreign intelligence information, they must be promptly destroyed. Communications concerning Americans may not be kept more than five years.

If a target who was outside the United States enters the country, the monitoring must stop immediately.

Five myths about the National Security Agency (NSA)

Five myths about the National Security Agency (NSA)

By James Bamford, Published: June 21

James Bamford is the author of three books on the NSA, including “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.”

When the National Security Agency was created through a top-secret memorandum signed by President Harry Truman in 1952, the agency was so secret that only a few members of Congress knew about it. While the NSA gradually became known over the decades, its inner workings remain extremely hidden, even with the recent leaks about its gathering of Americans’ phone records and tapping into data from the nine largest Internet companies. Let’s pull back the shroud a bit to demystify this agency.

1. The NSA is allowed to spy on everyone, everywhere.

After his release of documents to the Guardian and The Washington Post, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said, “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal e-mail.”

But Snowden probably couldn’t eavesdrop on just about anyone, including the president, without breaking the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids the NSA from targeting U.S. citizens or legal residents without an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This applies whether the person is in the United States or overseas. According to documents from Snowdenpublished by The Post and the Guardian on Thursday, if agency employees pick up the communications of Americans incidentally while monitoring foreign targets, they are supposed to destroy the information unless it contains “significant foreign intelligence” or evidence of a crime.

What’s technically feasible is a different matter. Since 2003, the NSA has been able to monitor much of the Internet and telephone communication entering, leaving and traveling through the United States with secret eavesdropping hardware and software installed at major AT&T switches, and probably those of other companies, around the country.

2. The courts make sure that what the NSA does is legal.

This is part of the NSA’s mantra. Because both the surveillance court and the activities it monitors are secret, it’s hard to contradict. Yet we know about at least one transgression since Congress created the court in 1978 in response to the NSA’s previous abuses.

Under the court’s original charter, the NSA was required to provide it with the names of all U.S. citizens and residents it wished to monitor. Yet the George W. Bush administration issued a presidential order in 2002 authorizing the NSA to eavesdrop without court-approved warrants.

After the New York Times exposed the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, Congress amended the law to weaken the court’s oversight and incorporate many of the formerly illegal eavesdropping activities conducted during the Bush years. Rather than individual warrants, the court can now approve vast, dragnet-style warrants, or orders, as they’re called. For example, the first document released by the Guardian was a top-secret order from the court requiring Verizon to hand over the daily telephone records of all its customers, including local calls.

3. Congress has a lot of oversight over the NSA.

This is the second part of the mantra from NSA Director Keith Alexander and other senior agency officials. Indeed, when the congressional intelligence committees were formed in 1976 and 1977, their emphasis was on protecting the public from the intelligence agencies, which were rife with abuses.

Today, however, the intelligence committees are more dedicated to protecting the agencies from budget cuts than safeguarding the public from their transgressions. Hence their failure to discover the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping activity and their failure to take action against the NSA’s gathering of telephone and Internet records.

4. NSA agents break into foreign locations to steal codes and plant bugs.

Five Myths

A feature from The Post’s Outlook section that dismantles myths, clarifies common misconceptions and makes you think again about what you thought you already knew.

According to intelligence sources, a number of years ago there was a large debate between the NSA and the CIA over who was responsible for conducting “black-bag jobs” — breaking into foreign locations to plant bugs and steal hard drives, or recruiting local agents to do the same. The NSA argued that it was in charge of eavesdropping on communications, known as signals intelligence, and that the data on hard drives counts. But the CIA argued that the NSA had responsibility only for information “in motion,” while the CIA was responsible for information “at rest.” It was eventually decided that the CIA’s National Clandestine Service would focus on stealing hard drives and planting bugs, and the NSA, through a highly secret unit known as Tailored Access Operations, would steal foreign data through cyber-techniques.

5. Snowden could have aired his concerns internally rather than leaking the documents.

I’ve interviewed many NSA whistleblowers, and the common denominator is that they felt ignored when attempting to bring illegal or unethical operations to the attention of higher-ranking officials. For example, William Binney and several other senior NSA staffers protested the agency’s domestic collection programs up the chain of command, and even attempted to bring the operations to the attention of the attorney general, but they were ignored. Only then did Binney speak publicly to me for an article in Wired magazine.

In a Q&A on the Guardian Web site, Snowden cited Binney as an example of “how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

And even when whistleblowers bring their concerns to the news media, the NSA usually denies that the activity is taking place. The agency denied Binney’s charges that it was obtaining all consumer metadata from Verizon and had access to virtually all Internet traffic. It was only when Snowden leaked the documents revealing the phone-log program and showing how PRISM works that the agency was forced to come clean.

washwriter@gmail.com

Government Dodging Questions About Spying In Chicago Terror Plot

Source

Adel Daoud Secret Surveillance: Government Dodging Questions About Spying In Chicago Terror Plot

By MICHAEL TARM 06/21/13 04:09 PM ET EDT AP

CHICAGO — Lawyers for a U.S. citizen charged with terrorism in Chicago said in a Friday filing that the government is dodging questions about whether it used expanded secret surveillance programs against their client to ensure the hotly debated practices can't be challenged in the Supreme Court.

The claim in the Chicago case came in an early-morning filing at federal court in Chicago by attorneys for Adel Daoud, a 19-year-old, of Hillside, who is accused of trying to ignite what he thought was a car bomb outside a bar last year in Chicago. Daoud, whose trial is set for Feb. 3, has pleaded not guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and other charges.

Legal observers say the question of what the government has to divulge and when has become an increasingly pressing one in light of new revelations about US. intelligence methods, and the answer courts eventually provide could have far-reaching implications.

Recent leaks by a former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, authorized one program that gathers U.S. phone records and another that tracks the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

Prosecutors in the Daoud case refused to say in a filling last week whether they used far-reaching surveillance programs to launch their two-year investigation of the suburban teenager, saying they were under no legal obligation to spell out just what led to an FBI sting focused on him.

Friday's 13-page defense filing argues the government's refusal to confirm or deny whether it used those programs left defense attorneys legally hamstrung: With no answer, they have no grounds to mount a challenge to the programs' constitutionality. And yet, prosecutors could still use the evidence at trial.

"Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly (about its surveillance methods)," the filing says. "When a criminal defendant's constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of state secrets."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, Kim Nerheim, declined comment on the filing.

But Karen Greenberg, director of the New York-based Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, says government prosecutors, if they can, typically err on the side of not divulging procedures in terrorism cases.

"I don't think it necessary means they fear losing a Supreme Court challenge," she said. "Actually, I don't get the sense they are worried."

She added that defense attorneys face such insurmountable odds in terrorism cases, it's no surprise many are now zeroing in on the constitutionality of surveillance methods.

"They don't have too many other legal tools in their tool box," she said. "You will have more and more of these kinds of challenges."

A judge in the Chicago case is expected to rule soon on whether prosecutors are obliged to say if they used the expanded surveillance.

The primary source of contention in Daoud's case, as in much of the national debate over U.S. surveillance, is the secret FISA court – set up by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA amendments passed in 2008 allow the government to obtain broad intercept orders from the court – raising the prospect that calls and emails between foreign targets and innocent Americans could be subject to surveillance.

Similar disputes over the possible use of expanded surveillance have surfaced elsewhere, including in the federal case of two Florida brothers, Sheheryar Alam Qazi and Raees Alam Qazi, arrested last year for allegedly plotting to detonate bombs in New York City. Both men, who are naturalized U.S. citizens, have pleaded not guilty.

A recent filing by Sheheryar Alam Qazi's attorneys echoes the Daoud filing, saying the defense wasn't seeking details about the secret surveillance procedures – only whether they were used.

Since the 2008 amendments extended the reach of the foreign intelligence law, the U.S. government has consistently declined requests in terrorism cases to say if enhanced surveillance powers kick-started wider investigations, according to both the Daoud and Qazi filings.

"(The government) would undoubtedly prefer to maintain that record, which has rendered the government's warrantless wiretapping program all but unreviewable in the interim," the Qazi filing says.

In February, the Supreme Court threw out an attempt by U.S. citizens to challenge the 2008 expansion of FISA because the plaintiffs couldn't prove the government did or will monitor their conversations along with those of potential foreign terrorist and intelligence targets.

But the high court added its decision did not insulate the FISA expansion from judicial review in the future.

___

Follow Michael Tarm at www.twitter.com/mtarm

Teen terror suspect says feds must admit spying on him

Teen terror suspect says feds must admit spying on him, Americans

Friday, June 21, 2013

June 21, 2013 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- NSA, CIA, FBI and FISA have become acronyms that simply translate as SPY to many Americans after recent revelations that U.S. government agencies have been tracking the populous' electronic movements in the name of national security.

Now, as a worldwide debate ensues over privacy vs. security, the federal prosecution of suburban Chicago teenager Adel Daoud could become the defining case in how far American authorities may go while snooping on Americans citizens.

In a blunt and occasionally snarky motion filed Friday morning, Mr. Daoud's attorneys chide the government for refusing to disclose whether they used far-reaching electronic surveillance to build a case against the 19-year old west suburban Hillside man. Daoud, an American citizen, was arrested in a federal sting last September amidst a Jihadist plot to blow up a downtown Chicago bar, investigators said.

Daoud's attorney Thomas Durkin, a former federal prosecutor, says that U.S. authorities utilize "a Global War on Terror playbook" to their advantage and then in every case refuse to disclose it.

"Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly. When a criminal defendant's constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets" Durbin states in the motion.

At issue in the Daoud case is whether federal law enforcement agencies relied on electronic surveillance under a controversial, five-year old amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA.)

The amendment, officially known as the FISA Amendments Act-or FAA-has lately been branded as PRISM. But by whatever name or grouping of letters, it amounts to American authorities spying on American citizens without the usual approval by a conventional public court.

"In the nearly five years since the FAA was enacted, the government has never once disclosed its reliance on material obtained through FAA surveillance" states the Daoud motion. "It would undoubtedly prefer to maintain that record, which has rendered the government's warrantless wiretapping program all but unreviewable in the interim.

"As appears it has done in other cases, the government would be able, in essence, to transform its FAA surveillance into FISA evidencereaping the fruits of that FAA surveillance, while cleverly sidestepping any possible constitutional challenge to the FAA's warrantless wiretapping program."

Prosecutors contend that federal law does not require the disclosure sought by lawyer Mr. Durkin in Daoud's case. In a court filing last week, government attorneys maintained that they have actually provided more information than the required minimum-although they did not disclose whether extraordinary surveillance tactics were used during the two-year Daoud investigation.

Daoud's legal team disputes that and Judge Sharon Coleman Johnson will determine who is correct.

As the I-Team first reported, Daoud's legal defense team says it first learned of the spy campaign against the Hillside teen from the floor of the United State Senate.

"When Senator Diane Feinstein urged the Senate to reauthorize the FAA during a December 27, 2012, floor debate, she observed that the FAA had been used in nine specific cases, including a 'plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar.' The government does not deny that this is a reference to Defendant's case, but if nothing else, the government should be forced to answer whether Senator Feinstein had correct information from the intelligence agencies when she spoke from the Senate floor."

Daoud, who has been held without bond in the Chicago MCC since his arrest last September, is now looking for notice from the government concerning suspicions that agents eavesdropped on him, monitored his internet usage and surveilled him using any other electronic methods.

"Whether the government relied on FAA surveillance when it obtained its FISA order is a crucial element of giving adequate notice to criminal defendants. The government should be compelled to provide a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer to the question of whether its evidence was obtained or derived from electronic surveillance conducted under the FAA" his motion states.

As the NSA and PRISM spy programs controversy grows around the world, U.S. officials have eeked out some details. According to attorney Durkin: "On June 18, 2013, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and testified that NSA surveillance programs helped prevent 'potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11."

"As appears it has done in other cases, the government would be able, in essence, to transform its FAA surveillance into FISA evidencereaping the fruits of that FAA surveillance, while cleverly sidestepping any possible constitutional challenge to the FAA's warrantless wiretapping program" the defense motion states.

"In the nearly five years since the FAA was enacted, the government has never once disclosed its reliance on material obtained through FAA surveillance to counsel's knowledge. It would undoubtedly prefer to maintain that record, which has rendered the government's warrantless wiretapping program all but unreviewable in the interim."

Well publicized leaks this month from former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden have revealed that a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) authorized the gathering of U.S. phone records. Another program made public by Snowden showed that American agents track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links terrorism.

Last February, the Supreme Court blocked U.S. citizens from challenging the 2008 expansion of FISA on grounds they could not prove the government will monitor their conversations along with those of potential foreign terrorist and intelligence targets. The vote was 5-4.

U.K. Spy Agency Taps Trans-Atlantic Fiber Optic Cables

Source

Report: U.K. Spy Agency Taps Trans-Atlantic Fiber Optic Cables

by Eyder Peralta

June 21, 2013 1:30 PM

The drip-drip of classified information has now moved overseas: Citing more classified documents leaked by , that the British spy agency taps into trans-Atlantic fiber optic cables, sucking up vast amounts of data that includes communication sent by Americans and Britons.

The big claim here is that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the equivalent of the NSA, sucks up that information in an indiscriminate manner. The NSA has access to the information.

Here's how The Guardian describes the program:

"The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

"One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

"GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

"This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets."

The newspaper quotes an unnamed source with knowledge of the program as saying that while the program collects a lot of information, it does not have the "resources" to look at it.

"If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic — British people talking to each other," the source told the paper.

Snowden told The Guardian that the GCHQ is "worse than the U.S."

Communications of Millions Subject to US-UK Spying

Communications of Millions Subject to US-UK Spying

By Eric London

Global Research, June 22, 2013

World Socialist Web Site

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed on Friday that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ and the NSA record the content of phone calls, email messages, Facebook posts and browser histories of tens of millions of people. By tapping into fiber-optic cables—the infrastructure through which all Internet traffic must pass—the two agencies have created a systematic procedure for procuring, filtering and storing private communications.

The leak is the latest in a series that have left the US and UK governments scurrying to cover up their deeply antidemocratic maneuvers with scripted lies. It comes one day after the release of secret FISA Court documents showing the NSA has almost complete latitude to monitor the communications of US residents (See, “NSA monitoring US communications without a warrant, documents show”)

Hours after the release of the latest documents, the US government announced that it was filing charges against Snowden under the Espionage Act, which contains a possible penalty of execution.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama said in a public speech two weeks ago. UK Foreign Minister William Hague told MPs last week that there is “a strong framework of democratic accountability and oversight” within the national intelligence apparatus.

According to documents leaked to the Guardian, and reported by Glenn Greenwald, however, GCHQ and the NSA have set up a complex scheme by which the intelligence agencies collect data and content from the communications of at least tens of millions of people. Officials monitor the data and content of those communications and then store what they deem valuable.

Described by GCHQ with the revealing titles “Mastering the Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation,” the programs expose the repeated claims of President Obama and his coconspirators as outright lies.

Through the “Tempora” program, the two agencies have been tapping and storing hundreds of petabytes of data from a majority of the fiber-optic cables in the UK over the past 18 months. The NSA has a similar program in the US, as revealed in an Associated Press report last week.

First, GCHQ handles 600 million “telephone events” each day by tapping over 200 fiber-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US. According to the Guardian, GCHQ is able to collect data at a rate “equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours” by processing data from a minimum of 46 fiber-optic cables simultaneously.

The data is then transmitted to a government database and shared with the NSA, which is given top clearance. Lawyers for the GCHQ told their American counterparts that it was “your call” as to what limitations should be in place for data sifting and storage.

According to the leaked documents, these massive databases have been built up over the past several years through widespread corporate collaboration. GCHQ colludes with an array of companies it calls “intercept partners,” and sometimes forces them to hand over huge quantities of data for inspection and storage. The corporate agreements were kept highly guarded under fears that public knowledge of the collusion would lead to “high-level political fallout.”

Once the data is collected, the agencies then filter information through a process known as Massive Volume Reduction (MVR). Through this process, information is pared down to specific individuals, email addresses, or phone numbers. The NSA identified 31,000 “selector” terms, while GCHQ identified 40,000. The leaked documents reveal that a majority of the information extracted is content, including word-for-word email, text and phone recordings.

Through Tempora, GCHQ and the NSA have set up Internet buffers that allow the agencies to watch data accumulate in real-time and store it for less than a week for content or 30 days for metadata.

“Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ’s special source data,” agents explained in the leaked documents. Valuable information is presumably removed from this temporary buffer and kept on file in intelligence storage facilities.

This information filtration system is not aimed at eliminating the possibility of storing the data of innocent people. In fact, this is precisely the purpose of the surveillance programs. Rather, unnecessary information is sifted out because the governments do not yet have the ability to store such vast quantities of communications content and metadata.

Despite these technological limitations, the immensity of the Tempora program was best described by GCHQ attorneys who acknowledged that listing the number of people targeted by the program would be impossible because “this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage.”

GCHQ officials bragged that its surveillance program “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA,” and were told by GCHQ attorneys that “[w]e have a light oversight regime compared with the US.” The latter statement is extraordinary given the fact that the FISA Court allows the NSA to operate almost entirely without constraint.

Friday’s revelations highlight the international character of the global surveillance programs. Far from being satisfied by storing the content of the communications of its own residents, the US and UK governments are working together to create an unprecedented database of international intelligence.

The intimacy of the two spy agencies is evidenced by an order given by NSA head Keith Alexander in 2008: “Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time? Sounds like a good summer homework project for [British and American spy center] Menwith!”

Snowden noted Friday that “it’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight. They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”

Just like their American counterparts, the GCHQ attorneys have attempted to place a legal veneer over the facially illegal spying operations of the government.

GCHQ lawyers have invoked paragraph four of section 8 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to run around the legal requirement that intelligence officials acquire a warrant before performing a wiretap. Since this would have required GCHQ to acquire a warrant for every person in the UK, the attorneys instead have claimed that they can perform indiscriminate data mining operations with a “certificate” from a minister.

In a briefing document released by Snowden, GCHQ attorneys claim that these certificates “cover the entire range of GCHQ’s intelligence production.”

Under Ripa, GCHQ officials may also seek a Sensitive Targeting Authority (STA), which would allow them to spy on any UK citizen “anywhere in the world” or on a foreign person in the UK.

A lawyer for GCHQ also noted in the secret documents that the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which oversees the intelligence agencies, has “always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret,” and that a tribunal set up to monitor the agencies has “so far always found in our favor.”

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, states: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence,” and that “[t]here shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society…”

In Britain as much as the United States, the ruling class is engaged in activity that is in flagrant violation of these democratic principles.

The legal loopholes that allow GCHQ to spy on the world

The legal loopholes that allow GCHQ to spy on the world

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball

The Guardian, Friday 21 June 2013 12.23 EDT

William Hague was adamant when he addressed MPs on Monday last week. In an emergency statement (video) forced by the Guardian's disclosures about GCHQ involvement with the Prism programme, the foreign secretary insisted the agency operated within a "strong framework of democratic accountability and oversight".

The laws governing the intelligence agencies provide "the strongest systems of checks and balances for secret intelligence anywhere in the world", he said.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian give the impression some high-ranking officials at GCHQ have a different view.

In confidential briefings, one of Cheltenham's senior legal advisers, whom the Guardian will not name, made a note to tell his guests: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

The parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which scrutinises the work of the agencies, was sympathetic to the agencies' difficulties, he suggested.

"They have always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret," the legal adviser said.

Complaints against the agencies, undertaken by the interception commissioner, are conducted under "the veil of secrecy". And the investigatory powers tribunal, which assesses complaints against the agencies, has "so far always found in our favour".

The briefings offer important glimpses into the GCHQ's view of itself, the legal framework in which it works, and, it would seem, the necessity for reassuring the UK's most important intelligence partner, the United States, that sensitive information can be shared without raising anxiety in Washington.

None of the documents advocates law-breaking – quite the opposite. But critics will say they highlight the limitations of the three pieces of legislation that underpin the activities of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – which were repeatedly mentioned by Hague as pillars of the regulatory and oversight regime during his statement to the Commons.

The foreign secretary said GCHQ "complied fully" with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the Human Rights Act (HRA) and the Intelligence Services Act (Isa).

Privacy campaigners argue the laws have one important thing in common: they were drafted in the last century, and nobody involved in writing them, or passing them, could possibly have envisaged the exponential growth of traffic from telecoms and internet service providers over the past decade.

Nor could they have imagined that GCHQ could have found a way of storing and analysing so much of that information as part of its overarching Mastering the Internet project.

The Tempora programme appears to have given Britain's spymasters that resource, with documents seen by the Guardian showing Britain can retain for up to 30 days an astronomical amount of unfiltered data garnered from cables carrying internet traffic.

This raises a number of questions about the way GCHQ officials and ministers have legitimised the programme.

The briefings, which are entitled UK Operational Legalities, stress that GCHQ "is an organisation with a highly responsible approach to compliance with the law".

GCHQ also has a well staffed legal team, known as OPP-LEG, to help staff navigate their way through the complexities of the law.

But there appears to be some nervousness about Tempora. In a paper written for National Security Agency (NSA) analysts entitled A Guide to Using Internet Buffers at GCHQ, the author notes: "[Tempora] represents an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data.

"As large-scale buffering of metadata and content represent a new concept for GCHQ's exploitation of the internet, GCHQ's legal and policy officers are understandably taking a careful approach to their access and use."

So how did GCHQ secure the legal authority for setting up Tempora, and what safeguards are in place for sharing the intelligence with the Americans? According to the documents, the British government used Ripa to get taps on to the fibre-optic cables.

These cables carry internet traffic in and out of the country and contain details of millions of emails and web searches. The information from these cables went straight into the Tempora storage programme.

In one presentation, which appeared to be for US analysts from the NSA, GCHQ explained: "Direct access to large volumes of unselected SSE data [is] collected under a Ripa warrant."

The precise arrangement between the firms is unclear, as are the legal justifications put before ministers. Isa gives GCHQ some powers for the "passive collection" of data, including from computer networks.

But it appears GCHQ has relied on paragraph four of section 8 of Ripa to gain "external warrants" for its programmes.

They allow the agency to intercept external communications where, for instance, one of the people being targeted is outside Britain.

In most Ripa cases, a minister has to be told the name of an individual or company being targeted before a warrant is granted.

But section 8 permits GCHQ to perform more sweeping and indiscriminate trawls of external data if a minister issues a "certificate" along with the warrant.

According to the documents, the certificate authorises GCHQ to search for material under a number of themes, including: intelligence on the political intentions of foreign governments; military postures of foreign countries; terrorism, international drug trafficking and fraud.

The briefing document says such sweeping certificates, which have to be signed off by a minister, "cover the entire range of GCHQ's intelligence production".

"The certificate is issued with the warrant and signed by the secretary of state and sets out [the] class of work we can do under it … cannot list numbers or individuals as this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage."

Lawyers at GCHQ speak of having 10 basic certificates, including a "global" one that covers the agency's support station at Bude in Cornwall, Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, and Cyprus.

Other certificates have been used for "special source accesses" – a reference, perhaps, to the cables carrying web traffic. All certificates have to be renewed by the foreign secretary every six months.

A source with knowledge of intelligence confirmed: "Overall exercise of collection and analysis [is] done under a broad, overall legal authority which has to be renewed at intervals, and is signed off at a senior political level."

The source said the interception commissioner was able to "conclude that [the process] was not appropriate", and that the companies involved were not giving up the information voluntarily.

"We have overriding authority to compel [them] to do this," the source said. "There's an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this.

"Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice. They can't talk about the warrant, they can't reveal the existence of it."

GCHQ says it can also seek a sensitive targeting authority (STA), which allows it snoop on any Briton "anywhere in the world" or any foreign national located in the UK.

It is unclear how the STA system works, and who has authority over it.

The intelligence agencies also have to take note of the HRA, which demands any interception is "necessary and proportionate".

But the documents show GCHQ believes these terms are open to interpretation – which "creates flexibility". When Tempora became fully functional in around 2011, GCHQ gave the NSA access to the programme on a three-month trial – and the NSA was keen to impress.

The US agency sent a briefing to some of its analysts urging them to show they could behave responsibly with the data. Under a heading – "The need to be successful!" – the author wrote: "As the first NSA users to receive operational access [to Tempora], we're depending on you to provide the business case required to justify expanded access. Most importantly we need to prove that NSA users can utilise the internet buffers in ways that are consistent with GCHQ's legal and policy rules.

"In addition, we need to prove that NSA's access … is necessary to prosecute our mission and will greatly enhance the production of the intelligence … success of this three-month trial will determine expanded NSA access to internet buffers in the future."

The NSA appears to have made a successful case. In May last year, an internal GCHQ memo said it had 300 analysts working on intelligence from Tempora, and the NSA had 250. The teams were supporting "the target discovery mission".

But the safeguards for the sharing of this information are unclear.

Though GCHQ says it only keeps the content of messages for three working days, and the metadata for up to 30 days, privacy campaigners here and in the US will want to know if the NSA is adhering to the same self-imposed rules. One concern for privacy campaigners is that GCHQ and the NSA could conduct intercepts for each other, and then offer to share the information – a manoeuvre that could bypass the domestic rules they have to abide by.

This was raised by MPs during last week's statement, with the former Labour home secretary David Blunkett calling for clarification on this potential loophole.

Last week, the Guardian sent a series of questions to the Foreign Office about this issue, but the department said it would not be drawn on it.

"It is a longstanding policy not to comment on intelligence matters; this includes our intelligence co-operation with the United States.

"The intelligence and security committee is looking into this, which is the proper channel for such matters."

German minister seeks answers from UK over spying 'catastrophe'

German minister seeks answers from UK over spying 'catastrophe'

By Michael Nienaber

BERLIN | Sat Jun 22, 2013 4:24pm BST

(Reuters) - Britain's European partners will seek urgent clarification from London about whether a British spy agency has tapped international telephone and Internet traffic on a massive scale, Germany's justice minister said on Saturday.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper read like the plot of a horror film and, if confirmed as true, would be a "catastrophe".

In its latest article based on information from Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the Guardian reported a project codenamed "Tempora" under which Britain's eavesdropping agency can tap into and store huge volumes of data from fibre-optic cables.

Tempora has been running for about 18 months and allows the Government Communications Headquarters agency (GCHQ) to access the data and keep it for 30 days, the paper said, adding that much information was shared with the NSA.

"If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

"The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation."

With a few months to go before federal elections, the minister's comments are likely to please Germans who are highly sensitive to government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.

"The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell's surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain," the parliamentary floor leader of the opposition Social Democrats, Thomas Oppermann, was quoted as saying in a newspaper.

Orwell's novel "1984" envisioned a futuristic security state where "Big Brother" spied on the intimate details of people's lives.

"This is unbearable," Oppermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "The government must clarify these accusations and act against a total surveillance of German citizens."

Earlier this month, in response to questions about the secret U.S. data-monitoring programme Prism, also exposed by Snowden, British Foreign Secretary William Hague told parliament that GCHQ always adhered to British law when processing data gained from eavesdropping.

He would not confirm or deny any details of UK-U.S. intelligence sharing, saying that to do so could help Britain's enemies.

News of Prism outraged Germans, with one politician likening U.S. tactics to those of the Stasi, and the issue overshadowed a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama to Berlin last week.

(Writing by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

UK security agency has spy program; shares data with NSA

Guardian newspaper: UK security agency has spy program; shares data with NSA

By CNN Staff

updated 9:16 PM EDT, Fri June 21, 2013

London (CNN) -- Britain's equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, has tapped into many of the world's key international fiber optic cables and is routinely downloading and analyzing vast quantities of Internet and phone traffic, sharing the data with the NSA, The Guardian newspaper reported Friday.

The NSA slammed the report as "absolutely false."

"Any allegation that NSA relies on its foreign partners to circumvent U.S. law is absolutely false. NSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself," NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel said.

The scope of the surveillance dragnet described in the article is enormous.

The newspaper says the report, like many previous ones, is based on the Guardian's reading of documents provided by former U.S. defense contractor Edward Snowden, who admitted leaking documents this month detailing government surveillance programs.

Unlike some previous reports, the paper has not published the full documents on which the story was based.

A spokesman for the British agency, known as GCHQ, issued a statement saying that in line with long-standing practice, it does not comment on intelligence matters.

"It is worth pointing out that GCHQ takes its obligations under the law very seriously," the statement read. "Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee."

The prime minister's office at 10 Downing Street also gave a statement saying only, "We don't comment on intelligence matters."

The GCHQ is one of the three UK intelligence agencies and, according to its website, forms a "crucial part of the UK's national intelligence and security machinery."

A source with knowledge of intelligence matters said "intelligence agencies are there to keep citizens safe and the vast majority of data collected is discarded."

The process used by the GCHQ, the source said, "scans bulk data for any information that can have national security implication.

"Only information deemed useful for national security is pulled out and examined in more detail. The vast majority of data is not examined or retained.

"The process is legal and governed by the 2000 Regulatory Investigatory Power Act. It is regularly reviewed and authorized by ministerial warrants. This is vital national security work. It's proportionate and it's about following terrorist or criminal activity and not about following law-abiding citizens."

CNN's Bharati Naik contributed to this report.

Freedom fighter Snowden off to Venezuela???

Source

Reports: Snowden fled Hong Kong, in Moscow

Associated Press Sun Jun 23, 2013 10:37 AM

HONG KONG — NSA leaker Edward Snowden was permitted to leave Hong Kong despite an extradition request that he be returned to the United States to face charges of espionage, Hong Kong said Sunday.

Russian state media say he has landed in Moscow and that he intends to fly to Cuba and on to Venezuela.

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed his departure from Hong Kong just hours after officials announced they filed a formal petition with Chinese authorities seeking Snowden's arrest and return to the United States.

"We have been informed by the Hong Kong authorities Mr. Snowden has departed Hong Kong for a third country,'' Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said Sunday. "We will continue to discuss this matter with Hong Kong and pursue relevant law enforcement cooperation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel.''

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said on Sunday that the U.S. government must exhaust all legal options to get Snowden back.

"Every one of those nations is hostile to the United States," Rogers, R-Mich., said on NBC's Meet the Press.

"When you think about what he says he wants and what his actions are, it defies logic," said Rogers, who repeated his assertion that Snowden's leaks of secret government surveillance programs had damaged U.S. national security.

The Hong Kong government said Sunday that Snowden, 30, was allowed to fly out "on his own accord" because a the U.S. extradition request announced Saturday did not fully comply with Hong Kong law.

Russian news media site RT reported that Snowden will be on a flight to Havana, leaving Moscow on Monday and then on to Caracas, arriving Monday night. Russia's state ITAR-Tass news agency said Snowden was on Flight SU213, which landed on Sunday afternoon.

RT reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin was unaware of Snowden's plans to fly to Moscow. It said Russian Interfax news agency said Snowden was met at the airport by an official from the Venezuela embassy.

Venezuela's Foreign Ministry in Caracas said it had no information on Snowden to provide. Earlier this month, Peskov said the Kremlin would consider granting Snowden asylum if he asked for it.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, told Australian Sydney Morning Herald that Snowden will be met by "diplomats from the country that will be his ultimate destination" in the airport, who'll accompany him on a further flight to his destination.

Interfax reported that Snowden has not been able to leave the airport because he does not have a Russian visa. He was accompanied by Wikileaks representative Sarah Harrison, a British citizen and Assange confidante who does have a Russian visa, according to Interfax. A car belonging to the Venezuela embassy was spotted visiting the airport.

Wikileaks has published national secrets on its site in the past and Assange is hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of rape. WikiLeaks said it had helped him exit Hong Kong.

"(Snowden) is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum,and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks," the group said in a statement.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said she was not surprised that Snowden would seek safe haven in Cuba or Venezuela, "two regimes that have a longstanding history of giving refuge to fugitives from U.S. law."

"The cruel irony is that there are no press freedoms in either Cuba or Venezuela, yet Snowden who supposedly stands for transparency in government seeks refuge in police states like these two countries," she said.

Hong Kong said in a statement that it allowed Snowden to leave because documents provided by the U.S. government for extradition did not "fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law," and the U.S. had not yet provided the additional information requested to consider the U.S. request for a provisional arrest warrant.

It said there was no legal basis to stop Snowden from leaving, and the U.S. had been informed of his departure.

Regina Ip, a legislator and Cabinet member, said Sunday that a judge in Hong Kong might have rejected a provisional arrest warrant for Snowden if the government had proceeded with the "insufficient" information the U.S. had provided.

"I don't think we need to be concerned about any consequences," she said without elaboration.

After the announcement Saturday of the extradition request, an Obama administration official told USA TODAY that Hong Kong risked harming relations with the two sides if it did not comply with its legal obligations.

Snowden has been the focus of a criminal investigation since he acknowledged earlier this month that he was the source of materials detailing surveillance programs that collected telephone records for millions of Americans and a separate operation that targeted the Internet communications of non-citizens abroad who were suspected of terrorist connections.

A criminal complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia on June 14 and was unsealed Friday.

Hong Kong also said it had asked the U.S. to clarify reports, based on interviews with Snowden, that the NSA had hacked into computers in Hong Kong and would follow up on the matter "to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong."

Legislator Leung Kwok Hung called Snowden's departure "a loss" for the people of Hong Kong given the value of his leaks in bringing attention to U.S. electronic surveillance in Hong Kong and globally. Leung worries that Snowden may end up in a place where he is less able to call attention to the NSA's activities.

"He has done something good for Hong Kong and the rest of the world already," said Leung, chairman of the League of Social Democrats. "I totally respect his choice as an individual" to leave Hong Kong. As an individual he needs to take care of his interests," he said.

The South China Morning Post meanwhile published additional allegations of hacking in Hong Kong and China on Sunday based on its June 12 interview with Snowden. The newspaper reported that Snowden had provided information to show that the NSA had hacked into the Hong Kong system of Pacnet, which runs undersea telecommunications cables around the Pacific, and into 63 computers and servers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of China's most elite schools.

He added, "The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data."

The newspaper did not indicate why it withheld publication of these reports until Snowden had left Hong Kong.

Snowden, who was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton as an NSA systems analyst in Hawaii, fled to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong last month with top-secret documents and court orders on government surveillance operations.

A one-page criminal complaint against Snowden was unsealed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., part of the Eastern District of Virginia where his former employer, government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered, in McLean. He is charged with unauthorized communication of national defense information, willful communication of classified communications intelligence information and theft of government property. The first two are under the Espionage Act and each of the three crimes carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison on conviction.

The complaint is dated June 14, five days after Snowden's name first surfaced as the person who had leaked to the news media that the NSA, in two highly classified surveillance programs, gathered telephone and Internet records to ferret out terror plots.

Snowden told the South China Morning Post in an interview published June 12 on its website that he hoped to stay in the autonomous region of China because he has faith in "the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate."

James Hon, a leader of the League in Defense of Hong Kong's Freedom, said, "If (Snowden) has left, that would be good news… because you don't know what the Hong Kong government and the Chinese government together are going to do to him."

Hon, whose group participates in many opposition protests in Hong Kong, added, "I wish him luck."

Contributing: Kevin Johnson in Washington; Richard Wolf in McLean, Va.; Arutunyan reported from Moscow

Snowden seeks asylum, Ecuador says

Source

Snowden flees Hong Kong for Moscow

By Kathy Lally, Jia Lynn Yang and Anthony Faiola, Updated: Sunday, June 23, 11:30 AM E-mail the writers

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, fled Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday with the assistance of the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport aboard an Aeroflot flight, according to Russian media reports and a WikiLeaks spokesman.

Snowden’s ultimate destination was unknown, but Ricardo Patiño Aroca, Ecuador’s foreign minister, tweeted Sunday afternoon that his government had received a request for asylum from Snowden. WikiLeaks released a statement saying Snowden was “bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum.”

The Hong Kong government said Sunday that Snowden left “on his own accord for a third country.” A black BMW with diplomatic license plates assigned to the Ecuadoran Embassy was seen parked at Sheremetyevo, but it was unclear who might have been in the car.

The Russian news agency Interfax and Radio Ekho Moskvy reported that Snowden was booked on a flight to Cuba and then from Havana to Caracas, Venezuela. Either, or both, could be stopping points on the way to Ecuador. The next Aeroflot flight to Havana leaves Monday afternoon.

WikiLeaks, which has published hundreds of thousands of classified documents, said it is aiding Snowden in his bid to avoid a return to the United States, which has filed espionage charges against him and asked Hong Kong to detain him.

The group posted on Twitter about 5 a.m. EDT that Snowden was “currently over Russian airspace accompanied by WikiLeaks legal advisors.” The organization later said Snowden was accompanied on his flight to Moscow by Sarah Harrison, who the organization said is a UK citizen, journalist and researcher working with the WikiLeaks legal defense team.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist and spokesman for WikiLeaks, said in a phone interview that Snowden would overnight in Moscow, which he described as “not a final destination.” He declined to say when Snowden would be departing or where his next or ultimate stop would be.

Hrafnsson said he had personally established contact with Snowden last week while the American was still in Hong Kong. Arrangements were made for Harrison, a member of the WikiLeaks legal defense team, to meet Snowden in Hong Kong and accompany him out. Harrison was still with Snowden in Moscow, Hrafnsson said.

He said information on Snowden’s next step would probably be withheld until at least tonight or tomorrow morning.

“The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr. Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person,” said Baltasar Garzon, legal director of WikiLeaks and lawyer for Julian Assange, the group’s founder, who has spent the past year holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. “What is being done to Mr. Snowden and to Mr. Julian Assange — for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest — is an assault against the people.”

Three U.S. officials said that Snowden’s passport had been revoked, before he left Hong Kong. The State Department said privacy laws prevented it from commenting on Snowden’s passport.

“As is routine and consistent with U.S. regulations, persons with felony arrest warrants are subject to having their passport revoked,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “. . . Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States.”

But Interfax, quoting a Russian law enforcement source, said Snowden could continue on his journey from Moscow despite revocation of his U.S. passport if the country where he was seeking asylum provided him with travel documents. Those documents could include affirmation of refugee status, Interfax reported, or even a passport from the destination country.

Snowden, who has drawn comparisons to Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who provided secret files to WikiLeaks, was being examined at the airport by a doctor from the Ecuadoran Embassy on Sunday morning, according to RT, a television network financed by the Russian government. Other Russian media also reported that Snowden was in Moscow.

The Hong Kong government said that documents from the U.S. government requesting a warrant for his arrest “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law” and it had asked the United States to provide “additional information.”

“As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr. Snowden from leaving Hong Kong,” the statement said.

A senior Justice Department official disputed that claim. “The request met the requirements of the agreement,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. “They came back to us late Friday with additional questions, and we were in the process of responding. Obviously, this raises concerns for us and we will continue to discuss this with the authorities there.”

The Hong Kong government said it had informed the U.S. government that Snowden had left.

It has also formally written to the U.S. government asking for “clarification” on reports that computer systems in Hong Kong had been hacked by U.S. agencies.

“The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong,” the statement said.

Nanda Chitre, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, confirmed in a statement that U.S. officials had been informed by Hong Kong of Snowden’s departure.

“We will continue to discuss this matter with Hong Kong and pursue relevant law enforcement cooperation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel,” Chitre said.

Snowden would not need a Russian visa if he remained at Sheremetyevo International Airport and departed for another country from there. He could stay within passport control and wait for another flight.

However, if he had to transfer to another Russian airport for a flight out, he would need a transit visa, which usually is not difficult to obtain.

Hrafnsson said he had made contact with Iceland’s government on Snowden’s behalf, but had been told that asylum seekers need to be present and within that nation’s jurisdiction before any claim could be processed. Hrafnsson added that people “within the WikiLeaks circle” had also approached “other governments” on Snowden’s behalf, but he declined to be more specific.

If Snowden is relocating to Ecuador, he would have limited travel options. There are no direct flights from Moscow to Quito, and many would-be layover destinations would probably heed Washington’s request to detain him. One likely exception would be transitioning through Havana. There are direct flights from Moscow to Havana five days a week, including Mondays, and a direct flight from Havana to Quito on Fridays.

Famous leaks in American history: Ten famous leaks in American history — and leakers from Ben Franklin to Edward Snowden.

Patiño recently said Quito would be willing to consider an asylum claim by Snowden. Speaking at a news conference in London after visiting Assange last Monday, Patiño suggested that his nation would approve such a request.

“If he wants to seek asylum from the Ecuadorian government he can do so, and we, of course will analyze it,” Patiño said during the news conference at the Ecuadoran Embassy. Authorities in Ecuador would weigh a petition “responsibly, just like we did so in Mr. Assange’s case,” the minister added.

Assange, the head of the anti-secrecy group, has been unable to leave the Ecuadoran Embassy because the United Kingdom has refused to provide him safe passage while he faces rape charges in Sweden.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa has emerged as one of the loudest critics of U.S. policy in the Western hemisphere. In 2011, his administration expelled the American ambassador in Quito to protest a cable released by WikiLeaks that alleged the Ecuadoran police force was rife with corruption.

The extradition treaties between the United States and both Ecuador and Venezuela state that offenses of “a political character” do not warrant extradition — much like the United States’ agreement with Hong Kong. A U.S. report on international narcotics control from 2012 says that Venezuela “does periodically deport non-Venezuelan nationals to the United States.” The treaty with Ecuador was signed in 1872; the agreement with Venezuela went into effect in 1923.

The Russian consulate in Hong Kong declined to comment.

The U.S. government last week asked Hong Kong to issue a provisional arrest warrant and filed charges against Snowden, including theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.”

Under the extradition treaty between the United States and Hong Kong, a judge must review the request for a provisional arrest warrant and make sure it meets certain conditions before issuing the warrant. .

The judge may have considered Snowden more of an activist than a criminal. The extradition also can be rejected if there’s any reason to believe that the person would not receive a fair trial if returned to his home country.

It’s unclear whether Chinese leadership in Beijing had any role in Hong Kong’s decision. Hong Kong is a semiautonomous region that prides itself on its independent legal system, but the government ultimately answers to the mainland government, whose influence can be difficult to discern. Residents in Hong Kong are deeply resistant to any overt sign of interference from the Communist Party.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing said in a statement Sunday that it had seen the reports of Snowden’s departure but did not have “specific details,” stating it would continue to pay attention to developments. The government added that it was “deeply concerned” about reports of U.S. government cyberattacks on China, saying “it proved that China is a victim of cyberattacks.”

The statement also said China opposes all forms of cyberattacks. “China is willing to strengthen dialogue and cooperation with international community based on the spirit of mutual respect, make joint effort to maintain peace and security in cyberspace.”

Ken Lieberthal, a China expert with the Brookings Institution, said it was doubtful that Beijing — or Hong Kong — had much appetite for having Snowden within their borders.

“I think the Chinese government’s position has been, ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with this,’ ” said Lieberthal, adding that this episode is unlikely to damage U.S.-China relations because U.S. government officials knowledgeable about China would understand the distinction between Hong Kong’s actions and Beijing’s.

Lieberthal said Hong Kong may well have looked carefully at the information provided by the U.S. government and decided it technically didn’t meet the test for issuing a warrant. “That seems like a perfectly justifiable position,” Lieberthal said. “I assume they’d be delighted not to be in the middle of this.”

Yang reported from Hong Kong, Lally reported from Moscow and Faiola reported from London. Ernesto Londoño in Kabul, Sari Horwitz in Washington and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.

Where Did Our ‘Inalienable Rights’ Go?

Source

Where Did Our ‘Inalienable Rights’ Go?

By MAX FRANKEL

Published: June 22, 2013

NOW that we sense the magnitude of our government’s effort to track Americans’ telephone and Internet transactions, the issue finally and fully before us is not how we balance personal privacy with police efficiency.

We have long since surrendered a record of our curiosities and fantasies to Google. We have broadcast our tastes and addictions for the convenience of one-button Amazon shopping. We have published our health and financial histories in exchange for better and faster hospital and bank services. We have bellowed our angers and frustrations for all to overhear while we walk the streets or ride a bus. Privacy is a currency that we all now routinely spend to purchase convenience.

But Google and Amazon do not indict, prosecute and jail the people they track and bug. The issue raised by the National Security Agency’s data vacuuming is how to protect our civil liberty against the anxious pursuit of civic security. Our rights must not be so casually bartered as our Facebook chatter. Remember “inalienable”?

I envy the commentators who, after a few days of vague discussion, think they have heard enough to strike the balance between liberty and security. Many seem confident that the government is doing nothing more than relieving Verizon and AT&T and Facebook of their storage problems, so that government agents can, on occasion, sift through years of phone and Internet records if they need to find a contact with a suspicious foreigner. Many Americans accept assurances that specific conversations are only rarely exhumed and only if the oddly named Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allows it. Such sifting and warrants — in unexplained combination with more conventional intelligence efforts — are now said, by President Obama and his team, to have prevented several dozen potential terrorist attacks, with elliptical references to threats against New York City’s subways and stock exchange.

Even if true and satisfying, these assurances are now being publicized only because this huge data-gathering effort can no longer be denied. Whatever the motive for the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, they have stimulated a long-overdue public airing. Although the government’s extensive data-hauling activity was partly revealed by diligent reporters and a few disapproving government sources over the last seven years, the undeniable proof came only from Mr. Snowden’s documents. Until then, the very existence of the enterprise was “top secret” and publicly denied, even in Congressional hearings. Even now, the project remains a secret in every important respect.

As those of us who had to defend the 1971 publication of the secret Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War have been arguing ever since, there can be no mature discussion of national security policies without the disclosure — authorized or not — of the government’s hoard of secrets.

HOW many thousands have access to these storage bins? Who decides to open any individual file and who then gains access to its content? Is there ever a chance to challenge the necessity of opening a file? And what happens to gleaned information that has no bearing whatsoever on terrorism?

Given the history of misused “secrets” in Washington, such questions are by no means paranoid. J. Edgar Hoover used F.B.I. investigations and files to smear the reputations of individuals — even to the point of intimidating presidents. Throughout the government, “security” monitors leaked personnel files to Congressional demagogues like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to wreck the careers of officials and blacklisted citizens with claims of disloyalty. President Lyndon B. Johnson and other officials used secret files from the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate political opponents. President Richard M. Nixon tried to use the C.I.A. to cover up his Watergate crimes.

Information that is gathered and managed in secret is a potent weapon — and the temptation to use it in political combat or the pursuit of crimes far removed from terrorism can be irresistible.

President Obama and other defenders of the amassing of data insist that no individual conversation or transaction is ever examined without “court” approval, meaning a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But the court authorizes the scrutiny of more Americans than foreigners, and it is no court in the customary sense: it operates entirely in secret. Its members are federal judges from around the country, any one of whom may authorize the opening of files. Lacking any real challenge to the evidence, they function more as grand jury than court. Mr. Obama has conceded that only a handful of warrant requests have ever been turned down (a few have been modified), a success rate he attributes to government restraint.

Yet most federal judges are predisposed to defer to executive claims of national security. They are generalists with little experience in evaluating intelligence, and they are reluctant to hamper government operatives sworn to defend the nation. The same reluctance is evident among members of Congress, who pose as watchdogs but melt when they hear appeals to patriotism from the managers of the intelligence services.

In theory, Americans are in the habit of resisting government intrusions on their rights of free speech and association. Accordingly we should be skeptical of such overweening exertions. But the data-hauling has gone on for years without real challenge. When asked whether the government could not simply log individual suspicious calls without amassing a national database, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, said he was open to discussing that approach, though it might delay work in a crisis. A delay of hours? Days? Weeks? Did President George W. Bush or Mr. Obama ever ask the question?

What ought to compound our skepticism is the news that there is money to be made in the mass approach. We are learning that much of the snooping is farmed out to profit-seeking corporations that have great appetites for government contracts, secured through executives who enrich themselves by shuttling between agency jobs and the contractors’ board rooms. We have privatized what should be a most solemn government activity, guaranteeing bloat and also the inevitable and ironic employ of rebellious hackers like Mr. Snowden.

Where then can we find the skeptical oversight that such a radical challenge to our freedom demands? Presidents beholden to their own bureaucracies seem disinclined to play the skeptic or even to create an elite independent commission, like the Warren Commission, which examined the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, to assess the conflict between liberty and security and point the way to reasonable balance.

Despite the predilections of federal judges to defer to the executive branch, I think in the long run we have no choice but to entrust our freedom to them. But the secret world of intelligence demands its own special, permanent court, like the United States Tax Court, whose members are confirmed by the Senate for terms that allow them to become real experts in the subject. Such a court should inform the public about the nature of its cases and its record of approvals and denials. Most important, it should summon special attorneys to test the government’s secret evidence in every case, so that a full court hears a genuine adversarial debate before intruding on a citizen’s civil rights. That, too, might cost a little time in some crisis. There’s no escaping the fact that freedom is expensive.

Silicon Valley long has had ties to military, intelligence agencies

Silicon Valley long has had ties to military, intelligence agencies

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

Posted: 06/22/2013 03:00:00 PM PDT

Disclosures about a secret government intelligence effort called Prism have rocked some of Silicon Valley's leading Internet companies, but the program is hardly the first instance of U.S. military and intelligence officials turning to the tech industry for help.

"The industry has always tried to make it seem like it was all venture capitalists and free thinkers. And it does include those people," said longtime Silicon Valley watcher Lenny Siegel, who runs the nonprofit Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View. "But there's no question that the government, particularly the military, was a driving force in the development of the computer technology that we use today."

Experts say the government has had good An illustration picture shows the logo of the U.S. National Security Agency on the display of an iPhone in Berlin, June 7, 2013. The debate over whether the U.S. government is violating citizens' privacy rights while trying to protect them from terrorism escalated dramatically on Thursday amid reports that authorities have collected data on millions of phone users and tapped into servers at nine internet companies. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski ( PAWEL KOPCZYNSKI ) reason to cultivate ties with Silicon Valley companies. The valley has what U.S. military and intelligence agencies want: cutting-edge technology and online services -- from social networks to Web-based email and video chat rooms -- that people all over the world use to communicate and share information.

And despite its libertarian bent, Silicon Valley, in turn, has benefited over the years from federal research funding, supply contracts and even regulators' good will.

Silicon Valley's ties to the government are decades old. Back in the 1980s, the valley's biggest employer was Sunnyvale's Lockheed Missiles and Space, which developed weapons and spy satellites for the Defense Department. The Internet itself started as a defense research project. And military contracts helped support the famed SRI think tank in Menlo Park, where researchers have developed and in some cases spun off pioneering technology used in robotics, mapping and the voice-recognition software that powers Apple's (AAPL) Siri personal assistant.

Today, the CIA has its own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, to help finance promising tech startups. Software-makers such as Palo Alto's Palantir Technologies sell sophisticated programs that law enforcement and intelligence agencies use to analyze vast amounts of data. Mainline companies such as Cisco Systems (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have multimillion-dollar contracts to supply computer hardware and tech services to the military and other government offices.

But while there has always been a government presence in the valley, most people don't associate those efforts with the more widely known commercial and consumer tech industry. That's why it was a surprise, at least to some, when a former National Security Agency contractor leaked details of the Prism program. Details are still murky, but the program appears to give U.S. spy agencies, while investigating overseas terror plots, access to information about the online activities of certain individuals who use Internet services operated by Silicon Valley companies.

"These worlds coexisted, but one was hidden in plain sight. They never collided until today," said Steve Blank, a serial tech entrepreneur and Stanford University lecturer who has studied Silicon Valley history.

The valley's leading Internet companies say they supply user information only in response to specific legal demands. Google (GOOG), Facebook, Apple and Yahoo (YHOO) have all said they review government data requests carefully and reject those that don't follow the law. In recent days, they have pressed the government for permission to disclose more about those requests, so they can reassure customers that they aren't handing over information on a broad scale.

Silicon Valley's relationship with the federal government is complex: Companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple are frequently scrutinized by regulators for compliance with antitrust and consumer protection laws. And the tech industry pours millions of dollars into lobbying on legislation and policies that affect it.

Civil liberties activists worry that those interactions, especially the threat of regulatory action, make it all the more difficult for tech companies to resist when the National Security Agency or FBI come asking for customer data.

"The government has its thumb on their rate of return for investment," said attorney Shayana Kadidal of the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights. "They have no incentive to fight the government back on any of this stuff."

Others note that at least one company fought a secret legal battle to challenge information requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which governs Prism. The name of the company, which lost its appeal in the federal court that handles FISA matters, has been classified. But The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, has reported it was Yahoo.

The court's 2008 ruling in that case sent a strong message to other Internet companies that future legal challenges would be difficult, said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Prism is not the only instance where authorities have used a Silicon Valley company's products to collect information. Networking equipment-maker Cisco, for example, says it's legally required to build a technical feature known as "lawful intercept" capability into some of the products it sells to phone and cable providers, so their systems can be accessible to court-ordered wiretaps by police or other authorities.

Tech companies have also collaborated voluntarily with U.S. authorities in areas such as computer security. In recent years, Intel's (INTC) McAfee unit and other security firms have shared information and advised government officials about computer viruses and other malicious Internet attacks.

The government, in turn, has provided access to some of its knowledge on the subject: A few years ago, according to Bloomberg News, U.S. authorities gave Google co-founder Sergey Brin a top-secret briefing on a Chinese army unit that was linked to an attack on Google's network.

Staff writer Troy Wolverton contributed to this report. Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022. Follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

You can bet that Big Brother is watching you

You can bet that Big Brother is watching you

Mon Jun 24, 2013 7:30 PM

Let me get this straight: If you use a wireless phone or the Internet, the Obama administration (aka Big Brother) is tracking you.

If you call a suicide hotline, Big Brother knows. If you buy guns, Big Brother knows. If you want an abortion, Big Brother knows. If you are a newspaper reporter contacting a source, Big Brother knows. If you call your tax adviser, Big Brother knows. When you call your doctor, Big Brother knows.

Big Brother didn’t stop the Boston bombing. But California Democrats Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and many Republicans say that they knew your personal calls and e-mails were being tracked, so they approved the unreasonable searches. Only a terrorist would object.

Big Brother rules. Resistance is futile. And I will be tracked for sending this letter.

— Gerry Walsh, Surprise

2 sent to prison for creation, sale of machine guns

In fact one of the first cases on which involved a sawed off shotgun (which is subjected to the same laws a machine guns) was United States v. Miller ruled that the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) was unconstitutional at in the lower court.

That case was appealed directly to the Supreme Court by the Federal government. That was allowed in those days.

Oddly nobody showed up to represent Miller in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court reversed the decision because only the Federal government was represented in the case and the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) was constitutional.

"Neither the defendants nor their legal counsel appeared at the Supreme Court. A lack of financial support and procedural irregularities prevented counsel from traveling. Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision was rendered."

United States v. Miller

2 sent to prison for creation, sale of machine guns

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:33 PM

Two licensed gun dealers have been imprisoned for their roles in an illegal machine-gun manufacturing and sales operation that went undetected by authorities for nearly 15 years.

A U.S. District Court judge in Phoenix recently sentenced Randolph Benjamin Rodman, 60, of Maryland, and Idan C. Greenberg, 59, of Glendale, to prison terms of 121 months, or nearly a decade, and 33 months, or nearly three years, respectively, in connection with the bicoastal enterprise.

Authorities said Rodman, Greenberg and four other licensed dealers — three in Arizona and one in Maryland — conspired to make newly manufactured machine guns in violation of a 1986 ban and transferred them using paperwork for different firearms.

More than 30 such weapons were accounted for by agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, court records show.

Federal law defines a machine gun as any weapon that automatically shoots more than one bullet with a single trigger pull. In 1986, Congress banned the possession and transfer of all machine guns except for those legally owned before May 19, 1986, (meaning the firearms are federally registered) and machine guns possessed or manufactured for governmental entities.

Once the ban was implemented, the price of legally available machine guns, which stands at about 196,000 firearms, skyrocketed. Alan Korwin, a Scottsdale-based gun-law expert, said they can easily fetch $15,000 to $20,000 apiece in today’s market.

“They’re coveted by enthusiasts,” Korwin said. “You might find one for $10,000 that is in poor condition.”

George Clark, a defendant-turned-federal witness from the Kingman area, testified in November that he used a hacksaw to harvest serial numbers from less desirable, federally registered machine guns. Clark, a licensed gun maker, said he then welded the numbers onto new, custom-made, fully automatic weapons made at the request of other licensed dealers or for himself.

Clark’s advertisement for a MAC-style machine gun on subguns.com first piqued the ATF’s interest in October 2006, according to a search warrant. “MAC” stands for Military Armament Corp. The description of the MAC-style gun didn’t match what was actually being sold: a Model 1919 .30-caliber machine gun, a belt-fed firearm popular for infantry use during the 20th century.

Clark told agents he had been doing similar work since 1993, when he made his first M1919 using another serial number for a retired veteran who wanted the gun for sentimental reasons but couldn’t afford any on the market. Clark testified to having made similar guns for other licensed dealers, including Rodman and Greenberg, all of whom he claimed were in on the scheme.

Anyone who wants to own or transfer a registered machine gun must apply for a tax stamp, pay the tax and get ATF approval for the transfer or possession.

In addition to creating the new machine guns, authorities said, Clark and others failed to properly register the firearms with the ATF, instead passing them off as the originals.

Greenberg’s attorney did not return a call for comment. According to a court transcript of Greenberg’s testimony in August 2012, he has held a federal firearms license since 1980 and, in 1985, became a licensed dealer of weapons regulated by the National Firearms Act, which includes machine guns and short-barreled rifles and shotguns.

He ran his business, Firearms Adviser, from an address at 1001 S. Fifth St. in Phoenix, according to AFT licensing records. Greenberg’s attorney told the court that his client also trained members of the Israeli military and conducts firearms workshops for law enforcement.

A federal jury in December found Greenberg guilty of conspiracy, illegal possession of a machine gun, and receipt and possession of a firearm made in violation of the National Firearms Act.

The same jury convicted Rodman of 22 charges, including conspiracy; the manufacturing, possession, receipt and transfer of machine guns in violation of the act; and making false entries on applications and records.

NYC to police the police - Probably not!!!!

Well at least that's how the cops feel, and the elected officials that cater to the police unions like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

On the other hand I doubt any new laws will make the police obey the law. After all we currently have the US Bill of Rights and the police at the city, county, state and Federal levels routinely flush those constitutional rights down the toilet. Yea, sure every once in a while a cop gets more then a slap on the wrist for violating our rights but that is the exception rather then the rule.

Just two days ago I was falsely arrested by the police in Chandler, Arizona for unknown reason. When I took the 5th and refused to answer their questions the pigs did as they always do and told me the 5th Amendment didn't apply in this case. What rubbish. The pigs that arrested me were G. Peterson or G. Patterson #200, L.J. Morris badge #270 and piggy B Lucas, who refused to give me his badge and made it almost impossible to get this name.

I am not going to waste my time filing a complain with the Chandler Police Department because like most police departments they are corrupt.

I do plan to file a lawsuit in Federal Court suing the pigs for false arrest and civil rights violations, but I don't expect to win it. Not because my civil rights weren't violated or because I wasn't falsely arrested, but because it is THEIR SYSTEM and it is also corrupt.

Source

New York City Council Votes to Increase Oversight of Police Dept.

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Published: June 27, 2013

Over the strident objections of the mayor and police commissioner, the New York City Council early Thursday morning approved by veto-proof majorities a pair of bills aimed at increasing oversight of the Police Department and expanding New Yorkers’ ability to sue over racial profiling by officers. [Yea, but don't count on this new law being enforced if it is passed. The cops currently flush the Bill of Rights done the toilet with out any punishment. Another toothless law won't change things]

The two bills, known together as the Community Safety Act, passed during a late-night meeting of the Council that began after 11 p.m., lasted more than three hours and in which members also voted to pass the city’s budget and override a mayoral veto of a law on paid sick leave.

But it was the two policing bills that for months have stirred a heated public debate between its supporters, who are seeking a legal means to change the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who have warned that the measures would hamstring police officers and lead to a dangerous spike in crime. [Yea, it's really hamstringing cops when you expect them to obey the same laws they expect the rest of us to obey]

One, known as Intro 1079, would create an independent inspector general to monitor and review police policy, conduct investigations and recommend changes to the department. The monitor would be part of the city’s Investigation Department alongside the inspectors general for other city agencies.

The law would go into effect Jan. 1, 2014, leaving the matter of choosing the monitor to the next mayor.

The other bill, Intro 1080, would expand the definition of bias-based profiling to include age, gender, housing status and sexual orientation. It also would allow individuals to sue the Police Department in state court — not only for individual instances of bias, but also for policies that disproportionately affect people in any protected categories without serving a significant law enforcement goal. [Sorry to tell you this it is already illegal to stop people because of their age, gender, and race, but the police do it anyhow]

Both measures passed the 51-member Council with the votes needed to override a mayoral veto. As that threshold was passed just after 2:20 a.m., scores of supporters who had filled the chamber’s gallery and waited hours through the debate erupted into cheers.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has promised to veto both measures and this week called his opposition to them a matter of “life and death,” released a statement after the vote. “I will veto this harmful legislation and continue to make our case to Council members over the coming days and weeks,” he said. [It's a life or death matter when the police are expected to obey the law???? Obliviously Bloomberg thinks he is a royal ruler and we are all serfs expected to obey him.]

An attempt to override his veto would extend the protracted clash between the mayor and the Council over policing. The process could take more than two months, putting the override vote only weeks before the mayoral primary.

The legislation has already been a nettlesome issue in the Democratic race for mayor, especially for Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker, who has faced a growing challenge to her early front-runner status. She supported the measure creating an independent inspector general for the Police Department, which passed by a vote of 40 to 11, but she opposed the other, on police profiling, which received 34 votes in favor and 17 against.

“I worry about having too much judicial involvement,” she said before casting her vote, explaining that she did not believe the profiling bill would make New Yorkers less safe. [We already have the Bill of Rights and it doesn't make us safer, because the government has flushed it down the toilet. If passed this law will almost certainly be flushed down the toilet like the Bill of Rights has been]

Despite her earlier stated opposition, she allowed both bills to move forward, and on Monday presided over a so-called discharge vote — the first since the current structure of the Council was established in 1989 — to bring the legislation out of committee, where it had stalled.

The two bills were first introduced as a package last year by Councilmen Jumaane D. Williams and Brad Lander.

Mr. Bloomberg has 30 days to veto the bills. If he does so, the City Council then has 30 days from its next full meeting to hold an override vote. The mayor and the Police Department have lobbied hard against the bills in public and behind the scenes, and they appeared likely to keep up the pressure between the veto and the override vote in an effort to change the minds of supporters.

Mr. Kelly sent a letter on Tuesday to each of the Council members, arguing that the profiling bill could be used to force the removal of surveillance cameras and urging them to vote against it. “The bill would allow virtually everyone in New York City to sue the Police Department and individual police officers over the entire range of law enforcement functions they perform,” Mr. Kelly wrote. [We certainly can't have laws where citizens are allowed to sue crooked cops can we???? Well that's how the cops feel, althought the rest of us serfs think it is a good idea]

Mr. Williams, responding to Mr. Kelly’s letter, said: “If the cameras were put in high crime neighborhoods as a response, that’s good policing. If he put them there because black people live there, that’s a problem.”

At least one Council member received a call from his local police station commander to protest the legislation ahead of the vote.

“They were deeply concerned about 250s and said they would be unable to perform them because of the profiling part of the reform,” said Councilman Daniel Dromm of Queens, referring to the police form used for street stops. “But for me, it’s the teeth of the reform; it’s the needed piece.” He voted for both bills.

In voting against the two measures early Thursday morning, Peter F. Vallone Jr., the chairman of the public safety committee, said, “New Yorkers went to bed a long time ago, safe in their beds. But they are going to wake up in a much more dangerous city.”

Papers Please - Bill to Expand U.S. Database to Verify Hires

Bill to Expand U.S. Database to Verify Hires

By JULIA PRESTON and ASHLEY PARKER

Published: June 26, 2013 245 Comments

WASHINGTON — The sweeping immigration measure advancing rapidly in the Senate goes far beyond much-debated border security measures and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants with a crucial requirement that could affect every American who takes a new job in the future.

The provision, a linchpin of the legislation, would require all employers in the country within five years to use a federal electronic system to verify the legal eligibility to work of every new hire, including American citizens.

The verification plan has united an unusual array of supporters — including Democrats protective of workers’ rights and Republicans normally skeptical of government intrusion — who say it is essential for preventing illegal immigration in the future because it would remove the jobs magnet that attracts migrants to this country.

But there has been little debate up to now about the provision to expand the federal system, which is known as E-Verify, and critics of the measure as well as some proponents worry that most Americans are unaware of the mandate’s broad scope. The system relies on imperfect federal databases that contain errors, and when it goes national, some Americans are likely to face unexpected bureaucratic headaches and could even lose new jobs.

“I don’t think people really understand that this creates a regulation not just for every employer, or for every immigrant, but also for every citizen in this country,” said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group that favors limited government and opposes mandatory employee verification.

Now, with the bill headed for a final vote in the Senate as early as Thursday, the E-Verify mandate has become the focus of intense last-minute deal making.

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, has demanded a separate vote on an amendment that would make the requirements even tougher by ordering employers to comply sooner and tightening antifraud measures. Sponsors of the overhaul, which seems headed for passage, are negotiating with Mr. Portman, hoping to win his support to maximize the Republican votes in the final tally.

One American who has been watching the progress of the E-Verify provisions with a growing sense of dread is David Borris, the owner of Hel’s Kitchen Catering, a small business in Northbrook, Ill. While he agrees with the path to citizenship in the bill, Mr. Borris said he worried that the requirement to check all new employees with E-Verify would bring a host of costly and time-consuming troubles.

Mr. Borris said he needed to spend his time finding new customers who are planning banquets and bar mitzvahs, and perfecting the eggplant timbale that is a signature dish of his service.

“Businesses like mine don’t have the resources to be catching up with bureaucratic snafus,” he said. Mr. Borris is a leader of the Main Street Alliance network, one of many small business organizations opposing the E-Verify mandate.

On Wednesday, talks were still under way between Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate to try to hold a vote on a several additional amendments, which would likely include the proposal on E-Verify that Mr. Portman offered, together with Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana.

The measure would speed up the dates when employers would have to start using the system. It would also increase the use of photograph technology to eliminate a flaw in the system, which can fail to detect unauthorized immigrants who present employers with valid documents belonging to someone else.

“No matter how many miles of fence we build and how many agents we station on the border, I truly believe people will come to this country illegally as long as they believe America offers a better life and a better job,” Mr. Portman said on the Senate floor. Speaking on Wednesday, the senator said, “I believe strongly that if we do not have a stronger employee verification system at the workplace, this legislation is not going to work.”

Even without Mr. Portman’s vote, the overhaul bill appears almost certain to pass. It gathered new momentum Wednesday, when the Senate voted 69 to 29 to formally add a border security plan by two Republican senators, Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota, to the legislation. Fifteen Republicans supported the proposal, which would cost roughly $40 billion and create what some senators have described as a “border surge,” adding 20,000 new border patrol agents and erecting 700 miles of fencing at the southern border, among other measures.

In the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved, 22 to 9, a stand-alone bill that includes a nationwide E-Verify mandate similar to the one in the Senate legislation.

The need for worker verification to prevent unauthorized immigrants from taking jobs was one of the early agreements the eight senators who wrote the overhaul bill came to, aides said. The E-Verify mandate is one of the hard “triggers” in the legislation: under its terms, the system must be in use nationwide before any immigrants who had been here illegally can apply for permanent resident green cards, a crucial step on the path to citizenship.

Up to now the E-Verify system, which is run by Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, has been mostly voluntary and has earned surprisingly few detractors. With more than 411,000 employers currently participating, the system is reporting an accuracy rate of 99.7 percent in confirming that newly hired employees were authorized to work.

Of more than 20.2 million workers run through the system in 2012, only 0.26 percent turned out to be legally authorized after an initial erroneous denial, according to official figures. The system identified 221,155 new hires who did not have legal documents to work in this country. Officials said those figures proved the system was effective.

But under the proposed immigration changes, the system would quickly grow to include all of the nation’s 7.3 million employers and more than 156 million workers. “As you expand it out to the entire work force, even if the agency has worked hard to increase their accuracy, there is still a real problem with errors,” said Emily Tulli, a lawyer at the National Immigration Law Center, a legal assistance organization in Los Angeles.

The system matches identity information provided by newly hired employees against Social Security and Homeland Security records. Errors can occur when, for example, a newlywed adopts a spouse’s name and forgets to advise Social Security or when an employer misspells a foreign name.

In many cases, it takes a trip to a Social Security office to fix mistakes in the records. If the error is not speedily resolved, the worker can lose the job.

Homeland Security officials insist those cases are rare, and say they are confident the system can handle the expansion. A recently added tool improves accuracy by allowing employers to match a photo in the E-Verify system with a document presented by the new employee. Another tool allows people to check themselves before starting a job search.

A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, Peter Boogaard, said new employees would not be providing any more personal information than was already required on standard hiring forms. “So mandatory verification will likely go unnoticed by the majority of Americans,” Mr. Boogaard said.

But Mr. Borris, the caterer, is unconvinced. His full-time staff of 25 employees grows during busy times with about 80 seasonal workers, including many Latinos. He has one staff member to fill out employee forms, handle his payroll, manage his e-mail list and make all-important choices about which customers will get holiday gifts. Most companies now using the voluntary program have human resources staff, he said.

“That error rate is just a small number unless it’s your business or your brother or your sister,” Mr. Borris said.

NSA collected Americans' email data for a decade under Bush and Obama

Source

NSA collected Americans' email data for a decade under Bush and Obama, new report details

By Jeremy C. Owens

jowens@mercurynews.com

Posted: 06/27/2013 09:07:46 AM PDT

The National Security Agency began tracking email and Internet-use data after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, continuing and expanding the program through 2011, according to new documents published by The Guardian on Thursday.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, received records about the NSA's Prism program -- which collected similar "metadata" on Americans' cellphone usage from top carrier Verizon Wireless -- from Edward Snowden, a security contractor with Booz Allen who fled the U.S. after passing on the information.

Thursday's report involves a different NSA program, a warrantless surveillance program code-named Stellar Wind that was begun in 2001, under President George W. Bush. The Guardian Activists of Ukraine's Internet party, one of them acting as a CIA agent making telephone taps, demand the American authorities stop the pursuit of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden at an action of protest near the US Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, June 27, 2013. ((AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)) obtained a 2009 draft report by the NSA's inspector general and a 2007 Justice Department memo detailing the program, but did not reveal a source for the information.

President Barack Obama's administration confirmed that the program existed and was discontinued in 2011.

"The Internet metadata collection program authorized by the FISA court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted," Shawn Turner, director of communications for national intelligence, told the Guardian. "The program was discontinued by the executive branch as the result of an interagency review."

According to the report, the NSA received details about whom emails were directed to and IP addresses of the senders, which can provide physical locations, but could not see the content of the emails. In the beginning, the program only received such data when the communication involved a party outside the United States, but the 2007 memo shows that it eventually began to analyze data on communications between Americans.

Another document, created in 2008 and signed by the then-defense secretary and attorney general, says that the information provided through the program included "the information appearing on the 'to,' 'from' or 'bcc' lines of a standard email or other electronic communication," The Guardian reported.

Authorities used the information to analyze communications of targeted individuals in terrorism investigations, looking for whom was being contacted by suspects and also the contacts of those contacts, which the NSA refers to as "contact chaining."

When the program began under President Bush in 2001, it had no legal authority, according to the documents, and Justice Department and FBI officials -- including then-deputy Attorney General James Comey, Obama's nominee for FBI director -- rebelled against the program in 2004 and had it shut down. However, Bush then took the program to the court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and received official clearance for the activity ; the court renewed its order every 90 days until it was shut down in 2011, according to The Guardian.

Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.

The Criminal N.S.A.

The Criminal N.S.A.

By JENNIFER STISA GRANICK and CHRISTOPHER JON SPRIGMAN

Published: June 27, 2013

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”

It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Let’s examine them in turn.

Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contract employee and whistle-blower, has provided evidence that the government has phone record metadata on all Verizon customers, and probably on every American, going back seven years. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious affiliations and political activities are, and so on.

The law under which the government collected this data, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows the F.B.I. to obtain court orders demanding that a person or company produce “tangible things,” upon showing reasonable grounds that the things sought are “relevant” to an authorized foreign intelligence investigation. The F.B.I. does not need to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed, or any connection to terrorism.

Even in the fearful time when the Patriot Act was enacted, in October 2001, lawmakers never contemplated that Section 215 would be used for phone metadata, or for mass surveillance of any sort. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that “Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations.” The N.S.A.’s demand for information about every American’s phone calls isn’t “targeted” at all — it’s a dragnet. “How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?” Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: It’s not.

The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date, even if there is no particular reason to believe that any but a tiny fraction of the data collected might possibly be suspicious. That is a shockingly flimsy argument — any data might be “relevant” to an investigation eventually, if by “eventually” you mean “sometime before the end of time.” If all data is “relevant,” it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.

Let’s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.’s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of e-mails and other messages — including communications to, from and between Americans.

The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non­American individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans’ international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, e-mails, video and voice chats, photos, voice­over IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.

How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.

If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.

The administration hides the extent of its “incidental” surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not “target” American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans’ e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government ­fed misunderstanding.

A “target” under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on — not the people the government is trying to listen to. It’s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans’ messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.

Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Christopher Jon Sprigman is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Uncle Sam spying on people that buy fireworks??? Probably.

I think a better idea would be to take all the guns and explosives away from Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam would no longer be able to terrorize and murder brown skinned folks in third world countries. And of course Uncle Sam's goons in the FBI, Homeland Security, BATF, DEA and other government police forces would no longer be able to terrorize Americans on the home front.

Source

Feds urge fireworks sellers to watch for suspicious buyers

Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY 11:10 a.m. EDT June 29, 2013

A federal task force says that fireworks sellers should keep a close eye out for suspicious people buying fireworks.

As the frenzy for fireworks peaks in the runup to Independence Day, a federal task force is warning fireworks retailers to keep watch for suspicious purchasers.

The National Explosives Task Force issued an industry advisory Thursday warning that consumer fireworks are a "common component used in improvised explosive devices." It advised retailers to look for possible signs of suspicious activity, including customers who ask about how to take apart or modify the fireworks or who seek to purchase commercial-grade fireworks.

The advisory comes in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 on April 15. In an indictment made public Thursday, a grand jury charged Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with detonating bombs made from pressure cookers, low-explosive powder and shrapnel at the marathon. The indictment says his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, purchased 48 mortars containing 8 pounds of low-explosive powder from Phantom Fireworks, a retail store in Seabrook, N.H., on Feb. 6.

This is the second time in recent years that fireworks have been used in a terror plot. Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, who confessed to a failed attempt to bomb Times Square in 2010, purchased fireworks from a Phantom store in Matamoros, Pa.

But the use of fireworks for nefarious acts has not dampened demand among consumers or prompted backlash from state or federal regulators. Last year, consumers purchased more than 185 million pounds of fireworks, according to data from the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission.

All but four states — Delaware, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey — allow the sale of some types of fireworks or sparklers. No state has tightened restrictions on fireworks since the bombing, says Julie Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association, a trade group based in Bethesda, Md.

Now is peak fireworks season: 90% of everyday consumer pyrotechnics is sold between April 15 to July 15, Heckman says.

"I think most Americans realize that bad things can be made out of many common materials," Heckman said.

Consumer fireworks individually do not mass detonate because they contain low levels of explosive mixed with other chemicals to make the firework colorful, says Phantom CEO Bruce Zoldan. The Boston bombers, using a technique recommended by al-Qaeda, appear to have cut open the pyrotechnics to remove the powder and put it in the pressure cooker, Zoldan said.

"It's possible to get enough powder together to do something, but there are easier ways to do that," Zoldan said.

The industry, which is tightly regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and state authorities, is willing to work on ways to prevent products from being used improperly or assist law enforcement when needed, Zoldan said.

Phantom Fireworks maintains a database of customers for marketing so the company was able to identify Tsarnaev's purchase, Zoldan said.

"I think the industry will have to gather together and come up with something that will protect the industry's interests by working hand in hand with Homeland Security," he said. "If we're selling a product that's capable of being dissected, then we as an industry will have to get together to do what's right."

The industry has taken such steps before, he said. Decades ago, the industry created and funded the American Fireworks Standards Laboratory to safety test products to prevent fireworks-related injuries, he said.

"Now we need to make a proactive effort to help monitor individuals who might come in to buy fireworks for not honorable reasons," Zoldan said. "We help Americans celebrate America's birthday. We're not going to let criminals ruin that."

Syria could become another American military failure

Letter: Syria could become another American military failure

Posted: Monday, July 1, 2013 11:59 am

Letter to the Editor

America hasn’t “won” a war since 1945. Korean War cost a billion dollars and didn’t change a thing. 36,574 Americans died and 103,284 were wounded.

During the 1967 Israel/Arab War, 34 American Sailors were killed and 171 wounded by the Israel Air Force.

The Vietnam War cost more than a trillion dollars and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army ended up taking over South Vietnam anyway, at a cost of 58,200 American military deaths and 303,644 wounded.

In Lebanon, 241 marines were killed and 60 wounded in 1983 and Hezbollah runs Lebanon today.

The Bosnian War saw a Serbian out-of-date missile battery shoot down our stealth bomber, a billion of America’s state-of-the-art technology ended up in the hands of the Russians and communist Chinese.

Our military went into Somalia to take out a local warlord and we saw on television the horrific murdering of American warriors in the “Black Hawk Down” fiasco.

The Iraq War cost 4,487 American lives and 32,226 wounded and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The Afghanistan War has cost a trillion dollars and the lives of 2,235 American military men and women, and 17,700 were wounded.

For what, none of deaths of American military or the wounded have changed these countries into upstanding democracies. The same political, ethnic and religious divisions still exist in the Korean Peninsula, Lebanon, Somalia, Israel, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan that existed before America squandered its treasure and sacrificed the lives of its military men and women.

And now it looks like Syria will be the next fiasco.

Leon Ceniceros

Mesa

Bolivian president’s plane forced to land in Austria in hunt for Snowden

American tyrants search Bolivian President's plane for Edward Snowden

And I thought my civil rights were violated when the jackbooted Chandler Police thugs falsely arrested me last week. (See this URL)

Emperor Obama really is a tyrant who thinks he is above international law and can do whatever he wants to destroy his enemies of which freedom fighter Edward Snowden is one of.

Source

Bolivian president’s plane forced to land in Austria in hunt for Snowden

By Kathy Lally and Juan Forero, Updated: Wednesday, July 3, 8:12 AM E-mail the writers

MOSCOW — Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane, forced to land in Austria because of suspicions that American fugitive Edward Snowden was on board, was permitted to fly home Wednesday, Bolivian and European authorities said.

The search for Snowden turned into a major diplomatic fiasco, with Bolivia, Venezuela and several other Latin American countries lashing out at the United States and accusing it of having strong-armed European countries into redirecting the official Bolivian presidential plane.

Snowden, who revealed secret U.S. surveillance programs and fled to Hong Kong, then Moscow, to stay beyond American reach, was not aboard the plane, an irate David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s foreign minister, told reporters after the Bolivian delegation landed in Vienna.

“We don’t know who invented this lie,” he said from Bolivia’s capital, La Paz.

Morales’s plane, ferrying him home from a conference in Moscow, was redirected to Vienna late Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to allow it to enter their airspace, Bolivian and Venezuelan officials said.

Authorities in Austria confirmed that the plane was searched and that Snowden, 30, was not on the flight. There was no indication that he had left Moscow, where he has been in diplomatic limbo for more than a week.

“Our airport staff have checked it over and can assure you that no one is on board who is not a Bolivian citizen,” Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger told reporters at the Vienna airport, Reuters news agency reported. He called it a “voluntary examination.” But Morales had told reporters that no Austrians had been on board.

Bolivia’s government responded angrily to the incident. Vice President Alvaro Garcia announced that the ambassadors of France and Italy and the consul for Portugal would be summoned to the Foreign Ministry in La Paz on Wednesday to explain what he called “the abuse” of redirecting Morales’s plane.

He said the representatives of those countries need to explain “these disagreeable, terrible and abusive events.”

The incident also raised the ire of governments and organizations across Latin America, which cast Morales’s troubles as a dire violation against a small country orchestrated by Washington. Even Colombia’s leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), called the rerouting of the plane “an infamy.”

Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States, which is based in Washington and is made up of governments across the Western Hemisphere, called for an explanation from the European countries that Morales’s government accused of blocking his plane’s flight path.

“Nothing justifies an action of such disrespect from the highest authorities of a country,” said Insulza, who is from Chile.

Choquehuanca said Morales’s plane was an hour from French airspace when it was told it could not enter. “Portugal has to explain to us,” he said. “France has to explain to us why they canceled” flight authorization.

The Portuguese Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday that Portugal informed the Bolivians on Monday afternoon, a full day before Morales’s flight, that it would not allow the Bolivian plane to land in the country for unspecified “technical reasons” but that it would allow an overflight.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that two officials with the French Foreign Ministry said that Morales’s plane also had authorization to fly over France. They would not comment on why Bolivian officials said otherwise. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named, according to ministry policy.

The wire service, citing an unidentified official in Vienna, reported that the flight crew on Morales’s aircraft asked controllers at the Vienna airport for permission to land because the plane needed more fuel to continue its journey.

The aircraft took off from Vienna shortly before noon Wednesday, AP reported. Spain said the plane would be allowed to refuel in the Canary Islands, although a Foreign Ministry official declined to comment on a claim by Bolivia that the permission was contingent on allowing authorities to search the plane, the wire service said.

The White House, CIA and State Department all declined to comment on the situation involving the Bolivian aircraft. But the latest twist seemed to signal that U.S. authorities have been able to marshal support from European countries in what has been a feverish pursuit of the former National Security Agency contractor.

It also underscored how Snowden has settled still deeper into isolation as one country after another has rejected his appeals for asylum since his disclosure of a trove of highly secret documents.

The diverting of Morales’s plane is sure to fan anger against the United States, which is trying to play down new revelations of spying against European allies while trying to win support to corral Snowden even from countries such as Russia, Bolivia and Venezuela, which are sharply at odds with the Obama administration.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua called the incident over Austria “an attempt on Evo Morales’s life.” He said it was a sign of how far “the empire” — a reference to the United States — and its “lackeys” would go “to hunt down a young man who has only said the truth.”

Bolivia’s defense minister, Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight, also blamed the United States, telling Bolivian media that “this proves with clarity an attitude of sabotage and plotting by the United States, pressuring European government.” He said that Italy, too, had barred Morales’s plane from its airspace.

For the United States, Bolivia clearly emerged as a possible sanctuary for Snowden, who was stuck in Russia after the United States revoked his passport before his arrival in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong on June 23.

In an interview earlier Tuesday in Moscow on the state-financed RT news channel, Morales said he would consider asylum for Snowden. “Yes, why not?” he said. “Bolivia is there to welcome personalities who denounce — I don’t know if it’s espionage or control. But we are here.”

After living unseen in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport for a week, Snowden sent out 19 asylum requests Sunday night, according to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that has been advising him. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he could stay here if he stopped leaking information harmful to the United States, an odd offer that Snowden refused, a presidential spokesman said Tuesday morning.

That left a list of countries, from Austria to Venezuela, to which Snowden had sent appeals. By Tuesday evening, at least eight of them — including Ecuador and Iceland, which had been asked earlier — had said an applicant must be in the country to be considered. At least three had said no, and others had not replied.

Some countries avoided him out of friendship with the United States, others for political or economic reasons. Ecuador, which at first had appeared enthusiastic, grew less so after Vice President Biden made a call to the president. To be granted asylum, Snowden would have to count on a country to defy the United States. Of those on his list, Bolivia and Venezuela were looking like the best possibilities. Both are hostile to the United States, and the presidents of both countries have heaped praise on Snowden.

Morales, who said his government had not received a formal request for asylum, in 2008 expelled the U.S. ambassador from his country and ended anti-drug cooperation with Washington.

“Bolivia, as well as Venezuela and Ecuador,” he said, “are exposed to constant surveillance from the U.S. empire.”

Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was also in Moscow, which had convened a meeting of gas-exporting countries, and Russian media speculated that he would take Snowden to Venezuela on his official plane.

Maduro smiled at that suggestion. “We will take with us numerous agreements on investments in the oil and gas sector,” he said. He defended the former National Security Agency contractor, however, saying that Snowden had neither killed anyone nor planted a bomb and that he deserved protection. “He only told the world a large truth to prevent war,” Maduro said. “The U.S. capitalist elite are trying to control the world and are spying on friends, foes and the entire planet.”

The Obama administration on Tuesday acknowledged contacting foreign governments on Snowden’s asylum list, but a State Department spokeswoman dismissed the leaker’s claims that Washington has mounted a campaign to pressure anyone against offering him sanctuary.

“We have been in touch, as we have been for several days now, with a broad range of countries that could serve as either transit spots or final destinations,” said the spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki. “And what we’ve been communicating is, of course, what we’ve been communicating publicly — that Mr. Snowden has been accused of leaking classified information. He is somebody that we would like to see returned to the United States.”

Late Tuesday, Maduro was preparing to fly on to Belarus — without Snowden, a member of his entourage told the Interfax news agency. Nothing could be done, the official told Interfax — the Venezuelan plane was at a different airport.

After his nine days in limbo, Snowden’s situation looked desperate. Officials here have portrayed themselves as powerless in the case because Snowden is outside their jurisdiction in the transit zone and needs a passport or other document before he can travel onward, but some Russians find that disingenuous. Russian officials always find a way to do exactly what they want, they say.

And that has raised questions about what is going on behind the scenes. Pavel Felgenhauer, a longtime military analyst and observer of the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, offered this speculative scenario: Russia must be trying to see whether it can recruit Snowden.

In an interview Tuesday, Felgenhauer said that when Putin told reporters that Snowden could stay if he stopped talking about the United States, Putin was saying that Snowden had to make a choice. Putin was telling Snowden that he would be working for Russia, not for one of the newspapers publishing his leaks, Felgenhauer said.

The reason Snowden has not been seen is that border guards, who stand at the door when an international flight lands and who work for the FSB, would have hustled him off to a safe room in the airport, or even a safe house elsewhere, Felgenhauer said. Snowden probably did not use a ticket he had to Havana on June 24, the analyst said, because his minders told him the United States would force the Aeroflot flight down when it flew over U.S. territory.

“He’s cornered psychologically,” Felgenhauer said. “You bring the guy to the breaking point to see if he’s real. By now he’s probably afraid of everything, convinced he’ll be hunted down like bin Laden if he leaves here.”

As Felgenhauer put it in a Novaya Gazeta article this week, “Snowden remained in Sheremetyevo like a suitcase with a broken-off handle: a pain to carry and a shame to throw away.”

Forero reported from Bogota, Colombia. Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Remember all the times we have been told that despite being a government entity the US Postal Service is run like a private business.

That is a big lie. In this article it certainly sounds like the the US Postal Service is a government entity that is helping the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet of police agencies spy on the American public.

Source

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON

Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.

In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.

In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.

Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”

But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”

For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.

The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things, obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.

In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.

“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.

Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

When you create a web page and you want to keep the information private from the world you can put a tag like this in the HTML

<META name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

I suspect when Google's robots gather information for the local police, FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet soup of Federal police forces that the robots ignore the meta tag.

Or perhaps they do honor the meta tag for the information they allow the general public to search for, but give ALL the information to the American police state.

Also I have also wondered if Google's robots index and catalog the comments put on their web pages. Browsers don't display the comments in web pages but are used to document the web pages by programmers and web masters.

I suspect Google's robots index and catalog the comments in web pages and give them to Uncle Sam's spies at the NSA and other Federal agencies.

Last I suspect that NSA or other Federal agencies now has their own robots that routinely scan the internet like Google's robots do.

I know on several of my web pages I get a daily visit or two from several IP addresses in Shady Side, Maryland (76.114.149.166 and 76.114.145.234) which I suspect is a government agency spying on me. Also I get visits from several other IP address, on a less frequent basis which I also suspect are police agencies spying on me. Maybe that Shady Grove, Maryland. I always get the names mixed up.

You can put a sign on your yard and home that says

"No Trespassing"

I wonder if you could put a sign like that you your web pages that said something like

"Police keep out - No trespassing"

Source

Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

By JAMES RISEN and NICK WINGFIELD

Published: June 19, 2013

WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Spy agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Max Kelly.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.

Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly.

“We are all in these Big Data business models,” said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.”

Although Silicon Valley has sold equipment to the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies for a generation, the interests of the two began to converge in new ways in the last few years as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data — at the same time that the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise. “These worlds overlap,” said Philipp S. Krüger, chief executive of Explorist, an Internet start-up in New York.

The sums the N.S.A. spends in Silicon Valley are classified, as is the agency’s total budget, which independent analysts say is $8 billion to $10 billion a year.

Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.

A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.

Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped. Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.

In its recruiting in Silicon Valley, the N.S.A. sends some of its most senior officials to lure the best of the best. No less than Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency’s director and the chief of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, showed up at one of the world’s largest hacker conferences in Las Vegas last summer, looking stiff in an uncharacteristic T-shirt and jeans, to give the keynote speech. His main purpose at Defcon, the conference, was to recruit hackers for his spy agency.

N.S.A. badges are often seen on the lapels of officials at other technology and information security conferences. “They’re very open about their interest in recruiting from the hacker community,” said Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

But perhaps no one embodies the tightening relationship between the N.S.A. and the valley more than Kenneth A. Minihan.

A career Air Force intelligence officer, Mr. Minihan was the director of the N.S.A. during the Clinton administration until his retirement in the late 1990s, and then he ran the agency’s outside professional networking organization. Today he is managing director of Paladin Capital Group, a venture capital firm based in Washington that in part specializes in financing start-ups that offer high-tech solutions for the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies. In effect, Mr. Minihan is an advanced scout for the N.S.A. as it tries to capitalize on the latest technology to analyze and exploit the vast amounts of data flowing around the world and inside the United States.

The members of Paladin’s strategic advisory board include Richard C. Schaeffer Jr., a former N.S.A. executive. While Paladin is a private firm, the American intelligence community has its own in-house venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, financed by the Central Intelligence Agency to invest in high-tech start-ups.

Many software technology firms involved in data analytics are open about their connections to intelligence agencies. Gary King, a co-founder and chief scientist at Crimson Hexagon, a start-up in Boston, said in an interview that he had given talks at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., about his company’s social media analytics tools.

The future holds the prospect of ever greater cooperation between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. because data storage is expected to increase at an annual compound rate of 53 percent through 2016, according to the International Data Corporation.

“We reached a tipping point, where the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it,” said Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. “Now we have an incentive to keep it forever.”

Social media sites in the meantime are growing as voluntary data mining operations on a scale that rivals or exceeds anything the government could attempt on its own. “You willingly hand over data to Facebook that you would never give voluntarily to the government,” said Bruce Schneier, a technologist and an author.

James Risen reported from Washington, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS???

Remember Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who introduced a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana. Kyrsten Sinema is now a US Congresswoman.

I guess the title of this article should have been "Vote for me and I will give you free stuff"

Source

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 6:27 PM

The first-term congresswoman reflects on her first six months in Washington.

After six months in Congress, what’s the No. 1 thing you’ve learned about the place?

I’ve learned I can still get a lot done for Congressional District 9 even though leaders in Congress aren’t accomplishing much. [I suspect Kyrsten Sinema means that she has accomplished tons of stuff while her fellow slackers have accomplished nothing. Of course if you ask me I would have said none of them have accomplished anything - well other then robbing us blind and micro-managing our lives]

In our district office, social workers help constituents solve problems every day. In our D.C. office, we help businesses access federal agencies, support local groups seeking federal grant funding, and advocate for the issues important to CD9 residents and businesses. [Translation - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?

I’ve always believed that relationships are key to solving problems.

In the Legislature, my relationships with Republicans and Democrats alike helped me serve my constituents well. In Congress, I’m working to build bipartisan relationships as well, though it’ll take a bit longer to make friends with all 537 of my colleagues! [Kyrsten, you didn't answer the question. It was "What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?" - But I guess the main purpose of this article is to tell the voters that if they vote for you, you will give them free stuff, so who cares if you answer the question]

What’s the biggest frustration? The biggest satisfaction?

Unfortunately, issues that shouldn’t be partisan, like military sexual trauma and college affordability, have been stymied by political posturing in Congress. Leaders in Congress should stop playing games and get to work solving our country’s challenges.

However, our office has been able to make a tremendous difference in the lives of CD9 residents.

For example, we recently helped Glen in Phoenix, who has a brain tumor. Last month, Glen had to choose to either buy expensive medicine to treat his tumor or buy a replacement bed for his home.

We worked with local charities and the pharmaceutical company to help him get both a bed and his life-saving medication. [Again - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

As a member of the minority party, it’s hard to get a bill passed. What have you been able to accomplish?

Congress is pretty divided right now and sadly, they’re not getting much done.

I’m proud to be one of the founding members of the United Solutions Caucus. We’re a group of 38 freshmen, Democrats and Republicans, working together to solve our fiscal crisis and reduce our debt and deficit. [Don't make me laugh Kyrsten, when it comes to taxing and spending in the Arizona legislator you were number #1. I am sure that in the US Congress you are also the #1 Congresswoman when it comes to taxing and spending. You reduce our debt??? Again don't make me laugh!!! Kyrsten, as the debt goes up you will probably cause it to increase more then any other Congressperson!!!!]

We’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which cuts $200 billion in wasteful spending. Earlier this year, I helped pass the Violence Against Women Act.

Are there any issues you’re working on with other Arizona members? [Well other then that "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

I’m working with Reps. Matt Salmon and Raul Grijalva on a bill to prevent the NSA from gathering innocent civilians’ private data. [Give me a break Kyrsten, on every election sign of your you have the fact that you are supported by the police unions on the signs. I find it hard to believe that you are trying to reduce the police state, when the police unions helped you get elected!!!] Reps. Ron Barber, Ann Kirkpatrick and I are working on legislation to help veterans get quicker and better access to VA services. [More of the old "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

You and Salmon, a Republican, have made several joint appearances. What’s the connection?

Our offices work closely together on constituent cases, and Matt and I share similar views on issues like global competitiveness, increasing foreign investment in Arizona companies, and increasing trade and exports. Plus, he’s a good guy and we get along.

What will immigration reform look like when the House is finished with it?

It’s too early to predict, but I’m committed to a bill that secures our border [so you do support the police state - 20,000 new Border Patrol cops???], creates a workable plan for a future flow of workers into the United States, and settles the status of “dreamers” and hard-working families living in the U.S. Compromise must be a part of any viable solution, and I hope the House is ready to get to “yes.” I certainly am! [Kyrsten, when a politician like you says "compromise" it means "if you vote for my pork, I will vote for your pork". Kyrsten with that in mind, I suspect you know how to compromise better then any other Congressman or Senator in Washington D.C.]

Critics of immigration bill say pork was added

A government welfare program for police officers???

The bill hires 20,000 NEW BP cops, increasing the number of cops in the Border Patrol from 20,000 to 40,000

Source

Critics of immigration bill say pork was added

By Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 11:23 PM

As debate rages over the sweeping immigration-reform package passed last month by the Senate, critics of the bill are accusing its backers of adding pork-barrel giveaways to win votes, an age-old complaint about Capitol Hill lawmaking.

They’re calling a provision that benefits Alaska’s fishing industry “the Alaska Seafood Special,” singling out its aid for Las Vegas tourism, and denigrating billions in border-security enhancements in southern Arizona as pork for Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

One politician’s pork, however, is another’s prudent or even essential spending.

Backers of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” bill say this line of attack is an attempt to paint it as a rerun of President Barack Obama’s controversial health-care overhaul of 2010, which remains infamous in Republican circles for parochial provisions such as the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” inserted at the behest of then-Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.

Supporters say, for example, that it is unfair to portray the bill’s $46.3 billion in border-security measures as pork because that spending relates directly to a central responsibility of the federal government.

Any backroom deal-making, they say, is minor by historical standards.

Still, the criticism has put McCain and Flake — Arizona Republicans with reputations as two of Capitol Hill’s fiercest foes of earmarks and wasteful spending — in the awkward position of defending the legislation against charges of pork. McCain and Flake were two of the Gang of Eight’s four Republican members and helped negotiate the bipartisan compromise, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already settled in the United States.

“Let’s be honest: There was some of the old-style politics,” Flake told The Arizona Republic. “I can tell you, though, I’ve been around this process, and it’s very rare that you get a bill that is this all-encompassing with so few parochial provisions like that.”

Questioned provisions

The landmark immigration bill, which the Senate passed June 27 on a 68-32 vote, picked up support last month after its proposed spending on U.S.-Mexican border security was dramatically increased.

An amendment by Republican Sens. John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee would add, among other things, 350 miles of pedestrian fencing to the 350 miles already in place on the border and nearly double the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, from about 20,000 to 40,000.

The bill also orders the purchase of certain kinds of border technology and equipment, such as certain makes and models of the Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.’s Black Hawk helicopter, leaving Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with limited flexibility to choose alternatives.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., quipped on the Senate floor that “there are federal contracting firms high-fiving at the prospect of all of the spending.”

Other parochial additions also have drawn scrutiny. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Mark Begich, D-Alaska, pressed for and received special consideration for the Alaska seafood industry. The legislation identifies fish-processing in the state as a “shortage occupation,” giving it an advantage under the bill’s proposed new W-Visa program for lesser-skilled workers.

“We might as well call this the Alaska Seafood Special,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a critic of the Alaska provision and the overall immigration bill.

In a written statement, Begich said he and Murkowski worked together “to make sure this bill protects Alaska seafood processors by ensuring a steady source of seasonal staffing in order to keep our Alaska economy strong.”

Attention also has focused on a $1.5 billion, two-year job program for unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., got included in the immigration bill.

Opponents characterized it as more ill-advised spending reminiscent of Obama’s 2009 economic-stimulus package.

Flake said the Sanders program is paid for by revenue generated by the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., an immigration-reform supporter, got funding extended for national travel-promotion efforts that benefit Las Vegas.

Other items in the legislation have been linked to Gang of Eight members.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham secured more visas for the meat industry in his home state of South Carolina; and Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., made sure the cruise-ship and ski industries important to their respective home states also received special consideration under the bill’s new visa system.

In an interview, McCain said he doesn’t view the immigration bill as containing any traditional pork. Some of the provisions that have drawn criticism were attempts to fairly address bona fide needs of unique labor forces, he said.

“There may have been a little of that (parochialism and making deals for votes), but overall, they were legitimate requirements,” McCain told The Republic. “Honestly, I was not involved in any of that, because of my principles. But, for example, the Alaska one was sold to me based on the unique circumstances concerning them. Then, there were a couple of other provisions that had to do with groups of unique people.”

‘It’s not pork’

Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, decried the bill as “a litany of de facto earmarks, carve-outs and pet spending initiatives” and seemed to suggest that McCain and Flake were hypocrites for accepting $250 million to boost immigration-related prosecutions in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector in Arizona.

“There are nine Border Patrol sectors, but the Tucson Sector is the surprise beneficiary of $250 million in a special earmark in this bill,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor.

“I would just ask the simple question: Don’t all of the border sectors need increased funding for prosecutions? Well, I believe the answer is yes, and so carving out the Tucson Sector for special treatment, I believe, is entirely inappropriate. So, we see that even longtime opponents of earmarks are now co-sponsoring legislation that is filled with de facto earmarks, including one that benefits their states alone.”

McCain and Flake flatly rejected the argument that the border measures are pork for Arizona. The two have long stressed that the Tucson Sector is the nation’s busiest for undocumented immigration and covers the part of the border most in need of attention.

“It’s the federal government’s responsibility to secure the border, and these appropriations and the items that are put on the border are to fulfill that purpose,” said Flake, who while serving in the House was instrumental in enacting a moratorium on earmarks. “It’s not pork.”

Steve Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, agreed that the Senate-passed flood of border spending, although it may be overkill, doesn’t fit the classic definitions of earmarks or pork. However, the makers of the bill’s mandated technology, such as Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, or VADER system, clearly would come out as big winners if the bill became law, he said.

The bill would require the purchase of six VADER systems, which rely on aerial drones, at an estimated total price of $55.8 million.

“This isn’t really being done by Corker and Hoeven to benefit their constituents, per se,” Ellis said. “They’re not bringing back the bacon to Tennessee and North Dakota.”

‘It’s political cover’

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the bill, suggested that the border-security amendment is a different kind of payoff for senators. The Washington, D.C.-based center backs more enforcement and overall reductions in immigration.

“They were buying votes there, too, but in a different way,” Krikorian said. “This was so Corker and Hoeven and a couple of others could posture about how tough they are on border security. In other words, it’s political cover.”

Other provisions clearly were intended to win over specific senators, such as the Alaska one critics have been calling the “Crab-husker Kickback” and “the Alaska Purchase,” Krikorian said.

“When you have a 1,200-page bill, it’s going to be full of that kind of junk,” he said.

“The amnesty bill is based on these kinds of corrupt bargains. There’s really no other way to put it.”

Immigrant-rights advocates, who support the bill even though they believe its border-security elements are excessive, aren’t buying the pork criticism.

Foes of the bill, which still must pass the Republican-controlled House in some form, are trying to fuel conservative skepticism by emphasizing the legislation’s length, as Krikorian did, and claiming it is stuffed with sweetheart deals, said Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-reform organization America’s Voice.

“They’re doing everything they can to equate this bill to ‘Obamacare,’ ” Sharry said. “It’s such a tired strategy.”

Android security flaw gives Homeland Security easy access to your phone????

Android security flaw gives NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, FBI, BATF, DEA, TSA, IRS, ICE, La Migra, ATF and a whole slew of other alphabet police agencies easy access to your phone????

Source

Android security flaw affects 99 percent of phones, researcher says

By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: July 5 E-mail the writer

Security researchers believe they have found a major security flaw in the Google’s Android mobile operating system, which could affect up to 99 percent of Android phones now in consumers’ hands.

In results published Wednesday by the Bluebox Security research firm, chief technology officer Jeff Forristal said the flaw gave hackers a “master key” into the Android system.

Google declined to comment on the report.

The problem lies in the security verification process that has been used on the Google Play applications store since the release of Android 1.6. It could leave up to 900 million devices open to hackers. The flaw, the research firm said, is a weakness in the way that Android applications verify changes to their code. The weakness would allow hackers to “turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan” without flagging the attention of Google’s app store, a mobile phone or the person using an application.

The result, researchers said, would be that anyone who breaks into an app this way would have access to the data that app collects and — if an app made by the device manufacturer gets exploited — could even “take over normal functioning of a phone.”

In the post, Forristal said that Bluebox reported the security flaw to Google in February. In an interview with CIO, he said that some manufacturers have already released fixes for the problem, specifically naming the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Security is a common concern on Android phones, in part because the open nature of the system also means that it’s easy for anyone to find out how it works. Android is the OS of choice for 75 percent of the world’s smartphones, IDC reported in May. But a report released in March from the F-Secure security firm found that 79 percent of all mobile malware found in 2012 was running on Android phones.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that so many smartphone manufacturers use their own versions of the Android operating system, making it more difficult to get system updates that may include security fixes out to customers.

Related stories:

As smartphone market matures, makers race to wow consumers

‘Fragmentation’ leaves Android phones vulnerable to hackers, scammers

Majority of mobile malware on Android phones, security firm says

Sign up today to receive #thecircuit, a daily roundup of the latest tech policy news from Washington and how it is shaping business, entertainment and science.

Lincoln’s Surveillance State

President Lincoln was reading our telegraphs????

Don't laugh, at the time it was considered a high-tech police state.

Source

Lincoln’s Surveillance State

By DAVID T. Z. MINDICH

Published: July 5, 2013

COLCHESTER, Vt. — BY leaking details of the National Security Agency’s data-mining program, Edward J. Snowden revealed that the government’s surveillance efforts were far more extensive than previously understood. Many commentators have deemed the government’s activities alarming and unprecedented. The N.S.A.’s program is indeed alarming — but not, from a historical perspective, unprecedented. And history suggests that we should worry less about the surveillance itself and more about when the war in whose name the surveillance is being conducted will end.

In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.”

I came across this letter in the 1990s in the Library of Congress while researching Stanton’s wartime efforts to control the press, which included censorship, intimidation and extrajudicial arrests of reporters. On the same day he received control of the telegraphs, Stanton put an assistant secretary in charge of two areas: press relations and the newly formed secret police. Stanton ultimately had dozens of newspapermen arrested on questionable charges. Within Stanton’s first month in office, a reporter for The New York Herald, who had insisted that he be given news ahead of other reporters, was arrested as a spy.

Having the telegraph lines running through Stanton’s office made his department the nexus of war information; Lincoln visited regularly to get the latest on the war. Stanton collected news from generals, telegraph operators and reporters. He had a journalist’s love of breaking the story and an autocrat’s obsession with information control. He used his power over the telegraphs to influence what journalists did or didn’t publish. In 1862, the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of “telegraphic censorship” and called for restraint on the part of the administration’s censors.

When I first read Stanton’s requests to Lincoln asking for broad powers, I accepted his information control as a necessary evil. Lincoln was fighting for a cause of the utmost importance in the face of enormous challenges. The benefits of information monitoring, censorship and extrajudicial tactics, though disturbing, were arguably worth their price.

But part of the reason this calculus was acceptable to me was that the trade-offs were not permanent. As the war ended, the emergency measures were rolled back. Information — telegraph and otherwise — began to flow freely again.

So it has been with many wars: a cycle of draconian measures followed by contraction. During the First World War, the Supreme Court found that Charles T. Schenck posed a “clear and present danger” for advocating opposition to the draft; later such speech became more permissible. During the Second World War, habeas corpus was suspended several times — most notably in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack — but afterward such suspensions became rare.

This is why, if you are a critic of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, it is imperative that the war on terror reach its culmination. In May, President Obama declared that “this war, like all wars, must end.” If history is any guide, ending the seemingly endless state of war is the first step in returning our civil liberties.

Until then, we will continue to see acts of governmental overreach that would make even Stanton blush. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,” Mr. Snowden told The Guardian. And unlike Stanton’s telegraph operation, which housed just a handful of telegraphers, the current national security apparatus is huge. An estimated 483,000 government contractors had top-secret security clearances in 2012. That’s a lot of Snowdens to trust with your information.

David T. Z. Mindich, a professor of media studies, journalism and digital arts at Saint Michael’s College, is the author of “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.”

Arizona court ruling upholds DUI test for marijuana

Source

Arizona court ruling upholds DUI test for marijuana

Posted on February 14, 2013 by admin

Associated Press Wed Feb 13, 2013 5:10 PM

PHOENIX — An appeals court has issued a ruling that upholds the right of authorities to prosecute pot smokers in Arizona for driving under the influence even when there is no evidence that they are actually high.

The ruling by the Court of Appeals focuses on the chemical compounds in marijuana that show up in blood and urine tests after people smoke pot. One chemical compound causes drivers to be impaired; another is a chemical that stays in people’s systems for weeks after they’ve smoked marijuana but doesn’t affect impairment.

The court ruled that both compounds apply to Arizona law, meaning a driver doesn’t have to actually be impaired to get prosecuted for DUI. As long as there is evidence of marijuana in their system, they can get a DUI, the court said.

The ruling overturns a decision by a lower court judge who said it didn’t make sense to prosecute a person with no evidence they’re under the influence.

The lower court judge cited the proliferation of states easing their marijuana laws, but the Court of Appeals ruling issued Tuesday dismissed that by saying Arizona’s medical marijuana law is irrelevant regarding DUI.

The Legislature adopted the decades-old comprehensive DUI law to protect public safety, so a provision on prohibited substances and their resulting chemical compounds should be interpreted broadly to include inactive compounds as well as active ones, the Court of Appeals said.

The case stems from a 2010 traffic stop in Maricopa County. The motorist’s blood test revealed only a chemical compound that is found in the blood after another compound produced from ingesting marijuana breaks down.

According to testimony by a prosecution criminalist, the compound found in the man’s blood doesn’t impair the ability to drive but can remain detectable for four weeks.

The man’s lawyer argued Arizona’s DUI law bars only marijuana and “its metabolite,” so only the first derivative compound that actually impairs drivers is prohibited.

Two lower court judges agreed, with one upholding the other’s dismissal of the case against the motorist, Hrach Shilgevorkyan.

Superior Court Commissioner Myra Harris’ ruling noted that several states have decriminalized pot, and that a growing number of states, including Arizona, have legalized medical marijuana.

“Residents of these states, particularly those geographically near Arizona, are likely to travel to Arizona,” Harris said in her 2012 ruling upholding the dismissal. “It would be irrational for Arizona to prosecute a defendant for an act that might have occurred outside of Arizona several weeks earlier.”

However, the Court of Appeals sided with prosecutors who appealed, saying that allowing the testing for marijuana’s active compound would unduly restrict law enforcement.

The ruling said it serves the Legislature’s intention to have a flat ban on driving under the influence to interpret the DUI law’s reference to a prohibited substance and “its metabolite” as covering both a substance’s active and inactive compounds.

Michael Alarid III, a lawyer for Shilgevorkyan, said he’ll ask the Arizona Supreme Court to consider an appeal.

He added the testing issue is increasingly important because people legally using pot in two Western states — Washington and Colorado — that last year approved marijuana decriminalization laws could be convicted of DUI if arrested while driving in Arizona weeks later.

Feds planned to arm drones

Feds to murder dope dealers & Mexicans with drones????

Feds to murder dope dealers & Mexicans with drones????

I have posted a number of articles where I made snide comments like "I wonder when the police will start using drone air strikes on American soil to murder drug dealers and blow up suspect drug houses"

Looks like that part of the American police state could be just around the corner.

Sadly the Feds may also use drones against brown skinned folks who sneak across the border too.

Here is a quote from the article:

"According to the document, titled 'Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System,' the weapons would be used against “targets of interest,” described as people or vehicles carrying smugglers or undocumented migrants"

Feds planned to arm drones

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jul 4, 2013 12:17 AM

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed plans at least three years ago to mount weapons on drones operated by Customs and Border Protection — though the agency denied Wednesday that it has any current plans to use armed drones.

The plans, outlining the idea of mounting “expendables or non-lethal weapons” on CBP drones, are disclosed in a 2010 document signed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and first posted Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit focused on cyberspace free speech, privacy and consumer-rights issues.

According to the document, titled “Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System,” the weapons would be used against “targets of interest,” described as people or vehicles carrying smugglers or undocumented migrants.

The DHS and CBP declined to answer specific questions about the document, but issued a statement Wednesday that “CBP has no plans to arm its unmanned-aircraft systems with non-lethal weapons or weapons of any kind.”

However, civil-rights advocates are concerned that Napolitano signed off on a document positing plans to place even “non-lethal” weapons on drones.

“We’ve never seen this before in any proposals to fly drones domestically,” said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney for the foundation, which first requested the documents last summer and then filed suit in October.

She said the foundation obtained the document last month.

In June, departing FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged in a Senate hearing that his agency has deployed surveillance drones, even though it hasn’t yet drafted regulations for their use.

“Weaponizing drones, even with non-lethal weapons, creates too much of a danger to the public,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. “And it is an open question what a ‘non-lethal’ weapon is. … Something that could incapacitate a person in the middle of a desert could be hugely problematic. We think that, in the United States, drones should be used for surveillance alone, and only under strong legal protections.”

The DHS document was heavily redacted, with pages of text blacked out. None of the material released details what “expendables” or “non-lethal” weapons would be.

Currently, the CBP operates 10 drones. It plans to have 17 by 2017. The “Gang of Eight” immigration bill passed by the Senate last week calls for the CBP and its subagency, the Border Patrol, to operate drones 24 hours a day, seven days a week along the southern border. If some version of that bill passes the House, as many as 24 additional drones could be deployed.

By law, to ensure that drone operations don’t pose a safety risk to civil aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration must issue “certificates of authorization” for all unmanned- aerial-vehicle operations.

In response to a query from The Arizona Republic, the FAA issued a statement Wednesday saying that it “has not approved any certificates of authorization for law-enforcement agencies that authorize armed operations.”

The FAA hadn’t responded by deadline when asked whether it has received requests to authorize armed operations.

In February, at a drone convention in northern Virginia, the FAA official charged with regulating unmanned aircraft said that FAA rules bar using weapons on drones.

“We currently have rules in the books that deal with releasing anything from an aircraft, period. Those rules are in place, and that would prohibit weapons from being installed on a civil aircraft,” including on unmanned aircraft, the FAA’s Jim Williams said, according to the Washington Times.

Williams couldn’t be reached Tuesday or Wednesday. When asked for the regulation Williams cited, an agency spokesman gave a regulation that says: “No pilot in command of a civil aircraft may allow any object to be dropped from that aircraft in flight that creates a hazard to persons or property. However, this section does not prohibit the dropping of any object if reasonable precautions are taken to avoid injury or damage to persons or property.”

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of a book on drone use, “Legitimate Target,” said that the Obama administration hasn’t articulated a clear policy on either domestic or overseas drone use and that neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have been eager to limit the executive branch in this area.

“This is the new Wild West,” he said. “They have no clear criteria, no articulation of the threat, no articulation of what constitutes a legitimate target.”

Meanwhile, flight logs of CBP drones obtained and posted Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that the CBP has lent its drones more than 200 times in recent years to other federal and state agencies, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Forest Service and state law-enforcement agencies in Minnesota, North Dakota and Texas, among others.

Desplegaría EU 40 helicópteros en la frontera: WP

Let's face it the "War on Drugs" is all about $$$MONEY$$$

Source

Desplegaría EU 40 helicópteros en la frontera: WP

Revela ‘The Washington Post’ que de aprobarse la enmienda de seguridad fronteriza en la Cámara de Representantes, la industria armamentista se vería beneficiada.

Una flotilla de 40 helicópteros sería desplegada en la frontera con México si la enmienda de seguridad incluida en la iniciativa de reforma migratoria es adoptada por la Cámara de Representantes estadunidense, reveló este martes The Washington Post.

Sin embargo, las adquisiciones ordenadas bajo la misma representarán una bonanza para algunas de las mayores empresas del ramo de defensa gracias a las especificaciones contenidas en la propuesta de los senadores republicanos Bob Corker y John Hoeven.

Algunos de los beneficiarios incluyen empresas como Bell, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky y American Eurocopter, de acuerdo con un listado de parte del equipo que el Departamento de Seguridad Interna (DHS) deberá adquirir si la enmienda es adoptada por la cámara baja.

El periódico The Washington Post recordó que la enmienda fue introducida a fin de que un mayor número de republicanos aprobara la iniciativa en el Senado, con la esperanza de mejorar sus prospectos en la Cámara de Representantes, donde enfrenta serias resistencias.

Críticos del proyecto, como el senador republicano por Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, calificaron las enmiendas como un paquete de estímulo para empresas de este ramo.

"El dinero de los contribuyentes debería mejorar la seguridad fronteriza y no ofrecer un estímulo para contratistas, por desgracia eso es lo que hace la iniciativa del Senado", dijo el legislador al diario.

La enmienda ordena la adquisición de 15 helicópteros Black Hawk fabricados por Sikorsky con un costo superior cada uno a los 17 millones de dólares, algunos de los cuales tiene tecnología digital.

El Departamento de Seguridad Interna (DHS) deberá adquirir también ocho helicópteros livianos fabricados por American Eurocopter, con un precio de tres millones de dólares cada uno, así como 17 helicópteros UH-1N fabricados por Bell.

The Washington Post enfatizó que en este caso se trata de un modelo tan viejo que la compañía no lo fabrica más.

La iniciativa también establece la adquisición de seis sistemas de radar fabricados por Northrop Grumman, cada uno de los cuales tiene un costo de 9.3 millones de dólares.

La enmienda representó una adición de 38 mil millones de dólares a los ocho millones considerados en un inicio.

El grueso de esa partida, 30 mil millones de dólares serán destinados para la contratación de más de 19 mil agentes de la patrulla fronteriza en la próxima década, que se sumarán a los 21 mil que en la actualidad están en servicio.

Aunque la enmienda permite al DHS sustituir el equipo a adquirir si así lo determina conveniente, organismos civiles de supervisión estimaron que esas especificaciones resultarán en compras directas y no resultado de un proceso de licitación.

"Los legisladores han puesto sus huellas a favor de productos específicos y eso es difícil de ignorar para una agencia", dijo el vicepresidente del grupo Taxpayers for Common Sense, Steven Ellis.

Cops have hand held fingerprinting machines to ID you

Almost always the next thing that happens is the cops steal my wallet and search it looking for an ID card which I don't carry, and in the process violating my 4th Amendment rights too.

I have not been stopped yet by a pig with one of these handheld finger printing devices but I suspect when I am, and when I refuse to voluntarily submit to finger printing, I will be physically restrained then my finger prints will be forcefully taken against my will.

I won't resist because I would rather be alive, then be murdered by some pig for thinking I have "constitutional rights"

I was falsely arrested on June 25, 2013 in Chandler and videotaped about 9 minutes of the false arrest. In the video at this URL http://tinyurl.com/chandlerarrest you can Chandler piggy G Pederson telling me that I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights in that case after I mentioned that in Miranda v Arizona the Supremes said that when a person takes the 5th the police must "immediately cease questioning" the person.

Source

Valley police departments utiliizing digital fingerprinting

By Michelle Mitchell The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jul 8, 2013 11:22 PM

A hand-held device that resembles a cellphone and taps fingerprint databases to help police officers identify people in the field is catching on with several departments in the Valley.

Officers say the devices are a valuable tool — particularly when they encounter people who aren’t carrying ID cards or who give false information.

“With these finger scanners ... you’re talking less than a minute (and) you know who you’re dealing with,” Chandler Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.

“The safety factor and the time-saving factors are just amazing.”

Not everyone is as sold on them, however, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has voiced privacy concerns.

The devices also raise concerns about identity theft and how that personal information is stored and transferred, particularly if a person is not charged with a crime, said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.

The devices are not designed to store fingerprint data — although they could be modified to do that — but to transfer the information through the officer’s existing in-car computer system, said Robert Horton, spokesman for manufacturer MorphoTrak.

Police departments in Mesa, Tempe and Phoenix began a pilot program last year using the MorphoTrak scanners.

Tempe and Mesa have now expanded those pilot programs.

“We were sold on how fantastic they are,” Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley said.

“It gives us a very quick response.”

Tempe had 14 scanners during the pilot and recently purchased 30 more.

Other departments have signed on, including Chandler, which bought 36 scanners; Scottsdale, which purchased 10, and Peoria, which bought five as a trial.

Chandler police skipped a smaller-scale pilot after hearing about their effectiveness from Mesa police officers through the East Valley Gang and Criminal Information Fusion Center, Favazzo said.

The cost of the scanners varies, but Valley cities paid about $1,200 to $1,800 per unit.

The devices allow officers in the field to scan a person’s fingerprints and compare them to local, state and federal databases.

The scanners will save officers time when someone does not have identification or provides false information, Favazzo said.

Without these devices, officers run variations of the name and birth date provided in an attempt to locate a driver’s license, warrant or other information about the person, Favazzo said.

If that does not work, officers will take the person to the station, [i.e. -falsely arrest them and make them prove they are not a criminal before releasing them] fingerprint them and wait for identity information.

“It will also let us know right away if we are dealing with a violent felon before we ever transport them,” Favazzo said.

The Tempe Police Department recently discovered by using the mobile fingerprint scanner that a man they had encountered was wanted by the FBI, Pooley said.

“We would have ended up letting this guy go,” he said.

Police departments find that the devices save them money by not having to transport people to the station and that they act as a force multiplier by keeping officers on the street, MorphoTrak’s Horton said.

The device will scan two fingerprints and the officer will receive a response in 30 seconds to several minutes, he said.

The Phoenix Police Department, which received three scanners last year as part of a pilot program, still is evaluating whether to expand the program, Sgt. Tommy Thompson said.

“Obviously as technology advances, we want to be involved in those advances, but we want to make sure they meet our needs and they’re a useful tool,” Thompson said.

Officers say they are sensitive to privacy concerns expressed by the ACLU. [Yea, sure. Like in my case where I am always told I don't have any stinking 5th Amendment right to refuse police questioning, which is almost always followed by an illegal search of my wallet in which the cop is hoping to find my ID]

Mesa officers are not trying to collect personal information, Sgt. Tony Landato said. [That's 100 percent BS. That is the WHOLE purpose of the fingerprint scanners - to get person information about the person - i.e. name and date of birth so the cops can search for outstanding warrants]

“We’re not taking a census,” Landato said. “We’re just trying to ensure the accuracy of the information that we’re taking down.

“If we can do this in a way that’s quicker for the officer and quicker for the citizen, then, hey, we both win.”

The state and FBI fingerprint databases that the scanners check do not contain citizenship or immigration-status information, although that could be possible in the future if the scanners are connected to Department of Homeland Security databases, Horton said.

The state ACLU’s Soler said departments should create policies that inform people who are not under arrest that they have the right to refuse submitting their fingerprints. [Yea, sure. Like I am always lied to by the police and told I don't have any 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer police questions]

“It’s critical that we think about these things before rolling out these new high-tech systems, and more often than not that doesn’t happen,” she said. “In this day and age when the technology so far outpaces the privacy laws, the individuals end up giving up a lot in terms of their privacy.”

The use of fingerprint scanners falls under existing Mesa Police Department policy, Landato said.

“We’re not going to fingerprint somebody unless we’ve got them under arrest or we have their consent,” he said. [Yea, I'm am 100 percent positive that is a big lie!!!!! I was also falsely arrested by the Mesa Police who also told me I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights. See false arrest by Mesa Police and lawsuit against Mesa Police]

Tempe police are writing a policy that would require officers to get consent from a person who is not under arrest, Pooley said. [Yea, sure. I also sure the Tempe for false arrest]

“Right now, there’s no authority that can compel a person to put their fingers on one of these gadgets, short of them being arrested,” said Sigmund Popko, clinical professor of law at Arizona State University. [Rubbish, what are you going to do when a cop with a gun and a badge forces you to give him your fingerprints??? Resist and be killed????]

While drivers are required to provide a license if they are pulled over, a passenger or pedestrian who is not in violation of a law would not be required to provide identification or fingerprints, said attorney John Phebus, vice chair of the criminal-justice section of the State Bar of Arizona. [Of course the police routinely lie to these people and tell them they are required to]

“Most people don’t know you can say no,” Phebus said. “When you’re in that moment, it’s awful hard to say no.”

Reach the reporter at michelle .mitchell@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7983.

RELATED INFO

Handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners About the scanner

What it does: The MorphoIDent handheld device scans a person’s fingerprints and transfers the information to a police officer’s phone or computer via Bluetooth or USB. It compares prints with state and federal fingerprint databases and reports a name and date of birth if a match is found.

Manufacturer: MorphoTrak, based in Alexandria, Va.

Cost: Varies, but Valley departments have paid $1,200 to $1,800 per device.

Dimensions: About 5 inches by 3 inches. Weight is about 5 ounces.

Who’s using the devices

Several Valley police departments are testing or using handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners:.

Chandler: 36 scanners, expected to be in use by August.

Glendale: 2 scanners (pilot), not yet deployed.

Tempe: 44 scanners, 14 currently in use.

Peoria: 5 scanners (pilot), purchased two months ago, not yet deployed.

Phoenix: 3 scanners (pilot), in use since the fall.

Scottsdale: 10 scanners, expected to be in use by late July.

The Laws You Can’t See

Sadly government bureaucrats do this ALL the time and come up with silly reasons on why they don't have to obey the US and State government constitutions.

An example of that is how the BATF has made an arbitrary decision that anybody that uses medical marijuana is not allowed to purchase a gun and doesn't have any Second Amendment rights. The IRS doesn't the same thing when it arbitrarily declares you to be a tax evader and assumes you are guilty till you prove your innocence, rather then the expected "innocent till proved guilty"

At the state level the police and DMV have ruled that you give up your 5th Amendment right against self incrimination when you get a drivers license and that you MUST submit to alcohol and drug tests if stopped by the police for DUI.

The good news is on that the Arizona courts have recently ruled that is a bunch of BS.

Source

The Laws You Can’t See

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: July 8, 2013 225 Comments

In the month since a national security contractor leaked classified documents revealing a vast sweep of Americans’ phone records by the federal government, people across the country have disagreed about the extent to which our expectation of personal privacy must yield to the demands of national security.

Under normal circumstances, this could be a healthy, informed debate on a matter of overwhelming importance — the debate President Obama said he welcomed in the days after the revelations of the surveillance programs.

But this is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.

As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.

But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.

The few public officials with knowledge of the surveillance court’s work either censor themselves as required by law, as Senator Ron Wyden has done in his valiant efforts to draw attention to the full scope of these programs, or they offer murky, even misleading statements, as the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., did before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.

When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.

Even before the latest revelations of government snooping, some members of Congress were trying to provide that check. In a letter to the court in February, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three others asked that any rulings with a “significant interpretation of the law” be declassified. In response, the court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, wrote that the court could provide only summaries of its rulings, because the full opinions contained classified information. But he balked at releasing summaries, which he feared would create “misunderstanding or confusion.” It is difficult to imagine how releasing information would make the confusion worse.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently reintroduced a bill that would require declassification. It was defeated in December. In light of the national uproar over the most recent revelations, the leadership in Congress should push to pass it and begin to shine some light on this dark corner of the judicial system.

We don’t know what we’ll find. The surveillance court may be strictly adhering to the limits of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Or not. And that’s the problem: This court has morphed into an odd hybrid that seems to exist outside the justice system, even as its power grows in ways that we can’t see.

Man charged in Casa Grande blast wants evidence suppressed

The 4th Amendment requires judges to have "probable cause" to issue a search warrant, but that is routinely ignored by judges who will rubber stamp a search warrant for any cop on anything.

"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"

Source

Man charged in Casa Grande blast wants evidence suppressed

The Associated Press Tue Jul 9, 2013 9:52 AM

Lawyers for an Iraqi man charged with detonating a homemade explosive device outside a Social Security Administration office in Arizona are asking a judge to throw out evidence collected by investigators during searches of his home and car.

Attorneys for Abdullatif Ali Aldosary say the search warrant used by investigators wasn’t supported by probable cause to believe he damaged federal property with an explosive.

Authorities say Aldosary researched bomb-making materials and gathered chemicals before detonating an explosive outside the agency’s Casa Grande office on Nov. 30.

No one was injured in the blast.

He has pleaded not guilty to maliciously damaging federal property with explosives, being a felon in possession of a gun and ammunition and attempted interference with the administration of the federal agency.

Files of bin Laden raid stashed within CIA

Source

Files of bin Laden raid stashed within CIA

Agency now can shield info on SEAL operation

Jul. 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — The top U.S. special operations commander, Adm. William McRaven, ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

An acknowledgment by McRaven was quietly removed from the final version of an inspector general’s report published weeks ago. A spokesman for the admiral declined to comment. The CIA, noting that the bin Laden mission was overseen by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta before he became defense secretary, said the SEALs were effectively assigned to work temporarily for the CIA, which has presidential authority to conduct covert operations.

“Documents related to the raid were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the direction of the CIA director,” agency spokesman Preston Golson said in an emailed statement. “Records of a CIA operation such as the (bin Laden) raid, which were created during the conduct of the operation by persons acting under the authority of the CIA Director, are CIA records.”

Golson said it is “absolutely false” that records were moved to the CIA to avoid the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. Effort to protect identities

The records transfer was part of an effort by McRaven to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general’s draft report.

But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell The Associated Press that it couldn’t find any documents inside the Defense Department that AP had requested more than two years ago, and would represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny.

“Welcome to the shell game in place of open government,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private research institute at George Washington University. “Guess which shell the records are under. If you guess the right shell, we might show them to you. It’s ridiculous.”

McRaven’s directive sent the only copies of the military’s records about the raid to the CIA. The agency has special authority to prevent the release of “operational files” in ways that can’t effectively be challenged in federal court.

The Federal Records Act would not permit agencies “to purge records just on a whim,” said Dan Metcalfe, who oversaw the U.S. government’s compliance with the Freedom of Information Act as former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy. “I don’t think there’s an exception allowing an agency to say, ‘Well, we didn’t destroy it. We just deleted it here after transmitting it over there.’ High-level officials ought to know better.”

It was not immediately clear exactly which Defense Department records were purged and transferred, when it happened or under what authority, if any, they were sent to the CIA. No government agencies the AP contacted would discuss details of the transfer. Follow-up to 'Zero Dark Thirty'

The AP asked for files about the mission in more than 20 separate requests, mostly submitted in May 2011 — several were sent a day after President Barack Obama announced that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been killed in a firefight.

McRaven’s unusual order would have remained secret had it not been mentioned in a single sentence on the final page in the inspector general’s draft report. That report examined whether the Obama administration gave special access to Hollywood executives planning a film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the raid. The draft report was obtained and posted online last month by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.

McRaven described steps he took to protect the identities of the SEALs after the raid, directing that their names and photographs not be released.

“This effort included purging the combatant command’s systems of all records related to the operation and providing these records to another government agency,” according to the draft report. The sentence was dropped from the report’s final version.

Current and former Defense Department officials knowledgeable about McRaven’s directive and the inspector general’s report told AP the description of the order in the draft report is accurate. The reference to “another government agency” was code for the CIA, they said. These individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Latinos now less likely to report crimes to police, poll says

Latinos now less likely to report crimes to police, poll says

May 07, 2013|By Brian Bennett

WASHINGTON – Many Latinos say they are less likely than before to report crimes because local police are increasingly involved in enforcing immigration laws, leading to a sharp increase in deportations, according to a new study.

About 44% of Latinos surveyed said they were less likely now to contact police if they were victims of a crime because they fear officers will inquire about their immigration status or the status of people they know. The figure jumps to 70% among Latinos who are in the country unlawfully.

“There is fear that is really widespread,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor of urban planning and policy at University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of the study.

The report, “Insecure Communities: Latino Perceptions of Police Involvement in Immigration Enforcement,” is based on a telephone survey of 2,004 Latinos in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Phoenix. The results are scheduled to be released Tuesday.

The survey was sponsored by the think tank PolicyLink of Oakland and conducted by Lake Research Partners, a polling firm in Washington, D.C., between Nov. 17 and Dec. 10.

“Over the last four years or so, the extent of deportations has seeped into the community’s consciousness,” Theodore said. “Trust has been undermined and that potentially has lasting implications.”

The Obama administration deported 409,849 people in fiscal year 2012, a 40% increase from 2007. Officials have attributed the increase in part to a fingerprint sharing program in local jails that notifies federal immigration agents when people arrested are in the country unlawfully or overstayed their visas.

Some officials have warned that the fingerprint sharing program, called Secure Communities, has deterred some crime victims from coming forward to aid police.

“This report highlights how local law enforcement's greater role in immigration enforcement has created mistrust between the Latino community and local police, making all of our communities less safe from crime," said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.). Polis will host a panel discussion about the report on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Colorado last week repealed a state law that had required police to report individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.

“This confirms what police experts have been saying for decades,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, a Latino nonprofit civil rights organization based in Los Angeles. “We have to have policies that make it clear there will be a separation between local police and immigration enforcement.”

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Twitter: @bybrianbennett

Extraen drogas del cuerpo a mujer en Arizona

I find this scary that the cops can now get doctors to slice and dice people looking for drugs inside them.

Source

Extraen drogas del cuerpo a mujer en Arizona

por CRISTINA SILVA - 06/29/2013

The Associated Press

PHOENIX, Arizona, EE.UU. - Un médico extrajo quirúrgicamente un paquete de metanfetamina de medio kilogramo de peso de la zona pélvica de una mujer después que supuestamente trató de pasarla de México a Arizona, informó el viernes una portavoz del Servicio Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza.

Claudia Ibarra, de 31 años, fue detenida esta semana en Puerto de San Luis cuando un agente federal sospechó del extraño intento de contrabando. Ibarra, que cruzó la frontera sola a pie, es ciudadana estadounidense de la ciudad fronteriza de Yuma.

Ibarra fue sometida a un registro en la frontera y entonces trasladada a una instalación médica cercana, donde el médico detectó y le extrajo el paquete de drogas. La mujer fue detenida por mostrar señales comunes de tráfico de drogas, dijo la portavoz Teresa Small, quien declinó ofrecer más detalles.

"Cuando la estaban cateando se dieron cuenta que tenía algo ahí", dijo Small.

La metanfetamina, envuelta en un preservativo y cinta adhesiva negra, estaba insertada en el cuerpo de Ibarra, quien fue entregada a la rama de investigaciones de la Policía de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas.

Las autoridades dijeron que no es inusual que los traficantes de drogas las escondan dentro del cuerpo, ya sea tragándose el paquete o a través de otros medios. Un oficial médico fue encargado de extraerle el paquete porque si se rompía la metanfetamina podía haber matado a Ibarra.

No se sabía si Ibarra tiene un abogado o ha sido arrestado anteriormente por tráfico de drogas.

Trazan plan para asegurar la frontera

Source

Trazan plan para asegurar la frontera

Washington, EU

por Agencia Reforma - Jul. 4, 2013 01:28 PM

La Voz

El plan para reforzar la frontera con México incluido en la reforma migratoria aprobada recientemente en el Senado de Estados Unidos especifica qué tipo de armamento y tecnología tiene que ser adquirida.

El plan incluye, por ejemplo, la compra de 6 sistemas de radar aéreo de la compañía Northrop Grumman valorados en 9.3 millones de dólares.

Además prevé la adquisición de 15 helicópteros "Black Hawk" de la empresa Sikorsky, cada uno de los cuales cuesta 17 millones de dólares.

También se contempla adquirir 8 helicópteros ligeros de la compañía American Eurocopter, cuyo precio de mercado asciende a 3 millones de dólares por pieza.

La compra de otros 17 helicópteros UH-1N de la compañía Bell, un modelo que además ya no se produce, también vienen mencionados en la reforma migratoria del Senado.

Con la excepción de casos como los descritos, la mayor parte del equipo no aparece detallado con el nombre de la empresa en cuestión, sino por su modelo genérico.

Así, por ejemplo, se plantea comprar 4 mil 595 sensores automáticos de tierra y 104 dispositivos de detección de isótopos radiactivos.

Lo que preocupa a analistas y a críticos es que no se estén respetando las reglas básicas de las licitaciones públicas, que en teoría no deberían manifestar preferencias por una marca o modelo.

Algunas voces han sugerido que los promotores del plan de blindaje fronterizo están más preocupados por beneficiar a ciertas empresas que por atajar la inmigración ilegal.

"Los fondos de los contribuyentes deberían gastarse en mejorar la seguridad fronteriza, no en ofrecer estímulos a los contratistas", dijo el republicano Tom Coburn, senador por Oklahoma.

Las expectativas de las empresas de armamento y seguridad de Estados Unidos han quedado muy dañadas en los últimos años por la retirada de las tropas de Afganistán e Irak.

Fuentes del Departamento de Seguridad consultadas por The Washington Post dijeron, por el contrario, que el plan está basado en sugerencias de la Agencia de Frontera y Aduanas realizadas en 2010.

En teoría, el Departamento de Seguridad podría escoger sus propios contratistas al margen de lo que diga la ley si así lo considera necesario, siempre que informe de ello al Congreso con 60 días de antelación.

Ex-Albuquerque cop accused in wife’s death testifies

Ex-Albuquerque cop accused in wife’s death testifies

Associated Press Wed Jul 10, 2013 9:56 AM

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s a murder trial involving nearly a half-dozen mistresses, a botched investigation at a troubled police department and a missing pickup truck at the heart of the case.

After a month of testimony, a former Albuquerque police officer accused of killing his wife with his service weapon took the stand Tuesday morning as the defense began wrapping up a case that has become a tale of workplace romances and steamy affairs, including a love triangle at the hair salon where the victim worked. In all, four mistresses and a woman who married defendant Levi Chavez just after his wife’s death have testified about their trysts with him. Several of the women were police officers.

The case also has threatened to further tarnish the reputation of the beleaguered Albuquerque Police Department, which already is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department over a series of police shootings. The trial included allegations that officers at the scene removed and even flushed key evidence down the toilet.

Chavez, 32, is accused of shooting his wife, Tera Chavez, 26, with his department-issued gun in 2007 at their Los Lunas home and then trying to make her death look like a suicide.

Prosecutors have depicted Chavez as a philanderer whose marriage was crumbling. They said he killed his wife after she found out that he had staged the theft of his pickup valued at more than $20,000 to collect the insurance proceeds.

On Tuesday, Chavez acknowledged cheating on his wife throughout their marriage and said his wife knew about his affairs. He said they fought often, and he would often leave “until the next time.” He also testified that Tera Chavez threatened suicide “countless times,” saying things like she couldn’t live without him.

The defense said the death was a suicide by a woman unraveling over her failed marriage and relationships. Chavez’s lawyer said he could not have killed his wife in October 2007 because he was with another woman at the time.

Tera Chavez was also having an affair with an Albuquerque police officer who was married to the maid of honor in her wedding, witnesses said. They had sex in the back of a hair salon where she worked, according to testimony.

“This trial is like a mosquito in a nudist colony,” said Tom Garrity, owner of the Albuquerque-based public relations firm The Garrity Group. “Where do you begin?”

The case is nearing the end as defense attorney David Serna calls final witnesses this week.

Serna, who has long represented clients in high-profile New Mexico homicide cases, was able to persuade the judge to bar statements Tera Chavez made about her husband and his “cop buddies” staging the theft of Levi Chavez’s 2004 Ford F-250 truck as part of an insurance scam.

Now Serna is working to show how his client was a victim of a larger effort to paint him as a monster.

“There has been a persistent anti-Levi Chavez campaign by the media from the beginning,” Serna told The Associated Press.

A key to Serna’s defense strategy has been to discredit former Valencia County Sheriff’s Detective Aaron Jones, one of the first investigators on the scene who concluded that the death “looked staged.” Serna has portrayed Jones as a conspiracy theorist unable to hold steady law enforcement jobs in California and New Mexico as he kept stumbling upon “nefarious activities” involving crooked police that were never borne out.

Jones was taken off the investigation into Tera Chavez’s killing after calling his supervisors derogatory names.

He was also in the middle of one of the trial’s more colorful moments when he testified that he believed Chavez was pretending to cry over his wife’s death during interviews, which he saw as a clue Chavez might have been involved.

“If there is no snot, believe him not,” he testified in a comment that drew immediate comparisons with attorney Johnnie Cochran’s theatrics during the O.J. Simpson trial.

But Chavez and his lawyer suffered an apparent setback last week when a crime scene expert testifying in his defense failed to pull off a demonstration of how the officer’s wife might have been able to kill herself with his gun.

There was a bullet in the gun’s chamber when it was found next to Tera Chavez’s body, leading prosecutors to argue that she could not have shot herself and then released the magazine.

Larry McCann, the expert, suggested that Tera Chavez held the gun upside down and used her thumb to pull the trigger. But McCann tried a few times to show jurors that he could pull the trigger and press the gun’s magazine release in one continuous motion, but it didn’t work.

“I can’t get it to work today,” he said.

The failed demonstration drew gasps, smiles and whispers from members of Tera Chavez’s family.

The investigation also has been criticized since an Albuquerque officer, on scene to help Levi Chavez cope with his wife’s death, cut out a piece of a bloody mattress and had the piece destroyed. Another officer used a toilet and flushed it before investigators had a chance to examine what might have been blood floating inside.

In other testimony, a digital forensic investigator with the Los Lunas Police Department told the jury that an Internet search from November 2006 on “how to kill someone” was found on Levi Chavez’s computer.

The testimony from Levi Chavez’s former mistresses included other bizarre details. One mistress provided an alibi. Another, who was called to counter the alibi, said that while she was carrying on the affair, she got her hair done by Tera Chavez at a Los Lunas salon. Another mistress said she and Levi Chavez had sex in a house he once shared with his wife just a few weeks she was found dead.

“I think people are more focused on all the drama than the positions of both sides arguing their cases,” Garrity said. “Jurors will have a hard time not to be caught up in that drama.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns Congress to stop budget cuts

Source

Hagel warns Congress to stop defense budget cuts

Associated PressBy RICHARD LARDNER and DONNA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned lawmakers Wednesday of severe and unacceptable effects on the U.S. military if Congress doesn't end the automatic spending cuts projected to slice $52 billion from the defense budget for 2014.

The budget reductions would reduce the size, readiness and technological superiority of the military, placing "at much greater risk the country's ability to meet our current national security requirements," Hagel wrote in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Hagel told Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., that the Defense Department hopes to avoid a second year of furloughs of civilian personnel during the 2014 budget year that begins Oct. 1. But he says if the cuts stay in effect, the department will have to consider involuntary reductions in force to reduce personnel costs.

Roughly 85 percent of the department's nearly 900,000 civilians around the world will be furloughed one day each week over the next three months as a result of the across-the-board cuts in the current budget year.

The letter was the strongest statement to date from Hagel pushing back against congressional resistance to alternative Pentagon proposals to save money. The administration has called for another round of domestic base closings, elimination of several weapons systems, a speedier drawdown in the size of the Army and Marine Corps, and increased fees for health care. Yet the House and Senate, in crafting their versions of a defense authorization bill, have soundly rejected the Pentagon plans.

For months, senior U.S. military leaders, including Hagel's predecessor, Leon Panetta, have called on Congress to stop the budget cuts, known as sequestration, or face the consequences of a military unable to handle all of its missions around the world.

But even with sequestration, the Pentagon will still maintain a total annual budget, adjusted for inflation, of well over $500 billion a year for the rest of the decade, according to Todd Harrison of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. That's a modest reduction when compared to the previous drawdowns in defense spending that came after the wars in Korea and Vietnam and the Cold War.

Hagel's letter "reads more like posturing than planning," according to Harrison, who said the Defense Department has not adequately communicated what the real effects of sequestration will be because it has not done the detailed planning to know.

"Instead, it has left Congress with vague, nonspecific threats of what would happen, which in the 2013 budget turned out to be inaccurate in many cases and ultimately proved ineffective in persuading Congress," Harrison said.

Hagel cautioned of cuts in the force to deal with the required budget reductions.

Specifically, the Pentagon chief took issue with the move in the House to increase the military pay raise from the proposed 1 percent to 1.8 percent. He said that would added about half a billion dollars to budget expenses and and "would force even larger cuts in other spending categories."

"If Congress does not approve these proposals, even more cuts in combat power, readiness and modernization would be needed to accommodate cuts of $52 billion in fiscal year 2014 and similar cuts in later years," Hagel wrote.

The automatic cuts kicked in March 1 and are the result of Congress' failure to trim the deficit by $1.2 trillion over a decade.

The Pentagon must reduce its 2013 budget by roughly $41 billion by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. In addition to furloughs of civilian employees, the armed forces are scaling back essential training and maintenance programs to deal with the lower spending levels.

Separately, the military also has to absorb a $487 billion reduction in defense spending over the next 10 years mandated by the Budget Control Act passed in 2011.

More lies and double talk from Congress.

Congress blames nameless bureaucrats for police state laws Congress passed

Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight

These are the typical lies and double talk that come out of Congress and other elected officials at all levels of government from the US Congress down to city level governments.

They passed these unconstitutional laws which have turned America into a police state. And now they want to deny responsibility for the harm the laws have caused by blaming it on the people they gave the power to enforce the unconstitutional police state laws.

Source

Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight

By Peter Wallsten, Published: July 10

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.

On three occasions since 2009, top Justice Department officials said the government’s ability to collect business records in terrorism cases is generally similar to that of law enforcement officials during a grand jury investigation. That comparison, some lawmakers now say, signaled to them that data was being gathered on a case-by-case basis, rather than the records of millions of Americans’ daily communications being vacuumed up in bulk.

In addition, two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say that even in top-secret briefings, officials “significantly exaggerated” the effectiveness of at least one program that collected data on Americans’ e-mail usage.

The administration’s claims are being reexamined in light of disclosures by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, reported by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, of broad government surveillance of Americans’ Internet and phone use authorized under secret interpretations of law.

At least two Republican lawmakers have called for the removal of Clapper, who denied the widespread surveillance of Americans while under questioning by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and issued his apology after the surveillance programs became public two months later.

A letter to Clapper sent two weeks ago from 26 senators from both parties complained about a series of statements from senior officials that “had the effect of misleading the public” and that will “undermine trust in government more broadly.”

Some Democrats and civil libertarians have expressed disappointment in what they say is a pattern of excessive secrecy from President Obama. He had pledged to run a more transparent administration than his predecessor, George W. Bush, who signed off on the NSA’s controversial warrantless wiretapping program and, with the authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, launched the bulk data-collection program that has continued.

“The national security state has grown so that any administration is now not upfront with Congress,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. “It’s an imbalance that’s grown in our government, and one that we have to cleanse.”

Administration officials say they have been as transparent as they could be in disclosing information about sensitive classified programs. All House and Senate members were invited to two classified briefings in 2010 and 2011 at which the programs were discussed, officials said.

Defenders of the surveillance programs in Congress, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence panel, have said the programs were fully explained. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) pointed to “many, many meetings” where surveillance was discussed and said members had “every opportunity to be aware of these programs.”

But some lawmakers say they feel that many of the administration’s public statements — often couched in terms that offered assurances of the government’s respect for civil liberties and privacy — seemed designed to mislead Americans and avoid congressional scrutiny. [Look Mr. Congressman or Congresswoman in the case of Kyrsten Sinema, you passed these laws, now you should take responsibility for them being abused. Don't blame your henchmen for abusing the laws you passed for them. You ARE the problem Mr. Congressman, now accept responsibility for the mess you created]

Wyden said that a number of administration statements have made it “impossible for the public or Congress to have a genuinely informed debate” about government surveillance. [Again Mr. Congressman you passed these laws, and YOU are the problem. Don't blame your henchmen for abusing the laws that passed] The Oregon senator, whose membership on the Senate Intelligence Committee gives him access to the classified court rulings authorizing broad surveillance, has tried in recent years to force a public discussion of what he has called “secret law.”

“These statements gave the public a false impression of how these authorities were actually being interpreted,” Wyden said. “The disclosures of the last few weeks have made it clear that a secret body of law authorizing secret surveillance overseen by a largely secret court has infringed on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights without offering the public the ability to judge for themselves whether these broad powers are appropriate or necessary.”

At the time that Justice Department officials appeared at public hearings in 2009 and 2011, the White House was pushing Congress to reauthorize provisions of the USA Patriot Act, including Section 215, which allows for the collection of “business records” and has since drawn attention as the justification for the bulk surveillance of phone records.

Two top Justice Department officials — Todd M. Hinnen and David S. Kris — told lawmakers in separate appearances that the government’s authority in national security cases was “roughly analogous” to that available to FBI agents investigating crimes using grand jury subpoenas. Both officials cited data showing the number of surveillance orders that had been issued under the law, and both offered a caution, as Hinnen said in 2009, that, “as many members are aware,” a portion of the orders “were used to support important and highly sensitive intelligence collections.” Both invited lawmakers to learn more in classified sessions.

Hinnen, now a lawyer in private practice, said in an interview that the analogy was a direct reference to a provision in the business records law that says the government can collect information only if that data “can be obtained with a subpoena . . . issued by a court of the United States in aid of a grand jury investigation.”

Senior lawmakers have also cited the grand jury analogy, including Feinstein, who said in 2011 that the law “provides the government the same authority in national security investigations to obtain physical records that exist in an ordinary criminal case through a grand jury subpoena.”

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, on Wednesday stood by the officials’ testimony. “The statute itself describes the program in this way,” he said.

Still, some lawmakers now say the testimony offered no clear indication that all Americans were subject to surveillance under the administration’s broad standard.

“I don’t know if it was an outright lie, but it was certainly misleading to what was going on,” said Nadler, who was chairman of the committee that heard from Hinnen in 2009.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), a key author of the Patriot Act who presided over a 2011 House hearing where Hinnen appeared, wrote this month to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that the Justice Department’s description “left the committee with the impression that the administration was using the business records provision sparingly and for specific materials.”

In an interview, Sensenbrenner, former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he had thought that he and his colleagues had created a sufficiently narrow standard for seeking information. The provision allows the government to collect only data that is “relevant” to an authorized terrorism investigation. Some lawmakers, warning of government abuse, tried unsuccessfully in 2005 to tighten the standard.

The relevancy requirement “was intended to be limiting,” Sensenbrenner said. “Instead, what we’re hearing now is that ‘relevant’ was expanding.” Sensenbrenner called it a “stretch of the English language” for the administration to consider millions of Americans’ phone records to be “relevant.”

Sensenbrenner, who had access to multiple classified briefings as a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he does not typically attend such sessions. He called the practice of classified briefings a “rope-a-dope operation” in which lawmakers are given information and then forbidden from speaking out about it. Members are not permitted to discuss information disclosed in classified briefings.

“It’s the same old game they use to suck members in,” he said.

Referring to public testimony from officials, Sensenbrenner added: “How can we do good oversight if we don’t get truthful and non-misleading testimony?”

The allegation of misleading statements even during classified sessions comes from Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Their concerns arose from closed-door discussions in 2011 regarding a top-secret program that was collecting data about Americans’ e-mail usage.

The existence of the e-mail surveillance program, which was shut down in 2011, was first disclosed publicly late last month in The Post and the Guardian. After that disclosure, Wyden and Udall took the unusual step of releasing a statement describing classified interactions with intelligence officials. The senators said they had been “quite familiar” with the program and had devoted much of their time in 2011 to questioning officials about it.

Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight

“Intelligence officials have noted that the bulk email records program was discussed with both Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Wyden and Udall said. “In our judgment it is also important to note that intelligence agencies made statements to both Congress and the court that significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness.”

The senators said that their experience demonstrated that intelligence agencies’ assessments “are not always accurate.” The senators added that their exchanges with officials about the e-mail program “led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program in particular,” a reference to administration arguments that the ongoing surveillance efforts have been crucial in thwarting terror plots.

“We believe that the broader lesson here is that even though intelligence officials may be well-intentioned, assertions from intelligence agencies about the value and effectiveness of particular programs should not simply be accepted at face value by policymakers or oversight bodies any more than statements about the usefulness of other government programs should be taken at face value when they are made by other government officials,” the senators added.

Wyden’s March question to Clapper was part of a broader effort on the senator’s part to use carefully worded public statements and questions to draw attention to the existence of classified programs — and the administration’s lack of transparency — without revealing secret information in the process.

Clapper’s statement prompted some lawmakers to allege what Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) called a “double standard” in which a top official could deliver false testimony without fear of penalty.

“If the administration has a policy to lie to Congress about classified materials in unclassified hearings, then you have to ask yourself what value the hearings have and whether or not anyone else is doing it,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.).

Some are calling for a major overhaul of the current oversight system, including the intelligence committees and the surveillance court, which were created in the late 1970s amid growing concern about U.S. spy practices following Watergate, the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA efforts to overthrow foreign governments.

Congress “tried to make agencies which have to operate in secret accountable nevertheless to the law,” said former vice president Walter F. Mondale, who as a senator was a member of the Church Committee, which led the efforts to overhaul the system.

Now, Mondale said, “that system has totally collapsed.” He said Clapper’s willingness to mislead the public during Senate testimony “is what happens when there’s no accountability. . . . What is the consequence of fibbing to the American people?”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Yahoo seeks to reveal its fight against NSA Prism requests

Exclusive: Yahoo seeks to reveal its fight against NSA Prism requests

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/11/2013 06:10:53 AM PDT

SUNNYVALE -- In a rare legal move, Yahoo (YHOO) is asking a secretive U.S. surveillance court to let the public see its arguments in a 2008 case that played an important role in persuading tech companies to cooperate with a controversial government data-gathering effort.

Releasing those files would demonstrate that Yahoo "objected strenuously" to government demands for customers' information and would also help the public understand how surveillance programs are approved under federal law, the company argued in a filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this

Yahoo's argument against the data-gathering was rejected in a 2008 ruling that gave the government powerful leverage to persuade other tech companies to comply with similar information demands, according to legal experts. But under federal law, the court's ruling and the arguments by Yahoo and other parties have been treated as classified information. Until last month, Yahoo was not even allowed to say it was a party in the case.

If Yahoo succeeds in unsealing some of the court files, legal experts say, it would be a historic development and an important step toward illuminating the arguments behind the controversial Internet surveillance program known as Prism, which was revealed last month by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, along with other government data-gathering efforts.

"This is the first time we've seen one of these companies making this broad an argument in favor of transparency in the FISA court," said Alex Abdo, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who works on national security issues. FISA is the acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the surveillance court to review and approve secret government data-gathering efforts.

Only a handful of the court's opinions have ever been unsealed, Abdo said, although civil liberties groups have pressed for more disclosure.

"Revealing what went on in the court is critical to having a democracy," said Jennifer Stisa Granick, a civil liberties expert at Stanford law school's Center for Internet and Society.

In light of news reports that the surveillance court has issued broad opinions on constitutional issues in secret, Granick added, "If Yahoo is successful in revealing what the court did and why, then we will know more about the laws our government is purportedly operating under, which sadly we don't currently know."

Yahoo's move is the latest effort by some of Silicon Valley's leading Internet companies to convince the public that the companies didn't just invite the government to peruse customer files or give authorities broad access to users' email, Internet chats and other online activities.

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft have also challenged secrecy rules by filing lawsuits seeking permission to reveal, in broad numbers, how many requests for information they have received under national security programs.

While the companies may be legitimately concerned about customers' privacy, they also have a strong commercial incentive, Granick noted.

"Obviously, Yahoo wants this information released because it wants users to feel that it's trustworthy," she said. "If Yahoo can show that it fought strenuously and really did its best to try to protect its users, that may make people feel more comfortable about Yahoo having their data."

Experts say the 2008 case sent a strong message to other tech companies that might have wanted to resist government data requests.

"When you get presented with an order you don't think is constitutional and the government says, 'We have this secret court opinion that it is constitutional,' then you are pretty much stuck," said Mark Rumold, an attorney who has worked on surveillance court issues for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Yahoo was prohibited from discussing its appeal until last month, when The New York Times reported that unnamed sources said Yahoo had unsuccessfully fought the data requests on constitutional grounds.

After that news report, Yahoo persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which rejected its appeal five years ago, to declassify the fact that Yahoo was the company in that case. Yahoo's attorney, Marc Zwillinger, confirmed his involvement in the case this week.

While the court found the government's effort was constitutional, Zwillinger wrote in a blog post, "I think there are better ways to protect the rights of U.S. persons who may be affected by this surveillance. If more of the court's analysis, and the parties' briefs, are made available, the public and Congress can make a more informed decision as to whether this is the program they want to have in place."

Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Phoenix & Tempe Police uses Federal money to spy on protesters

In the article the protests are people who want to make the world a better place to live and doing it by protesting. They are not criminals who will cause the downfall of Western civilization as the police seem to make them out to be.

Of course part of the problem is the cops love this stuff, because it creates high paying jobs for themselves.

While I have a lot of disagreements with the Occupy Phoenix and Occupy Wall Street protesters I certainly support their right to protest 100 percent. And I actually agree with some of their gripes.

And last but not least as H. L. Mencken said:

"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."

Inside the Phoenix PD's Use of Federal Anti-Terrorism Resources to Track Valley Protesters

By Monica Alonzo Thursday, Jun 20 2013

It's mid-October 2011, and Occupy Phoenix protesters sit in a city park, some with their arms locked, most chanting: "We are the 99 percent!"

They are part of a movement gaining momentum across the United States whose mission is to denounce corporate greed. Their civil disobedience also is intended to deride a government influenced by the same wealthy corporations it bails out of financial crises.

About 1,000 people from across the Valley gather on October 15 at Cesar Chavez Plaza in downtown Phoenix. The throng stays in the civic space until it closes early in the evening and cops usher people out. Several hundred protesters aren't ready to call it a night, though, and move to Margaret T. Hance Park.

Night falls, and this park closes, too.

A smaller number of protesters remain sitting on the lawn into early morning, October 16, even as police warn them to leave or face arrest for violating a city loitering ordinance. Several in the crowd shout that they are peacefully protesting as uniformed officers arrive en masse.

The confrontation with police is unnecessary.

Protest organizers had sought a permit to remain in the park through the night. Former state Senator Alfredo Gutierrez had put his political weight behind negotiating a deal between city officials and organizers.

There were reports that Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon would show up to support the rally, but neither he nor the permit materialize.

Instead, a menacing wall of officers wearing dark uniforms and gas masks and carrying protective shields close in on protesters. They grab those who refuse to stand up by their wrists, necks, and arms and drag them away.

City cops arrest 45 people, including Gutierrez, who served in the Arizona Senate for 12 years.

Phoenix Police Department officials who ordered officers to don riot gear and haul off those loitering in the park after hours claim they simply were maintaining law and order.

But their officers did more than make sporadic arrests to control various Occupy-related protests across the Valley, according to a report recently co-published by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy.

DBA Press describes itself as an online publication reporting on private- and public-sector corruption, while the CMD states that it's an investigative-reporting group that "exposes corporate spin and government propaganda."

Freelance reporter and DBA Press publisher Beau Hodai's in-depth report "Dissent or Terror" details how law enforcement officials used the resources of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, its Terrorism Liaison officers, and an intelligence analyst to track and report on the movements of individuals affiliated, or believed to be affiliated, with the Occupy Phoenix movement.

And, the author reports, this information — obtained using these taxpayer-funded resources — promptly was shared with those whom Occupy organized to protest. Police officials passed along details to downtown Phoenix bank executives and the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that joins corporate executives and lobbyists with lawmakers to produce conservative "model" laws. For instance, ALEC created the framework for Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the state's draconian anti-immigrant law.

The PPD devoted significant time and resources to the probe, despite its officials noting that there was paltry participation in the local Occupy movement compared to movements in other U.S. cities.

"It's part of a surveillance state that's crept up on us, but is larger than people realize," Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, tells New Times. "We've seen this kind of monitoring . . . of political-protest activity . . . for decades."

Boghosian says the difference is that the Internet and social media have made it easier for local and federal law enforcement "to gather information on, and track with more sophistication, the activities of politically active individuals in the United States."

A behind-the-scenes look at the government's probing of Valley Occupy activists and protesters was a prelude to what has been referred to in recent weeks as "Orwellian" government tactics on several fronts.

Most recently, national outrage was sparked by revelations in the Washington Post and in London's Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency and the FBI have collected personal data from nine major U.S. Internet firms — including Facebook, Google, and Apple — and from millions of records from major U.S. cell phone carriers.

The NSA debacle follows others, including the IRS' treatment of conservative Tea Party groups during the 2012 election. The Associated Press reported that about 75 groups were targeted inappropriately for additional reviews to ensure they weren't violating their tax-exempt statuses.

Another instance of government intrusion came on May 13, when the AP reported that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months' worth of "telephone records of reporters and editors" that listed "outgoing calls for work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, and Hartford [Connecticut], and for the main number of the AP in the U.S. House of Representatives press gallery."

The feds also gathered the phone records and tracked the movements of a Fox News reporter while he was developing leads on stories.

In Phoenix, Occupy organizers say they, too, were targets of undue government scrutiny doled out strategically and intentionally by police to hamper their ability to protest.

Cops call it intelligence gathering. Organizers call it spying and infiltration.

"It's like killing an ant with a shotgun," says Diane D'Angelo, an Occupy Phoenix member and spokeswoman. "It's absurd . . . to investigate protesters [who] care about people getting their homes foreclosed on. When you're treating people occupying Cesar Chavez Plaza with the same kind of rigorous attention as someone who's a member of al-Qaeda, that's pretty scary!"

To be sure, some Occupy-related events across the country, including in Oakland and in New York, saw episodes of violent clashes between cops and protesters. Most arrests, however, resulted in loitering or urban-camping charges.

Like police agencies across the country, the PPD devoted the resources of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center to track members of the Occupy movement. Such information centers also are known as "fusion centers" because they pull together various law enforcement agencies.

In Arizona, the center touts itself as monitoring "all hazards" and potential terror threats. It's comprised of 25 law enforcement agencies, also including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Tempe and Mesa police departments, and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

The details of journalist Hodai's report were gleaned from thousands of pages of public records he obtained from local, state, and federal agencies. They reveal that as organizers met to plan protests and advance the Occupy movement in metro Phoenix, city police officials sent an undercover officer to pose as a Mexican eager to support the cause.

The Phoenix cop attended public group meetings but also spent time with organizers in the park and on other occasions to gather details about protests and report them to superiors.

At the same time, an analyst with the PPD's Homeland Defense Bureau, part of the fusion center, monitored Occupy protesters' Facebook and Twitter accounts or used advanced technologies, such as facial recognition, to identify members of the movement.

The Occupy movement in Phoenix never burgeoned as it did in other American cities, but the PPD cautiously and vigorously tracked it as though it were a huge threat.

Although initial demonstrations attracted sizable crowds, subsequent rallies drew 50 or fewer protesters. On some days, attendance was so low that it prompted "mockery within the ranks" of the police department, Hodai reports.A Phoenix police detective working as a terrorism liaison officer for the Arizona Counter Terrorism Intelligence Center sent a law enforcement brief on trends his colleagues in other states had observed at Occupy events.

The police sergeant who received the detective's brief on December 28, 2011, commented sarcastically that the national report failed to "mention the four people we have demonstrating at Chavez Plaza."

Other police records show that daily monitoring of social-media accounts linked to members or sympathizers of the Occupy cause revealed "concern and frustration [among organizers] over the consistently low level of community involvement in the movement," according to city records obtained by Hodai.

Even so, his report notes, the PPD spent $245,200 "directly related to the policing of Occupy Phoenix during the first three days of the movement's existence."

The resources of the counter-terrorism center, well-funded by federal dollars, were spent to keep track of various Occupiers. Hodai noted that Phoenix received more than $1 million in grant money from the Department of Homeland Security in September 2010 to fund, in part, an intelligence analyst.

Brenda Dowhan, the civilian analyst hired by the PPD, and her counterpart in the Tempe Police Department commented in one e-mail exchange about how pleased they were that their "interference" helped foil a plot by activists to use a piece of vacant land in Tempe for urban gardening.

Dowhan wrote: "Every site I've been on, they know we're watching them."

But cops were doing more than "watching" — they were tracking.

Monitoring protesters isn't exactly what the feds had in mind as they poured as much as $1.4 billion since 2003 into creating and expanding 70 fusion centers across the United States.

In fact, a bipartisan probe in 2012 by a U.S. Senate subcommittee was critical of fusion centers for wasting money, getting used in ways that weren't strengthening counter-terrorism efforts, and stepping on Americans' freedoms.

The subcommittee investigation found the intelligence coming from the centers was "oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and . . . occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism."

The bottom line is that the October 2012 subcommittee findings severely question the value of the feds' investment in the fusion centers.

Democratic U.S. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of that Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which analyzes waste in government, said in the 2012 document that "fusion centers may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism, such as contributions to traditional criminal investigations, public safety, or disaster response and recovery efforts." Nevertheless, he recommended that Congress "clarify the purpose of fusion centers and link their funding to their performance."

Republican U.S. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a ranking member of the subcommittee who initiated the investigation of fusion centers, said: "Congress has a duty to the American people to ensure . . . it is getting value for the millions of taxpayer dollars invested in fusion centers."

Perhaps Phoenix terrorism liaison officers and analysts also were keeping tabs on actual terrorism threats, but they certainly were absorbed by Occupy Phoenix.

Silent Witness, a nonprofit organization that solicits crime tips, passed along to the PPD an anonymous online tip it received on November 18 about an "Occupy nut" from the Phoenix area.

The unnamed tipster wrote that the woman appeared to be involved with a violent organization.

"I'm aware no crime has technically been committed," the tipster continued, claiming the young woman had outstanding arrest warrants, was paranoid, and knew of specific plans for a violent revolt involving bombs. "[But] I've got an actual crime for you . . . illegal possession/use of marijuana. I've seen her smoking it on camera."

The individual, who had encountered the woman he called Amber only online, pledged to get police a photo of her smoking pot.

Police didn't wait for the photo of her smoking pot. They set out to identify the woman from an earlier photo provided by the tipster of her sitting in front of a computer.

"We have a Facebook photo and tried to do facial recognition, but she was wearing glasses," Dowhan wrote to police officials after sending the photo for analysis to another police agency within the counter-terrorism center.

It appears the photo was sent to a Facial Recognition Unit operated by the county Sheriff's Office, which can compare biometric data from photographs, such as those found on Facebook, to photos in a huge database — and not just pictures of people who have had brushes with the law.

Aside from 4.7 million mug shots from Arizona jails, 12,000 photos in the state's sex-offender database, and 2 million others listed in federal jails, the database includes about 18 million Arizona driver's license photos.

Hodai reports that there were "multiple instances" of police taking photos from Facebook and then using facial-recognition software to attempt to identify people believed to be Occupy members. He says it's important to note that the invasive technology was employed to investigate protesters as though police had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes.

Going to such extremes seems unwarranted. But Phoenix police spokesman Trent Crump tells New Times that the department would have been criticized as "negligent" had it not checked out a such alleged threats and somebody "actually carried out some kind of violent behavior."

When the PPD encounters "any behavior or statements" that allude to a possible threat, Crump says, it must follow up.

Documents show, however, that police tracked and dug into the backgrounds of individuals previously identified as members of Occupy Phoenix, even in the absence of any threat.

On December 14, 2011, at least five members of the PPD's executive staff, including Central City Precinct Commander Louis Tovar, received an e-mail regarding "Phoenix Occupiers" from a man identifying himself as David Mullin.

Mullin wrote: "Dear Sir or Madam, Please consider leaving the Occupy movement alone. They speak for me, and I suspect a large portion of American[s] who are upset with corporate greed and the ability to purchase politicians and their votes. We are going to take back America for its citizens, and it would probably be better for your careers not to get in the way."

He signed off with a simple "thanks."

Tovar noted to his colleagues that he had received similar e-mails from others and that he was merely giving investigators a heads-up.

It was enough for Assistant Phoenix Police Chief Tracy Montgomery to take Mullin's note as a possible threat, if only to her job security. Responding to members of the department's executive staff, Montgomery wrote: "Interesting e-mail threatening our careers. Anyone know the name?"

Montgomery's question prompted a subordinate commander to order that a lieutenant "check it out," and the e-mail ended up with Detective C.J. Wren of the city's Homeland Defense Bureau (part of the state counter-terrorism unit) and with analyst Brenda Dowhan.

The following day, Wren sent an e-mail to his lieutenant letting him know that "we figured out exactly where this guy got the names and e-mails to send that message." He identified the e-mailer as a former Glendale resident who lived in Las Vegas.

The e-mail addresses of the PPD commanders Mullin had messaged were posted on a website called Occupy the Signal, and viewers were asked to write to the city's top cops.

"Will work on it some more when I get back," wrote Wren, who had to head out for another assignment.

Hodai notes in his report that it's not a "violation of Arizona law for constituents to write their public servants with their concerns" and that "encouraging open communication is not an act of terrorism."

Records show that Dowhan and Wren "devoted the better part of two days [to] discovering the identity and whereabouts of the e-mail author," according to Hodai's report, which said: "The purpose or conclusion of this investigation into . . . Mullin . . . is not clear."

On another occasion, two Occupy members posted plans on Facebook to travel to Flagstaff for Christmas 2011, and terrorism analyst Dowhan dutifully reported it to a Flagstaff terrorism official.

"I have notified the [official] there that they are coming and that we have no reason to believe that their visit is anything but peaceful," she wrote to her supervisors.

Her monitoring continued, and when the two individuals changed their travel dates, she again contacted Flagstaff law enforcement to report their updated plans.

Why would law enforcement here or in Flagstaff be so interested in the comings and goings of apparently "peaceful" citizens who only have exercised a constitutional right?

Because, Crump says, their past activities made Flagstaff authorities want to know about their presence in preparation for "any response deemed necessary."

But, Hodai tells New Times, "There is no predicate [for] criminal activity," continuing that police monitored not only people arrested or cited during Occupy protests but those who were just issued warnings.

"How much of a threat could these people possibly be that you need to give their information to a terrorism liaison [officer] or analyst, when [your] beat cop didn't even feel it was important enough to arrest them for whatever infraction?" he says.

Crump counters that there was no overreach, that "safeguards" exist in government to limit abuse of power.

He further justifies the official invasions of privacy by stating, "The public expects a great deal from us."

Government tracking of activists hardly was unique to Phoenix, as events nationally have trumpeted over the past couple of months. And groups targeted have not been limited to those on the political left.

Right-wing Tea Party organizations have sued the IRS after their tax-exempt statuses, or applications for them, were singled out because of key words in their names — "tea party" and "patriot."

Although IRS officials apologized in May, and none of the tax-exempt statuses was revoked, the controversy is ongoing. Conservative think tank American Center for Law and Justice filed a federal lawsuit on May 29 against the IRS on behalf of several Tea Party organizations, including the Greater Phoenix Tea Party.

The complaint states that the agency violated groups' constitutional rights by subjecting them to "burdensome inquiries and scrutiny . . . based solely upon Plaintiffs' political viewpoints, or Defendants' assumption of Plaintiffs' viewpoints, based on their organizational names."

But anyone with a cell phone or Internet access could have been caught up in PRISM, a U.S. government intelligence program launched in 2008. The program was exposed after the Guardian published leaked information about the NSA's intel program, including a top-secret court order demanding that Verizon Business Network Services turn over details of phone calls made between April 25 and July 19, 2013.

Intelligence officials later confirmed that the program probably included all U.S. cell phone carriers.

Details are still emerging, with CNN reporting that government officials now insist that the program is directed at "foreign targets located outside the United States" and that data mined as part of the program gets reviewed by the Obama administration, Congress, and judges.

Other acts of government intrusion include the feds' collection of phone records from the AP as part of a probe into who leaked details of a CIA operation in Yemen that thwarted a plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airplane on the anniversary of the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Open Channel, an investigative NBC news blog, reported on May 20 that the Justice Department's secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of logs for five reporters' cell phones and three reporters' home phones, as well as for two fax lines.

David Schulz, chief lawyer for the AP, said the subpoenas also covered the records for 21 phone lines in five AP offices — including one for a dead phone line at an office in Washington shut down six years ago. The phone lines at four other offices — where 100 reporters worked — also were covered by the subpoenas, the blog reported.

The AP also is considering legal action against the Justice Department.

A Fox News reporter came under scrutiny by the Justice Department in 2011 as it investigated an unrelated 2009 leak of classified and sensitive information related to North Korea.

The details of federal agents' snooping into the activities of reporter James Rosen first were reported on May 19 by the Washington Post, exposing the depth of government surveillance.

Rosen had written in June 2009, two years before the investigation, about "U.S. intelligence officials [warning] President Barack Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the looming passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution — condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests — with another nuclear test."

The Post reported that federal agents used security-badge-access records to track the reporter's State Department visits, traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report, and obtained a search warrant for his personal e-mails.

Congressman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, criticized the Justice Department's tendency to zealously investigate leaks to the media.

During a June 2 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Rogers said the Justice Department went too far when it cast such a wide net for AP reporters' phone records.

He said he knows, as a former FBI agent, how "incredibly important" keeping classified information secret is to national security.

"However, I think that dragnet that they threw out over those AP reporters was more than an overreach [and] a little bit dangerous when you talk about First Amendment protections for a free press."

Excessive scrutiny of average residents' exercising their constitutional rights to gather and protest also is dangerous, civil libertarians insist.

"We are very concerned . . . about this use of police resources against folks where there was no indication of any criminal activity, no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity," says Dan Pachoda, legal director of the Arizona office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Clearly, it was a political decision . . . based on ideology that led [Phoenix police] to this increased focus on these groups. The police didn't like what they were saying."

Phoenix police and other law enforcement agencies shared details about pending protests with the very corporate entities that Occupy organizers planned to demonstrate against.

In his report, Beau Hodai documents how a Phoenix terrorism liaison officer, a police officer hired by the right-wing ALEC group, a terrorism analyst, an undercover police officer posing as an Occupy supporter, and others coordinated with ALEC officials before its convention in Scottsdale.

He notes that one meeting coincided with updating a "face sheet" with photos of 24 people. The sheet was titled "Persons of Interest to the ALEC Conference," and stated, beneath the title: "Committed Assault on Police Officers."

Attorney Heidi Boghosian, who wrote Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance, says such cozy relationships and data monitoring "create a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech."

It amounts to the criminalizing of free speech, she says.

PPD spokesman Trent Crump says the department shares information with any group, regardless of ideology, expecting a large gathering. The goal, he insists, is to maintain public safety at the event.

Aside from analysts and terrorism liaison officers mining social-media networks, PPD leaders decided to embed undercover cops within the ranks of Occupy organizers.

A clean-cut man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair who appeared to be in his 50s introduced himself to activists in early 2011 while they were gathered at Conspire, a now-closed coffee shop and vegan cafe, Hodai's report states.

Although certain activists believed all along that he was a cop, the man claimed to be a homeless Mexican with ties to anarchists in that country. Public records show that after getting chummy with those attending Occupy gatherings, the man, who indeed turned out to be a cop, would report back any information about the group's future plans to his supervisors.

Hodai and Occupy activists question what suspicion of criminal activity existed to prompt Phoenix police to "infiltrate" meetings where protests and demonstrations were being planned.

Crump told Hodai that police don't have to even "anticipate that there's going to be criminal activity" to gather intelligence. It's a routine exercise, he contended.

Hodai highlights in his report that dispatching undercover cops and mining social-media accounts weren't the only ways PPD officials obtained information about the Occupy movement here. They also asked private citizens to help out.

Cindy Dach, owner of MADE Art Boutique on Roosevelt Row and co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, got caught up in the controversy over the department's activities when she sent an e-mail to cops in 2011 informing them about an upcoming Occupy meeting.

Dach tells New Times that she did not intend to share information with police to hamper protesters' efforts.

"There were huge safety concerns," she says. "People forget that, at the time, sidewalks were not yet expanded, and police were working with a lot of residents and business owners to keep [First Fridays] a safe event."

First Friday is a monthly art walk through downtown Phoenix's Roosevelt Row, a revitalized urban area with restaurants, galleries, and boutiques.

Dach's e-mail to police let them know that activists planned to meet later on October 7. It wasn't until Hodai requested thousands of documents and e-mails from the PPD that Dach's message to cops came to light.

It drew mixed reaction from Occupy members, some calling for a boycott of her businesses.

Her public apology was posted on Facebook and OccupyPhx.org:

"I am truly sorry. It was never my intention to provide an intelligence-gathering tip to local police or [to] attempt to disrupt free speech." She added that, after reading Hodai's report, she "realized how naive I was in this situation."

Calling what transpired a sobering lesson, she said she didn't know her information would be "used instead to gather information about an Occupy meeting."

For D'Angelo, the PPD's information-gathering campaign against Occupy members "reinforces the notion that they were being treated like terrorists or criminals."

Although she had served on the city's Human Rights Committee, had been a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Transportation, and knew members of the state fusion center, her Facebook page and social-media accounts were monitored by police.

Detective Wren, Phoenix's terror liaison officer, told a colleague in an e-mail that he was gathering information from D'Angelo's social-media accounts, but he asked the officer not to mention anything to her about him "trolling" her Facebook page because he and D'Angelo were longtime friends.

"What amazes me is the tone-deafness of the Phoenix Police Department and city officials about why we were protesting," D'Angelo says. "They were assuming criminality and that Occupy was just a bunch of dirty hippies. That just wasn't the case."

One of the "dirty hippies," it turned out, was former Arizona Senator Gutierrez, also a past gubernatorial candidate, who was among those carried away by police in the early hours of October 16 for overstaying their welcome at a city park.

Boghosian says such action often "placates the public into thinking law enforcement is dealing with national-security threats." The reality, she says, is that the PPD was investigating "domestic activism" when it should have been "pursuing real criminal activity."

The local ACLU defended those arrested, and in nearly all cases, got the charges against them dismissed.

"At best, it's a bad use of police resources," ACLU lawyer Pachoda says, "because there was no indication that people were planning crimes, committing crimes, or meeting for any other purpose than [constitutionally protected] political protest."

Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance

Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance

Associated Press Tue Jul 16, 2013 11:10 AM

Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.

Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs earlier this year.

NSA public affairs deferred comment on the lawsuit to the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the lawsuit, the coalition demands that the federal government return and destroy any telephone communications information in its possession. It also wants a jury trial on the allegations contained in the suit.

The plaintiffs include the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the Council on American Islamic Relations Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and others.

The federal government has “indiscriminately obtained, and stored the telephone communications information of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Associational Tracking Program,” the lawsuit states.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in New York asking the government to stop the phone tracking program.

Sinema collects $1.6 million a year in bribes, no campaign contributions

Kyrsten Sinema job as a Congressman or Congresswoman gets paid a nice $174,000 a year. Something only most of the people she rules over can only dream about.

But if her current rate of campaign contributions, something the rest of us call bribes, continues she will be pulling in $1.6 million a year, almost 10 times the amount of her cushy $174,000 salary.

Last for those of you who don't keep up with the news, Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who tried to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet.

Source

Sinema a leader in campaign donations

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jul 16, 2013 10:50 PM

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., in her first year in Congress has vaulted to the top echelon of fundraisers nationwide, according to campaign-finance reports released this week.

Sinema, whose district includes parts of Phoenix and Tempe, raked in nearly $400,000 from April through June [for a year that would be $1.6 million], with major money coming from labor unions, Arizona State University employees and Democratic leadership groups. Her total surpassed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and roughly 90 percent of other House members, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Sinema ended the second quarter with $550,000 on hand.

The numbers show how important fundraising has become for incumbents like Sinema, especially those who represent competitive districts, said Bruce Merrill, a longtime political scientist and professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

Sinema’s fellow Democrats in hot seats for 2014 — Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of northern Arizona and Rep. Ron Barber of southern Arizona — raised significant amounts as well: about $300,000 each.

Kirkpatrick ended the quarter with $452,000 on hand, while Barber kept $330,000 in the bank.

“Whether it’s right or wrong, raising money is one of the principle components of American electoral politics,” Merrill said. “It’s kind of like a poker game: Do you have the ante to sit at the table and play?”

Sinema, Kirkpatrick and Barber, whose districts are closely split between Republican and Democratic voters, are likely to face tough re-election campaigns. Lining their war chests this early could deter potential challengers and prepare them for battle. The incumbents each spent more than $2 million in their 2012 campaigns.

Incumbents in safe Arizona districts raised smaller amounts:

Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican from Mesa, hauled in $165,000 and kept $243,000 on hand.

Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican from Fountain Hills, raised $163,000 and was left with $123,000.

Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Prescott, took in $79,000 and had $83,000 in the bank.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, and Rep. Ed Pastor, a Phoenix Democrat, each hauled in $65,000. Pastor had $1.3 million on hand compared with Grijalva’s $58,000.

The least successful fundraiser of Arizona’s delegation was Rep. Trent Franks, a Glendale Republican, who took in $25,000, even after putting out a plea for donations last month following furor over his comments regarding the incidence of pregnancy from rape.

The plea seems not to have made a ripple among pro-life activists. After his comments, only two donations came in from donors who were not corporations or from Washington political and legal firms. At the end of the quarter, he had less than $10,000 in the bank.

Only two candidates seeking to run for Congress next year spent the quarter fundraising seriously. Both are Republicans hoping to unseat Sinema in her brand-new Phoenix district.

Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot who lost last year’s Republican primary, raised $128,000 and had $206,000 on hand. Andrew Walter, a former ASU quarterback and first-time politician, pulled in $113,000 and was left with $122,000 in the bank.

Reports for Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake were not yet available.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8096.

Amid Gitmo strike, ex-detainee tells of force-feeding

Amid Gitmo strike, ex-detainee tells of force-feeding

By Ben Fox

The Associated Press

© June 16, 2013

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba

For more than three months, the U.S. military has faced off with defiant prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, strapping down as many as 44 each day to feed them a liquid nutrient mix through a nasal tube to prevent them from starving to death.

The standoff, which prompted President Barack Obama to renew his call to close the detention center, has grown to involve 104 of the 166 prisoners as of Saturday, and may be nearing a crisis point. Yet the experience of a former detainee demonstrates that a hunger strike at Guantanamo can be as indefinite as the open-ended detention that is at the heart of essentially every conflict at the military prison.

The men undergoing forced-feeding aren't permitted to speak to journalists, but Ahmed Zuhair knows what the experience is like. Until he was released from U.S. custody in 2009, he and another prisoner had the distinction of staging the longest hunger strikes at the prison. Zuhair kept at it for four years in a showdown that at times turned violent.

The military acknowledges a "forced cell extraction team" was repeatedly used to move him when he refused to walk on his own to where striking detainees were fed. He says his nasal passages and back are permanently damaged from the way he was strapped down and fed through a nasogastric tube.

Court papers show that Zuhair once racked up 80 disciplinary infractions in four months, refusing to be force-fed among them, and that he and fellow prisoners smeared themselves with their own feces for five days to keep guards at bay and protest rough treatment.

Zuhair, a former sheep merchant who was never charged with any crime during seven years at Guantanamo, stopped eating in June 2005, and kept up his protest until he was sent home to Saudi Arabia in 2009.

"Not once did the thought occur to me to stop my hunger strike," he says now. "Not once."

Zuhair spoke to The Associated Press in a telephone interview along with his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York.

The 47-year-old Zuhair lives with his wife and children in the Muslim holy city of Mecca. He said he doesn't get much news about Guantanamo in Saudi Arabia but that the world should not be surprised that prisoners are back on strike.

"The men there today are going through the same experience and they are suffering just as much, and so they probably will not stop either," he said.

Since the prison opened in 2002, seven prisoners have committed suicide. It's the policy of the U.S. Department of Defense to try to keep strikers alive. The feeding procedure is considered safe and its use has been upheld by the courts, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the detention center.

The medical personnel who conduct the feedings lubricate the feeding tubes, offer anesthetics to the prisoners and have rules for nasal rest to prevent long-lasting damage, Durand said.

"We think there are adequate safeguards in place to make it as pain-free and comfortable as possible," he said. "It's not done to inflict pain and it's not done as punishment. It's done to preserve life."

Officials refer to the process by the medical term "enteral feeding" rather than "force feeding." It involves restraining men with straps that resemble airplane seatbelts to a specially designed chair that looks like a piece of exercise equipment. Zuhair called it the "torture chair" and said he was left tied down for hours at a time, ostensibly so the liquid nutrient drink Ensure could be digested.

It is difficult to confirm the accounts of either prisoners or military officials. Journalists are not allowed to watch the feeding process or interview the men held behind the perimeter fences and coils of razor wire at this isolated U.S. military base on the southeastern edge of the Cuban coast.

Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, recently returned from a visit with clients held at Guantanamo and said several of the men had trouble concentrating, which she attributed in part to being kept isolated in solid-walled cells for most of the day.

She said one prisoner, Sabry Mohammed of Yemen, had lost more than 60 pounds (27 kilograms).

"Sabry Mohammed was a healthy young man before the strike," Kebriaei said in an email. "It was startling this time to see how much he has changed physically."

In an editorial published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, two doctors and a professor of medical ethics urged Guantanamo's prison doctors to refuse to force feed hunger strikers, saying to do so is a violation of ethical obligations. It's an argument that has been made for years by human rights groups and detainee advocates.

There are risks to prolonged enteral feeding, including the possibility of getting liquid in the lungs and or damaging the nasal passages, particularly when the person is uncooperative, said Dr. David L. Katz, an internist on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine. The effects of prolonged use of liquid nutrition instead of regular food are not really known, he said.

"You do a procedure when it's the best choice under the circumstances," Katz said. "In this ethical context, these are people you are forcing to receive sustenance they don't want. I don't know how you begin to measure risk-benefit trade-offs, but there are some medical risks, certainly."

The military began using the restraint chair at Guantanamo to feed prisoners in January 2006 after hunger strikers grew dangerously thin and officials feared some might die. Then, as now, prisoners said they were striking over what they considered the reckless handling of their Qurans by prison staff, conditions at the detention center and their indefinite confinement.

The number of men participating in that protest, which reached 131 at its peak, dwindled to just two — Zuhair and Abdul Rahman Shalabi, a fellow Saudi who remains at the prison and has joined the current hunger strike.

U.S. officials have said the feeding chair was never intended to break the strike, only to keep men alive. The military insists all its procedures are humane.

But Zuhair, and others, have long maintained otherwise. "During each force-feeding, my nose bleeds," he said in a sworn statement submitted to the court by his lawyer, Kassem. "The pain from each force-feeding is so excruciating that I am unable to sleep at night because of the pain in my throat."

At one point, the government facilitated a call to the prison from Zuhair's mother, who urged him to drop the hunger strike. "My family did not know what I was going through at Guantanamo — the humiliation, the torture, the solitary confinement," he told AP.

A court-ordered April 2009 report by Dr. Emily Keram, a forensic psychiatrist based in Santa Rosa, California, included interviews with guards who denied Zuhair's allegations that he was roughly forced into the restraint chair and left there much longer than the two-hour maximum.

Keram also found evidence that Zuhair wasn't always confrontational. Guards told her that Zuhair often served as an intermediary between troops and prisoners.

Guards told her that prisoners would sometimes sing as they were being force-fed, a favorite was hip hop artist Akon's "Locked Up."

At the time of Keram's evaluation, Zuhair, who is about 5 feet, 5 inches, weighed 115 pounds. Today, he says he weighs nearly 190 pounds (85 kilograms). Records show he dropped to 108 pounds in December 2005.

In his seven years at Guantanamo, Zuhair faced an evolving collection of allegations that he had ties to Islamic extremists, all of which he denied. He had been taken into custody by Pakistani agents in late 2001, and his lawyer says he was tortured into confessing to having met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan even though he had never been to that country. He was turned over to U.S. officials and moved to Guantanamo in June 2002.

Kassem pursued a legal challenge and sought to prove that Zuhair was wrongly held. "We just wanted to go to trial and have the hearing so a judge could rule on whether Ahmed's detention was legal or not," the lawyer said.

Finally it looked as if they were going to get the chance when the judge set a court date for late June 2009. But just before that could happen, the U.S. put Zuhair on a plane without warning and sent him home, where he went through a rehabilitation program set up by the Saudi government. He was one of the last prisoners allowed to leave before Congress put up roadblocks to releases.

The one-time merchant said he has no work now. And his stomach and back are in constant pain from the effects of his strike.

"I think about the men who are at Guantanamo and I wonder about America's humanity," he said. "I ask myself how much longer this will go on."

PRISM a small part of more intrusive snooping effort

June 15, 2013

PRISM a small part of more intrusive snooping effort

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- In the months and early years after 9 /11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often, there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate or not.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" -- not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to PRISM, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of PRISM this month by The Washington Post and The Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

However, interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while PRISM has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber-optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, PRISM appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, PRISM takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. PRISM makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. Those interviews, however, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to PRISM's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That storyline has attracted the most attention so far.

The second -- and far murkier one -- is how PRISM fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

After 9/11, the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' begins

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

However, Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job -- and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 al-Qaida terrorist attack, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber-optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber-optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over PRISM, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified, but former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the United States someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

US-98XN, or PRISM, takes over warrantless-wiretapping effort

When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national-security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now, Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Although the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as PRISM.

Although many details are still unknown, it worked like this:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the PRISM documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of 2012. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named PRISM. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called PRISM, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil-libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court -- and lost -- in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.

"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under PRISM, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces that make it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the PRISM documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate PRISM's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slides made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from PRISM and from the fiber-optic cables.

PRISM, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With PRISM, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, PRISM helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. However, it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber-optic cables that actually captures the data, experts say.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is if the government can use the data from PRISM to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. However, if PRISM provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible that the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.

Whether the government has that power and whether it uses PRISM this way or not remains a closely guarded secret.

After decrying Bush for PRISM, President Obama keeps it going

A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama said recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several as yet unspecified terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how PRISM works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.

"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."

Experts deride bite marks as unreliable in court

Source

Experts deride bite marks as unreliable in court

2:39 p.m. EDT June 16, 2013

At least 24 men convicted or charged with murder or rape based on bite marks on the flesh of victims have been exonerated since 2000, many after spending more than a decade in prison. Now a judge's ruling later this month in New York could help end the practice for good.

A small, mostly ungoverned group of dentists carry out bite mark analysis and their findings are often key evidence in prosecutions, even though there is no scientific proof that teeth can be matched definitively to a bite into human skin.

DNA has outstripped the usefulness of bite mark analysis in many cases: The FBI doesn't use it and the American Dental Association does not recognize it.

"Bite mark evidence is the poster child of unreliable forensic science," said Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the New York-based Innocence Project, which helps wrongfully convicted inmates win freedom through DNA testing.

Supporters of the method, which involves comparing the teeth of possible suspects to bite mark patterns on victims, argue it has helped convict child murderers and other notorious criminals, including serial killer Ted Bundy. They say problems that have arisen are not about the method, but about the qualifications of those testifying, who can earn as much as $5,000 a case.

"The problem lies in the analyst or the bias," said Dr. Frank Wright, a forensic dentist in Cincinnati. "So if the analyst is … not properly trained or introduces bias into their exam, sure, it's going to be polluted, just like any other scientific investigation. It doesn't mean bite mark evidence is bad."

The Associated Press reviewed decades of court records, archives, news reports and filings by the Innocence Project in order to compile the most comprehensive count to date of those exonerated after being convicted or charged based on bite mark evidence. Two dozen forensic scientists and other experts were interviewed, including some who had never before spoken to a reporter about their work.

The AP analysis found that at least two dozen men had been exonerated since 2000, mostly as a result of DNA testing. Many had spent years in prison, including on death row, and one man was behind bars for more than 23 years. The count included at least six men arrested on bite mark evidence who were freed as they awaited trial.

Two court cases this month are helping to bring the debate over the issue to a head. One involves a 63-year-old California man who is serving a life term for killing his wife, even though the forensic dentist who testified against him has reversed his opinion.

In the second, a New York City judge overseeing a murder case is expected to decide whether bite mark analysis can be admitted as evidence, a ruling critics say could kick it out of courtrooms for good.

Some notable cases of faulty bite mark analysis include:

— Two men convicted of raping and killing two 3-year-old girls in separate Mississippi crimes in 1992 and 1995. Marks on their bodies were later determined to have come from crawfish and insects.

— A New Mexico man imprisoned in the 1989 rape and murder of his stepdaughter, who was found with a possible bite mark on her neck and sperm on her body. It was later determined that the stepfather had a medical condition that prevented him from producing sperm.

— Ray Krone, the so-called "Snaggletooth Killer," who was convicted in 1992 and again in 1996 after winning a new trial in the murder of a Phoenix bartender found naked and stabbed in the men's restroom of the bar where she worked. Krone spent 10 years in prison, three on death row.

Raymond Rawson, a Las Vegas forensic dentist, testified at both trials that bite marks on the bartender could only have come from Krone, evidence that proved critical in convicting him. At his second trial, three top forensic dentists testified for the defense that Krone couldn't have made the bite mark, but the jury didn't give their findings much weight and again found him guilty.

In 2002, DNA testing matched a different man, and Krone was released.

Rawson, like a handful of other forensic dentists implicated in faulty testimony connected to high-profile exonerations, remains on the American Board of Forensic Odontology, the only entity that certifies and oversees bite mark analysts. Now retired, he didn't return messages left at a number listed for him in Las Vegas.

Rawson has never publicly acknowledged making a mistake, nor has he apologized to Krone, who described sitting helplessly in court listening to the dentist identify him as the killer.

"You're dumbfounded," Krone said in a telephone interview from his home in Newport, Tenn. "There's one person that knows for sure and that was me. And he's so pompously, so arrogantly and so confidently stating that, beyond a shadow of doubt, he's positive it was my teeth. It was so ridiculous."

The history of bite mark analysis began in 1954 with a piece of cheese in small-town Texas. A dentist testified that a bite mark in the cheese, left behind in a grocery store that had been robbed, matched the teeth of a drunken man found with 13 stolen silver dollars. The man was convicted.

The first court case involving a bite mark on a person didn't come until two decades later, in 1974, also in Texas. Two dentists testified that a man's teeth matched a bite mark on a murder victim. Although the defense attorney fought the admissibility of the evidence, a court ruled that it should be allowed because it had been used in 1954.

Bite mark analysis hit the big time at Bundy's 1979 Florida trial. bitemarks2

Forensic odontologist Dr. Richard Souviron pointing to a blown-up photograph of accused murderer Theodore Bundy's teeth during Bundy's 1979 murder trial in Miami, Fla.(Photo: AP Photo)

On the night Bundy went on a killing spree that left two young women dead and three others seriously wounded, he savagely bit one of the murder victims, Lisa Levy. A Florida forensic dentist, Dr. Richard Souviron, testified at Bundy's murder trial that his unusual, mangled teeth were a match.

Bundy was found guilty and executed. The bite marks were considered the key piece of physical evidence against him.

That nationally televised case and dozens more in the 1980s and 1990s made bite mark evidence look like infallible, cutting-edge science, and courtrooms accepted it with little debate.

Then came DNA testing. Beginning in the early 2000s, new evidence set free men serving prison time or awaiting the death penalty largely because of bite mark testimony that later proved faulty.

At the core of critics' arguments is that science hasn't shown it's possible to match a bite mark to a single person's teeth or even that human skin can accurately record a bite mark.

Fabricant, of the Innocence Project, said what's most troubling about bite mark evidence is how powerful it can be for jurors.

"It's very inflammatory," he said. "What could be more grotesque than biting someone amid a murder or a rape hard enough to leave an injury? It's highly prejudicial, and its probative value is completely unknown."

Fabricant and other defense attorneys are fighting to get bite mark analysis thrown out of courtrooms, most recently focusing their efforts on the New York City case.

It involves the death of 33-year-old Kristine Yitref, whose beaten and strangled body was found wrapped in garbage bags under a bed in a hotel near Times Square in 2007. A forensic dentist concluded a mark on her body matched the teeth of Clarence Brian Dean, a 41-year-old fugitive sex offender from Alabama, who is awaiting trial on a murder charge.

Dean told police he killed Yitref in self-defense, saying she and another man attacked him in a robbery attempt after he agreed to pay her for sex; no other man was found.

Dean's defense attorneys have challenged the prosecution's effort to admit the bite mark evidence, and a judge is expected to issue a ruling as early as mid-June — a pivotal step critics hope could eventually help lead to a ban on such evidence.

A dayslong hearing last year over the scientific validity of bite marks went to the heart of the debate.

"The issue is not that bite mark analysis is invalid, but that bite mark examiners are not properly vetted," Dr. David Senn, of San Antonio, testified at the hearing.

Another case gaining attention is that of William Joseph Richards, convicted in 1997 of killing his wife, Pam, in San Bernardino, Calif., and sentenced to life in prison.

Pam Richards had been strangled and beaten with rocks, her skull crushed by a cinder block, and her body left lying in the dirt in front of their home, naked from the waist down.

Dr. Norman Sperber, a well-respected forensic dentist, testified that a crescent-shaped wound on her body corresponded with an extremely rare abnormality in William Richards' teeth.

But at a 2009 hearing seeking Richards' freedom, Sperber recanted his testimony, saying that it was scientifically inaccurate, that he no longer was sure the wound was a bite mark, and that even if it was, Richards could not have made it.

Shortly after that, a judge tossed out Richards' conviction and declared him innocent. The prosecution appealed and the case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in December that Richards had failed to prove his innocence, even though the bite mark evidence had been discredited. In a 4-3 decision, the court said forensic evidence, even if later recanted, can be deemed false only in very narrow circumstances and Richards did not meet that high bar.

Since April 27, Richards' attorneys have been on what they dubbed a two-month "innocence march" from San Diego to the state capital, Sacramento, to deliver a request for clemency to Gov. Jerry Brown and raise awareness about wrongful convictions. They are expected to arrive later this month.

The American Board of Forensic Odontology recently got a request from Richards' attorneys, who are affiliated with the Innocence Project, for a written opinion on the shoddy bite mark evidence used against him. The board declined.

Only about 100 forensic dentists are certified by the odontology board, and just a fraction are actively analyzing and comparing bite marks. Certification requires no proficiency tests. The board requires a dentist to have been the lead investigator and to have testified in one current bite mark case and to analyze six past cases on file — a system criticized by defense attorneys because it requires testimony before certification.

Testifying can earn a forensic dentist $1,500 to $5,000 per case, though most testify in only a few a year. The consequences for being wrong are almost nonexistent. Many lawsuits against forensic dentists employed by counties and medical examiner's offices have been thrown out because as government officials, they're largely immune from liability.

Only one member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology has ever been suspended, none has ever been decertified, and some dentists still on the board have been involved in some of the most high-profile and egregious exonerations on record.

Even Dr. Michael West, whose testimony is considered pivotal in the wrongful convictions or imprisonment of at least four men, was not thrown off the board. West was suspended and ended up stepping down.

Among his cases were the separate rapes and murders of the two 3-year-old girls in Mississippi, where West testified that two men later exonerated by DNA evidence were responsible for what he said were bite marks on their bodies. The marks later turned out to be from crawfish and insects, and a different man's DNA matched both cases.

“People love to have a black-and-white, and it's not black and white. I thought it was extremely accurate, but other cases have proven it's not.”

— Dr. Michael West

West now says DNA has made bite mark analysis almost obsolete.

"People love to have a black-and-white, and it's not black and white," said West, of Hattiesburg, Miss., where he has a dental practice but no longer works on bite mark cases. "I thought it was extremely accurate, but other cases have proven it's not."

Levon Brooks, convicted of killing one of the girls, spent 16 years in prison. The other, Kennedy Brewer, was behind bars for 13 years, many of them on death row.

West defended his testimony, saying he never testified that Brooks and Brewer were the killers, only that they bit the children, and that he's not responsible for juries who found them guilty.

Other dentists involved in exonerations have been allowed to remain on the board as long as they don't handle more bite mark cases, said Wright, the Cincinnati forensic dentist.

"The ABFO has had some internal issues as far as not really policing our own," he said.

Wright and other forensic dentists have been working to develop guidelines to help avert problems of the past while retaining bite mark analysis in the courtroom.

Their efforts include a flow chart to help forensic dentists determine whether bite mark analysis is even appropriate for a given case. Wright also is working on developing a proficiency test that would be required for recertification every five years.

An internal debate over the future of the practice was laid bare at a conference in Washington in February, when scores of dentists — many specializing in bite mark analysis — attended days of lectures and panel discussions. The field's harshest critics also were there, leading to heated discussions about the method's limitations and strengths.

Dr. Gregory Golden, a forensic dentist and president of the odontology board, acknowledged that flawed testimony has led to the "ruination of several innocent people's lives" but said the field was entering a "new era" of accountability.

Souviron, who testified against Bundy in 1979 and is one of the founding fathers of bite mark analysis in the U.S., argued there's a "real need for bite marks in our criminal justice system."

In an interview with the AP, Souviron compared the testimony of well-trained bite mark analysts to medical examiners testifying about a suspected cause of death.

"If someone's got an unusual set of teeth, like the Bundy case, from the standpoint of throwing it out of court, that's ridiculous," he said. "Every science that I know of has bad individuals. Our science isn't bad. It's the individuals who are the problem."

Many forensic dentists have helped the Innocence Project win exonerations in bite mark cases gone wrong by re-examining evidence and testifying for the wrongfully convicted.

But a once-cooperative relationship has turned adversarial ever since the Innocence Project began trying to get bite mark evidence thrown entirely out of courtrooms, while at the same time using it to help win exonerations.

"They turn a blind eye to the good side of bite mark analysis," Golden told the AP.

One example is a case Wright worked on in 1998. He analyzed the bite marks of the only three people who were in an Ohio home when 17-day-old Legacy Fawcett was found dead in her crib. Of the three, two sets of teeth could not have made the bite marks, Wright testified; only the teeth of the mother's boyfriend could have. The boyfriend was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served eight years in prison.

Without the bite mark, Wright said, the wrong person might have been convicted or the man responsible could have gone free, or both.

"Bite mark evidence can be too important not to be useful," Wright said. "You can't just throw it away."

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NSA: The finder and keeper of countless US secrets

NSA: The finder and keeper of countless US secrets

Associated PressBy KIMBERLY DOZIER | Associated Press – Sun, Jun 9, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — An email, a telephone call or even the murmur of a conversation captured by the vibration of a window — they're all part of the data that can be swept up by the sophisticated machinery of the National Security Agency.

Its job is to use the world's most cutting edge supercomputers and arguably the largest database storage sites to crunch and sift through immense amounts of data. The information analyzed might be stolen from a foreign official's laptop by a CIA officer overseas, intercepted by a Navy spy plane flying off the Chinese coast, or, as Americans found out this past week, gathered from U.S. phone records.

Code-breakers at the Fort Meade, Md.-based NSA use software to search for keywords in the emails or patterns in the phone numbers that might link known terrorist targets with possible new suspects. They farm out that information to the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and to law enforcement, depending on who has the right to access which type of information, acting as gatekeeper, and they say, guardian of the nation's civil liberties as well as its security.

The super-secret agency is under the spotlight after last week's revelations of two surveillance programs. One involves the sweeping collection of hundreds of millions of phone records of U.S. customers. The second collects the audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas — and probably some Americans in the process — who use major Internet companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

NSA was founded in 1952. Only years later was the NSA publicly acknowledged, which explains its nickname, "No Such Agency."

According to its website, NSA is not allowed to spy on Americans. It is supposed to use its formidable technology to "gather information that America's adversaries wish to keep secret," and to "protect America's vital national security information and systems from theft or damage by others," as well as enabling "network warfare, a military operation," that includes offensive cyberoperations against U.S. adversaries.

The agency also includes the Central Security Service, the military arm of code-breakers who work jointly with the agency. The two services have their headquarters on a compound that's technically part of Fort Meade, though it's slightly set apart from the 5,000-acre Army base.

Visible from a main highway, the tightly guarded compound requires the highest of clearances to enter and is equipped with electronic means to ward off an attack by hackers.

Other NSA facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado and Hawaii duplicate much of the headquarters' brain and computer power in case a terrorist attack takes out the main location, though each one focuses on a different part of the globe.

A new million-square-foot storage facility in Salt Lake City will give the agency untold additional capacity to store the massive amounts of data it collects, as well as adding to its analytical capability.

"NSA is the elephant of the U.S. intelligence community, the biggest organization by far with the most capability and (literally) the most memory," said former senior CIA official Bruce Riedel, who now runs the Brookings Intelligence Project.

NSA's experts include mathematicians and cryptologists, a term that means everything from breaking codes to learning and translating multiple foreign languages. There also are computer hackers who engage in offensive attacks like the one the U.S. and Israel are widely believed to have been part of, planting the Stuxnet virus into Iranian nuclear hardware, damaging Iran's nuclear development program in 2010.

Then there are "siginters," the signals intelligence experts who go to war zones to help U.S. troops break through encrypted enemy communications or work with a CIA station chief abroad, helping tap into a foreign country's phone or computer lines.

"More times than we can count, we've made history, without history even knowing we were there," reads a quote on the NSA's Web page by the current director, Gen. Keith Alexander.

NSA workers are notoriously secretive. They're known for keeping their families in the dark about what they do, including their hunt for terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. NSA code-breakers were an essential part of the team that tracked down bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan in 2011.

Their mission tracking al-Qaida and related terrorist groups continues, with NSA analysts and operators sent out to every conflict zone and overseas U.S. post, in addition to surveillance and analysis conducted at headquarters outside Washington.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said in a statement Saturday that the NSA's programs do not target U.S. citizens. But last week's revelations show that the NSA is allowed to gather U.S. phone calls and emails and to sift through them for information leading to terrorist suspects, as long as a judge signs off. Lawmakers are questioning the scope of the information gathered, and how long and how much of it is kept.

"Does that data all have to be held by the government?" asked Sen. Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

King, a Maine independent, was briefed on the program this past week, but would not discuss how long the government holds on to the phone records. "I don't think there is evidence of abuse, but I think the program can be changed to be structured with less levels of intrusion on the privacy of Americans," he said.

While NSA has deferred any public comment to Clapper, it offered an internal article written by director of compliance John DeLong, who's is in charge of making sure NSA protects Americans' privacy.

DeLong writes that privacy protections are being written into the technology that sifts the information, "which allows us to augment — not wholly replace — human safeguards." The NSA also uses "technology to record and review our activities. ... Sometimes, where appropriate, we even embed legal and policy guidance directly into our IT architecture."

What that means is that the data sifting is mostly done not by humans, but by computers, following complicated algorithms telling them what to look for and who has a right to see it.

"Through software, you can search for key words and key phrases linking a communication to a particular group or individual that would fire it off to individual agencies that have interest in it," just like Amazon or Google scans millions of emails and purchases to track consumer preferences, explained Ronald Marks, a former CIA official and author of "Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World."

Detailed algorithms try to determine whether something is U.S. citizen-related or not. "It shows analysts, 'we've got a US citizen here, so we've got to be careful with it,'" he said.

Another way counterterrorist officials try to protect U.S. citizens is through centers where operators from the military, CIA, NSA, FBI, Treasury and others sit side by side. When one comes across information that his or her agency is not supposed to access, it's turned over to someone in the center who's authorized to see it.

But the process isn't perfect, and sometimes what should be private information reaches agencies not authorized to see it.

"When information gets sent to the CIA that shouldn't, it gets destroyed, and a note sent back to NSA saying, 'You shouldn't have sent that,'" Marks said. "Mistakes get made, but my own experience on the inside of it is, they tend to be really careful about it."

Analysts need that level of detail because they are no longer looking for large networks, but small cells or individuals that carry out "lone wolf" attacks, as the Boston Marathon bombing is thought to have been.

"If we are going to fight a war or low intensity conflict that has gone down to the level of individual attacks by cells one or two people, if you are looking for total risk management, this is the kind of thing you're going to have to do," Marks said.

___

Follow Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier

___

Online:

NSA: http://www.nsa.gov/

License plate cameras track millions of Americans

License plate cameras track millions of Americans

By Craig Timberg, Wednesday, July 17, 7:00 AM

The spread of cheap, powerful cameras capable of reading license plates has allowed police to build databases on the movements of millions of Americans over months or even years, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released Wednesday.

The license-plate readers, which police typically mount along major roadways or on the backs of cruisers, can identify vehicles almost instantly and compare them against “hot lists” of cars that have been stolen or involved in crimes. Do they have your photo?

In 26 states, police often can find out who you are based on your facial image, even if you've never been arrested for any crime.

Users of the enterprise cloud software giant will add the ability for sales teams to coach, motivate, and reward their fellow workers.

But the systems collect records on every license plate they encounter — whether or not they are on hot lists — meaning time and location data are gathered in databases that can be searched by police. Some departments purge information after a few weeks, some after a few months and some never, said the report, which warns that such data could be abused by authorities, and chill freedom of speech and association.

“Using them to develop vast troves of information on where Americans travel is not an appropriate use,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney at the ACLU and one of the authors of the report, “You are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements.”

The use of license-plate readers is common in the Washington area, where concerns about terrorism have fueled major investments in the equipment, with much of the money coming from federal grants. Agreements among departments and jurisdictions allow sharing of the location information, with data typically retained for at least a year.

Such details, say police and law enforcement experts, can help investigators reconstruct suspects’ movements before and after armed robberies, auto thefts and other crimes. Departments typically require that information be used only for law enforcement purposes and require audits designed to detect abuse.

“We’d like to be able to keep the data as long as possible, because it does provide a rich and enduring data set for investigations down the line,” said David J. Roberts, senior program manager for the Technology Center of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

But the ACLU argues that data collection by most police departments is unnecessarily broad. In an analysis of data collected in Maryland, the report found that license-plate readers recorded the locations of vehicle plates 85 million times in 2012.

Based on a partial-year analysis of that data, the ACLU found that about one in 500 plates registered hits. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it said, the alleged offenses were minor, involving lapsed registrations or failures to comply with the state’s emission-control program.

For each million plates read in Maryland, 47 were associated with serious crimes, such as a stolen vehicle or a wanted person, the report said. Statistics collected by the ACLU in several other jurisdictions around the country also found hit rates far below 1 percent of license plates read.

Maryland officials have defended their program, which collects data from departments across the state in a fusion center, which shares intelligence among federal, state and local agencies. In a recent three-month period, state officials said, license-plate readers contributed to 860 serious traffic citations and the apprehension of 180 people for crimes including stolen autos or license plates.

The center deletes the data one year after they are collected, in what officials said was a compromise between investigative needs and privacy rights.

“We don’t want to retain more information . . . than is necessary,” said Harvey Eisenberg, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversees Maryland’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council. “You strike the balance, because people are legitimately concerned.”

The license-plate readers are also widely used in Northern Virginia and the District, which has them mounted on many of the major roadways entering and exiting the city. A D.C. police spokeswoman did not immediately comment on the ACLU report.

Private companies also are using license-plate-reading technology to build databases, typically to help in repossessing cars.

License plate readers: A useful tool for police comes with privacy concerns

License plate readers: A useful tool for police comes with privacy concerns

By Allison Klein and Josh White, Published: November 19, 2011 E-mail the writers

An armed robber burst into a Northeast Washington market, scuffled with the cashier, and then shot him and the clerk’s father, who also owned the store. The killer sped off in a silver Pontiac, but a witness was able to write down the license plate number.

Police figured out the name of the suspect very quickly. But locating and arresting him took a little-known investigative tool: a vast system that tracks the comings and goings of anyone driving around the District.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.

Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

“It never stops,” said Capt. Kevin Reardon, who runs Arlington County’s plate reader program. “It just gobbles up tag information. One of the big questions is, what do we do with the information?”

Police departments are grappling with how long to store the information and how to balance privacy concerns against the value the data provide to investigators. The data are kept for three years in the District, two years in Alexandria, a year in Prince George’s County and a Maryland state database, and about a month in many other suburban areas.

“That’s quite a large database of innocent people’s comings and goings,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program. “The government has no business collecting that kind of information on people without a warrant.”

But police say the tag readers can give them a critical jump on a child abductor, information about when a vehicle left — or entered — a crime scene, and the ability to quickly identify a suspected terrorist’s vehicle as it speeds down the highway, perhaps to an intended target.

Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.

“It’s a perfect example of how they’d be useful,” said Lt. T.J. Rogers, who is responsible for the 26 tag readers maintained by the Fairfax County police. “We see a lot of potential in it.”

The plate readers are different from red-light or speed cameras, which issue traffic tickets and are tools for deterrence and enforcement. The readers are an investigative tool, capturing a picture of every license plate that passes by and instantly analyzing them against a database filled with cars wanted by police.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Police can also plug any license plate number into the database and, as long as it passed a camera, determine where that vehicle has been and when. Detectives also can enter a be-on-the-lookout into the database, and the moment that license plate passes a detector, they get an alert.

It’s that precision and the growing ubiquity of the technology that has libertarians worried. In Northern Virginia recently, a man reported his wife missing, prompting police to enter her plate number into the system.

They got a hit at an apartment complex, and when they got there, officers spotted her car and a note on her windshield that said, in essence, “Don’t tow, I’m visiting apartment 3C.” Officers knocked on the door of that apartment, and she came out of the bedroom. They advised her to call her husband.

A new tool in the arsenal

Even though they are relatively new, the tag readers, which cost about $20,000 each, are now as widely used as other high-tech tools police employ to prevent and solve crimes, including surveillance cameras, gunshot recognition sensors and mobile finger­print scanners.

License plate readers can capture numbers across four lanes of traffic on cars zooming up to 150 mph.

“The new technology makes our job a lot easier and the bad guys’ job a lot harder,” said D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

The technology first was used by the postal service to sort letters. Units consist of two cameras — one that snaps digital photographs and another that uses an optical infrared sensor to decipher the numbers and letters. The camera captures a color image of the vehicle while the sensor “reads” the license plate and transfers the data to a computer.

When stored over time, the collected data can be used instantaneously or can help with complex analysis, such as whether a car appears to have been followed by another car or if cars are traveling in a convoy.

Police also have begun using them as a tool to prevent crime. By positioning them in nightclub parking lots, for example, police can collect information about who is there. If members of rival gangs appear at a club, police can send patrol cars there to squelch any flare-ups before they turn violent. After a crime, police can gather a list of potential witnesses in seconds.

“It’s such a valuable tool, it’s hard not to jump on it and explore all the things it can do for law enforcement,” said Kevin Davis, assistant chief of police in Prince George’s County.

The readers have been used across the country for several years, but the program is far more sophisticated in the Washington region. The District has 73 readers; 38 of them sit stationary and the rest are attached to police cars. D.C. officials say every police car will have one some day.

The District’s license plate cameras gather more than a million data points a month, and officers make an average of an arrest a day directly from the plate readers, said Tom Wilkins, executive director of the D.C. police department’s intelligence fusion division, which oversees the plate reader program. Between June and September, police found 51 stolen cars using the technology.

Police do not publicly disclose the locations of the readers. And while D.C. law requires that the footage on crime surveillance cameras be deleted after 10 days unless there’s an investigative reason to keep it, there are no laws governing how or when Washington area police can use the tag reader technology. The only rule is that it be used for law enforcement purposes.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists. Click Here to View Full Graphic Story

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

“That’s typical with any emerging technology,” Wilkins said. “Even though it’s a tool we’ve had for five years, as it becomes more apparent and widely used and more relied upon, people will begin to scrutinize it.”

Legal concerns

Such scrutiny is happening now at the U.S. Supreme Court with a related technology: GPS surveillance. At issue is whether police can track an individual vehicle with an attached GPS device.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who has been closely watching the Supreme Court case, said the license plate technology probably would pass constitutional muster because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on public streets.

But, Kerr said, the technology’s silent expansion has allowed the government to know things it couldn’t possibly know before and that the use of such massive amounts of data needs safeguards.

“It’s big brother, and the question is, is it big brother we want, or big brother that we don’t want?” Kerr said. “This technology could be used for good and it could be used for bad. I think we need a conversation about whether and how this technology is used. Who gets the information and when? How long before the information is deleted? All those questions need scrutiny.”

Should someone access the database for something other than a criminal investigation, they could track people doing legal but private things. Having a comprehensive database could mean government access to information about who attended a political event, visited a medical clinic, or went to Alcoholics Anonymous or Planned Parenthood.

Maryland and Virginia police departments are expanding their tag reader programs and by the end of the year expect to have every major entry and exit point to the District covered.

“We’re putting fixed sites up in the capital area,” said Sgt. Julio Valcarcel, who runs the Maryland State Police’s program, which now has 19 mobile units and one fixed unit along a major highway, capturing roughly 27 million reads per year. “Several sites are going online over the winter.”

Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader’s computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it.

A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications.

There also has been scant legal precedent. In Takoma Park, police have two tag readers that they have been using for two years. Police Chief Ronald A. Ricucci said he was amazed at how quickly the units could find stolen cars. When his department first got them, he looked around at other departments to see what kind of rules and regulations they had.

“There wasn’t much,” Ricucci said. “A lot of people were using them and didn’t have policies on them yet.”

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Finding stolen cars faster

The technology first came to the Washington region in 2004 as a pilot program. During an early test, members of the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement Unit recovered eight cars, found 12 stolen license plates and made three arrests in a single shift. Prince George’s police bought several units to help combat the county’s crippling car theft and carjacking problem. It worked.

“We recover cars very quickly now. In previous times that was not the case,” said Prince George’s Capt. Edward Davey, who is in charge of the county’s program. “Before, they’d be dumped on the side of the road somewhere for a while.”

Now Prince George’s has 45 units and is likely to get more soon.

“The more we use them, the more we realize there’s a whole lot more on the investigative end of them,” Davey said. “We are starting to evolve. Investigators are starting to realize how to use them.”

Arlington police cars equipped with the readers regularly drive through the parking garage at the Pentagon City mall looking for stolen cars, checking hundreds of them in a matter of minutes as they cruise up and down the aisles. In Prince William County, where there are 12 mobile readers, the units have been used to locate missing people and recover stolen cars.

Unlike in the District, in most suburban jurisdictions, the units are only attached to police cars on patrol, and there aren’t enough of them to create a comprehensive net.

Virginia State Police have 42 units for the entire state, most of them focused on Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Tidewater area, and as of now have no fixed locations. There is also no central database, so each unit collects information on its own and compares it against a daily download of wanted vehicles from the FBI and the state.

But the state police are looking into fixed locations that could capture as many as 100 times more vehicles, 24 hours a day, with the potential to blanket the interstates.

“Now, we’re not getting everything — we’re fishing,” said Sgt. Robert Alessi, a 23-year veteran who runs the state police’s program. “Fixed cameras will help us use a net instead of one fishing pole with one line in the water waiting to get a nibble.”

Beyond the technology’s ability to track suspects and non-criminals alike, it has expanded beyond police work. Tax collectors in Arlington bought their own units and use the readers to help collect money owed to the county. Chesterfield County, in Virginia, uses a reader it purchased to collect millions of dollars in delinquent car taxes each year, comparing the cars on the road against the tax rolls.

Police across the region say that they are careful with the information and that they are entrusted with many pieces of sensitive information about citizens, including arrest records and Social Security numbers.

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not driving a stolen car, you’re not committing a crime,” Alessi said, “then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Previous articles on the American War Machine.

More articles on the American War Machine.