Homeless in Arizona

Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeal funding questioned

Don't count on it. It's about politics, not good government or human rights.

Sure Sheriff Joe is a thug that would make Hitler or Stalin proud, but despite that he is THE most popular politician in Arizona and it is highly unlikely that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will shut off his funding for that reason.

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeal funding questioned

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Jun 8, 2013 8:35 PM

Dozens of Latino legislators and anti-Sheriff Joe Arpaio demonstrators are calling on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to pick a side in a public ultimatum: Deny funding the sheriff’s appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that his office engaged in racial profiling, or concede that the supervisors condone racial profiling.

But the board refused to take a public stance on the issue last week, with the majority of supervisors saying the issue is not so black-and-white, and there are outstanding questions over legalities and logistics of the appeals process.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a ruling late last month that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos. In his 142-page ruling on Melendres vs. Arpaio, Snow outlined the constitutional violations sheriff’s deputies committed when they targeted Latino drivers and detained them on the side of the road longer than other drivers. Arpaio’s attorney, Tim Casey, denied Snow’s findings and said he would appeal the ruling.

Casey said the sheriff should determine how the case moves forward as the elected official named in the lawsuit.

“It is my understanding that, because this case does not involve a claim for money damages and only involves a claim for declaratory and injunctive relief that relate to the operations of MCSO, that the elected sheriff as policymaker for MCSO and its operations determines whether to appeal,” Casey said.

Maricopa County was named in the 2007 lawsuit, but administrators made the decision in 2009 to sever the county from the case. State statutes dictating the powers and duties of elected officers give the Board of Supervisors the authority to “direct and control the prosecution and defense of all actions to which the county is a party.”

The decision to remove the county from the litigation also could remove the board’s authority to have a say in the litigation, according to one reading of the statute, but there is not widespread agreement.

The board last Monday held a closed-door meeting on the ruling with Casey and Deputy County Attorney Tom Liddy. It was the first of what is expected to be a series of private board meetings on the issue. State law allows public bodies to meet behind closed doors in limited circumstances, such as to obtain legal advice by invoking attorney-client privilege.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery is reviewing whether, or how much, the board has a say in a potential appeals process.

The newly elected supervisors have wanted to resolve outstanding legal cases involving conflict among elected offices from recent years of political fights. In the past five months, the board settled three long-standing lawsuits involving the Sheriff’s Office and former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, agreeing to pay $3 million in an effort to move past lingering legal conflicts.

The Melendres case is the first major legal case that would test the new supervisors’ political leadership and how they would shape the course of a high-profile case that has brought national attention to county leaders.

A group of 33 Latino legislators from the House and the Senate wrote a letter urging the board not to fund the appeal of Snow’s ruling and to instead implement a remediation plan. The legislators proposed their own remediation plan for the board to consider.

To date, Maricopa County has spent $1,025,241 to defend Arpaio in the Melendres case.

The board is not a party to the lawsuit, so it is unclear how much of a say it has on whether to appeal. But the board oversees the budget and typically makes the final funding decisions for settlements and appeals in lawsuits against the county and elected officials.

“As such, you play an important role in mending the rift in this county that was caused by the illegal racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office,” legislators wrote in the joint letter.

About two dozen Arpaio protesters descended on last week’s board meetings, calling on supervisors to pick a side: Latinos or the sheriff. At times, the protesters’ demands became heated, leading board Chairman Andy Kunasek to forcefully ask them to maintain a civil discussion.

Kunasek said while he is not happy about paying for lawsuits the board was not named in, it is too early in the process to say whether he would support an appeal, and the board has not yet explored its options.

“(They’re) still ongoing matters, and the time for consideration isn’t even here yet,” Kunasek said.

While the sheriff has rights as an independently elected county official, Kunasek said the board would need, and want, to have a say in some part of the decision to appeal Snow’s ruling. Supervisors would need to review which, if any, parts of Snow’s ruling they are comfortable with appealing, he said.

Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, an Arpaio critic and the lone Democrat on the five-member board, opposed an appeal. She said the county would be better off spending the money on implementing remedies and monitoring the Sheriff’s Office. After reading the ruling, Wilcox said she believed there is no room to appeal.

“I really think we should move on. I think it would be a waste of taxpayer money to continue this battle,” Wilcox said. “An appeal, in my eyes, is that we support the racial profiling practices that went on.”

Wilcox said even if Arpaio were to appeal, she believes the board should deny funding and let Arpaio figure out an alternative way to pay for it that would not affect his budget.

Supervisors Denny Barney and Clint Hickman said it is too early to decide whether to appeal. Supervisor Steve Chucri declined to comment, saying that he believes he should reserve his thoughts for the board’s private meetings with attorneys for now and that the case can have implications on other pending litigation.

Hickman said he considers it the board’s job to ask questions of attorneys and find out its role in the appeals process.

“I do know that it’s up to the sheriff’s department to decide to appeal or not,” Hickman said. “They’re the ones that were involved in this lawsuit, but then we need to see what the further aspects of that are.”

Barney said he does not believe paying for an appeal would mean the board is wasting taxpayer money. Rather, the board would agree on and fund an appeal if it believes there are points in Snow’s ruling that need to be addressed so that county leaders can better understand legal constraints on future operations of the Sheriff’s and County Attorney’s offices within their mandated public-safety duties.

“The reality is, the only reason we would fund the appeal is if we felt like there was an actual point of law that needs to be addressed, if there’s an issue that relates to the police power of a municipality or a jurisdiction like the county — a subdivision of the state,” Barney said. “We’re going to spend money to do that.”

Republic reporter JJ Hensley contributed to this article.

Silence means your guilty??? - Supremes???

I think this case is a good example why you should always take the 5th and tell the police you don't want to talk to them PERIOD!!!!

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In Miranda case, Supreme Court rules on the limits of silence

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

June 17, 2013, 8:11 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Crime suspects need to speak up if they want to invoke their legal right to remain silent, the Supreme Court said Monday in a ruling that highlights the limited reach of the famous Miranda decision.

The 5-4 ruling upheld the murder conviction of a Texas man who bit his lip and sat silently when a police officer asked him about the shotgun shells that were found at the scene of a double slaying. They had been traced to the suspect's shotgun.

At his trial, prosecutors pointed to the defendant's silence as evidence of his guilt. In affirming the conviction of Genovevo Salinas, the court's majority admitted that some suspects might think they had a right to say nothing.

"Popular misconceptions notwithstanding," the Constitution "does not establish an unqualified 'right to remain silent,'" said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Rather, he said, the 5th Amendment says no one may be "compelled in any criminal case to be witness against himself." Since the Miranda decision in 1966, the court has said police must warn suspects of their rights when they are taken into custody.

But the Miranda decision covers only suspects who are held in custody and are not free to leave.

In the Texas case, Salinas was asked to come to the police station, and he agreed to do so. "All agree that the interview was noncustodial," Alito said, so the police were not required to read him his rights under the Miranda decision.

And although Salinas had a qualified right to remain silent under the 5th Amendment, a suspect must invoke his rights and say he wants to remain silent, the court ruled Monday.

Salinas "alone knew why he did not answer the officer's question, and it was therefore his burden to make a timely assertion of the privilege," Alito said.

The decision is consistent with the high court's grudging approach to the Miranda decision and related 5th Amendment questions over recent decades. The court's conservative-leaning justices have not been willing to overturn the Miranda precedent, but they have repeatedly narrowed its scope.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted with Alito to uphold the conviction in Salinas vs. Texas.

Alito noted that during a trial, defendants may refuse to testify, and prosecutors may not use their silence in court as evidence against them, citing the court's 1965 ruling in Griffin vs. California. In a concurring opinion, Thomas and Scalia said the Griffin case was mistaken and should be overruled.

Meanwhile, in another case, Thomas spoke for himself and four liberal justices to require a jury to find a defendant guilty of every facet of a crime that could lead to a mandatory prison term.

In Alleyne vs. United States, the court ruled that before a judge imposes an extra mandatory prison term on a defendant for conduct such as brandishing a firearm, a jury must find the defendant guilty of that offense. To do otherwise violates the defendant's basic right to a jury trial with his guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt, Thomas said.

Thomas has long maintained that juries, not judges, must decide whether a defendant is guilty of all the elements of a crime that warrant extra punishment. And in a rare show of unity with the court's more liberal members, he overruled earlier decisions that left this power in the hands of a judge.

In the case before the court, Allen Alleyne was given four years in prison for helping his girlfriend rob the manager of a convenience store. Following the prosecution's recommendation, the judge gave him an extra seven years for having brandished a firearm. But Alleyne said he had not brandished a gun, and the jury had not convicted him of that extra offense.

The 5-4 ruling overturns the extra seven-year term. The dissenters faulted the majority for overruling a precedent from 2002 that allowed judges to make such decisions.

david.savage@latimes.com

Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure

Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure

Posted: Sunday, June 16, 2013 8:41 am

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.

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 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.

But 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. But those interviews, 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 story line 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.

___

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.

But 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 terrorist attacks, 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 U.S. 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 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."

___

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. Though 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. Though 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 last year. 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 making 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 slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both 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. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

"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 whether 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. But 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 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 remains a closely guarded secret.

___

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 explained 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 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.

State photo-ID databases become troves for police

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State photo-ID databases become troves for police

Written by Craig Timberg Ellen Nakashima

Published: June 16

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The faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases that state officials assembled to prevent driver’s-license fraud but that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations.

The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial-recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens.

The most widely used systems were honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as soldiers sought to identify insurgents. The increasingly widespread deployment of the technology in the United States has helped police find murderers, bank robbers and drug dealers, many of whom leave behind images on surveillance videos or social-media sites that can be compared against official photo databases.

But law enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities.

Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face.

“Where is government going to go with that years from now?” said Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann, a conservative Republican who has fought the creation of such systems there. “Here your driver’s license essentially becomes a national ID card.”

Facial-recognition technology is part of a new generation of biometric tools that once were the stuff of science fiction but are increasingly used by authorities around the nation and the world. Though not yet as reliable as fingerprints, these technologies can help determine identity through individual variations in irises, skin textures, vein patterns, palm prints and a person’s gait while walking.

The Supreme Court’s approval this month of DNA collection during arrests coincides with rising use of that technology as well, with suspects in some cases submitting to tests that put their genetic details in official data­bases, even if they are never convicted of a crime.

Facial-recognition systems are more pervasive and can be deployed remotely, without subjects knowing that their faces have been captured. Today’s driver’s- license databases, which also include millions of images of people who get non-driver ID cards to open bank accounts or board airplanes, typically were made available for police searches with little public notice.

Thirty-seven states now use ­facial-recognition technology in their driver’s-license registries, a Washington Post review found. At least 26 of those allow state, local or federal law enforcement agencies to search — or request searches — of photo databases in an attempt to learn the identities of people considered relevant to investigations.

“This is a tool to benefit law enforcement, not to violate your privacy rights,” said Scott McCallum, head of the facial-recognition unit in Pinellas County, Fla., which has built one of the nation’s most advanced systems.

The technology produces investigative leads, not definitive identifications. But research efforts are focused on pushing the software to the point where it can reliably produce the names of people in the time it takes them to walk by a video camera. This already works in controlled, well-lit settings when the database of potential matches is relatively small. Most experts expect those limitations to be surmounted over the next few years.

That prospect has sparked fears that the databases authorities are building could someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas. Whatever the security benefits — especially at a time when terrorism remains a serious threat — the mass accumulation of location data on individuals could chill free speech or the right to assemble, civil libertarians say.

“As a society, do we want to have total surveillance? Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are . . . without any immediate probable cause?” asked Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied government facial databases. “A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.”

A facial ‘template'

Scott McCallum, systems analyst and co-administrator of the facial-recognition program for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida, discusses aspects of one of the most advanced facial recognition programs used for law enforcement in the country.

Facial-recognition systems analyze a person’s features — such as the shape of eyes, the curl of earlobes, the width of noses — to produce a digital “template” that can be quickly compared with other faces in a database.

The images must be reasonably clear, though newer software allows technicians to sharpen blurry images, bolster faint lighting or make a three-dimensional model of a face that can be rotated to ease comparisons against pictures taken from odd angles.

For the state officials issuing driver’s licenses, the technology has been effective at detecting fraud. As millions of images are compared, the software typically reveals the identities of hundreds or thousands of people who may have more than one driver’s license.

When searches are made for criminal investigations, typically a photo called a “probe” is compared against existing images in a database. The analytical software returns a selection of potential matches, though their accuracy can vary dramatically. A probe image of a middle-aged white man, for example, could produce a possible match with a 20-something African American woman with similarly shaped eyes and lips. Many systems include filters that allow searchers to specify race, sex and a range of possible ages for a suspect.

“It’s a fine line where you need to protect the rights of the citizens, but you also are protecting the right of citizens when you ferret out crime,” said Anthony J. Silva, administrator of Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles and a former town police chief.

Establishing identity, Silva said, is essential to effective police work: “I can’t tell you how many times I was handed fraudulent documents. And when you are on the street at 3 a.m., who do you call?”

Pennsylvania’s Justice Network, which has allowed police anywhere in the state to compare a facial image with mug-shot databases, has become a key in­vestigative tool, officials said, and last month it added access to 34 million driver’s-license photos. (Some residents have several images, taken over years.)

A detective in Carlisle, Pa., attempting to learn the real name of a suspect known on the street as “Buddha the Shoota” compared a Facebook page picturing the man with the mug-shot database and got a promising lead.

“Facebook is a great source for us,” said Detective Daniel Freedman, who can do facial searches from his department-issued smartphone. “He was surprised when we walked in and said, ‘How you doin’, Buddha?’  ”

He said the suspect responded, “How you know that?” — to which Freedman replied simply, “We’re the police.”

Safeguards and trends

There typically is little concern when facial-recognition systems relying on criminal databases help identify suspects in narrowly targeted investigations. But searches against images of citizens from driver’s licenses or passports, as opposed to mug shots of prisoners, raise more complex legal questions.

Police typically need only to assert a law enforcement purpose for facial searches, whether they be of suspects or potential witnesses to crimes. Civil libertarians worry that this can lead to broadly defined identity sweeps. Already many common but technically illegal activities — blocking a sidewalk, cycling at night without a light or walking a dog without a leash — can trigger police stops and requests for identification, they say.

“The potential for abuse of this technology is such that we have to make sure we put in place the right safeguards to prevent misuse,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “We also need to make sure the government is as transparent as possible in order to give the American people confidence it’s using this technology appropriately.”

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)

A few states, including Washington, Oregon and Minnesota, have legal barriers to police accessing facial-recognition technology in driver’s-license registries. New Hampshire’s legislature passed a law prohibiting ­motor vehicle officials from collecting any biometric data.

But the broader trend is toward more sophisticated databases with more expansive access. The current version of the Senate’s immigration bill would dramatically expand an electronic photo-verification system, probably relying on access to driver’s-license registries.

Montana has a facial-recognition system to help prevent fraud in its driver’s-license registry, but officials are still debating whether to allow police any kind of access.

“I can see it’s an amazingly powerful tool. It has a lot of possibilities,” said Brenda Nordlund, the administrator of the Motor Vehicle Division there. “I don’t know if that’s what citizens expect when they come in and get their driver’s-license pictures taken.”

There are substantial variations in how states allow police searches of their driver’s-license databases. Some allow only licensing-agency officials to conduct the actual searches. Others let police do searches themselves, but only from a headquarters office. And still others have made the technology available to almost any officer willing to get trained.

The District of Columbia has facial-recognition technology for its driver’s-license registry but does not permit law enforcement searches, spokeswoman Vanessa Newton said. Virginia motor vehicle officials have run a pilot program experimenting with facial-recognition technology but have not made a decision on whether police will have access to such a system if it is eventually installed, spokeswoman Sunni Brown said. Maryland does not use such technology in its driver’s-license registry.

Police long have had access to some driver’s-license information — including photographs — when they are investigating criminal suspects whose names they know. But facial-recognition technology has allowed police working from a photo of an unknown person to search for a name.

Las Vegas police, for example, called on authorities two states away in Nebraska for help solving a homicide. Based on a tip, investigators had a page from a social-media site featuring the image of an unknown suspect; the tipster said the woman in the photo had lived in Nebraska. The facial-recognition software produced a hit on a driver’s license there, cracking open the case.

“That picture hung on our wall for a long time,” said Betty Johnson, vehicle services administrator in Nebraska. “We are pretty darn proud of that one.”

Who has the databases?

A single private contractor, MorphoTrust USA, which is based in a suburban Boston office park but is owned by French industrial conglomerate Safran, dominates the field of government facial- recognition technology systems. Its software operates in systems for the State Department, the FBI and the Defense Department. Most facial-recognition systems installed in driver’s-license registries use the company’s technology, it says.

The largest facial database belongs to the State Department and includes about 230 million searchable images, split almost equally between foreigners who apply for visas and U.S. citizens who hold passports. Access for police investigations, though, is more limited than with state driver’s-license databases.

The FBI’s own facial-recognition database has about 15 million criminal mug shots. Bureau officials are pushing to expand that by tens of millions more by encouraging states to upload their criminal justice photos into the national system. The FBI does not collect driver’s-license images, but the bureau has developed access to state systems that do.

That effort began with“Project Facemask,” which compared images of federal suspects and fugitives against photos in North Carolina’s driver’s-license registry, helping identify a double-homicide suspect who had changed his name and moved to that state from California. The FBI now has agreements giving access to driver’s-license databases in 10 states for investigative purposes. Many motor vehicle officials say they also run searches for federal agents who request them, typically through “fusion centers” that ease the sharing of information among state, local and federal authorities.

Depending on the importance of the case, federal agents can potentially tap facial databases held by driver’s-license registries, state criminal justice systems, the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department, which has several million searchable faces, mostly Afghans and Iraqi men. Together these amount to an estimated 400 million facial images in government hands, though the rules on access to each database vary. (Often an individual is pictured in more than one database, or even more than once in a single one.)

Federal investigators searched several facial databases in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in April, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But the images were not clear enough to produce hits, even though both of the alleged bombers had driver’s licenses in Massachusetts, a state that uses facial-recognition technology.

Yet as facial databases grow and video cameras become more prevalent and powerful, such searches will become more effective, experts say.

“More and more, what you’re going to see is criminals and other people whose images were taken over the years are digitized, [and] put into these databases, and incidents like Boston will be easier to solve,” said James Albers, senior vice president for government operations for MorphoTrust USA.

Jake Ruberto, left, and and Scott McCallum, co-administrators of the facial-recognition program run by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. Jake Ruberto, left, and and Scott McCallum, co-administrators of the facial-recognition program run by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Dressback has been using facial-recognition software for more than six years. Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Dressback has been using facial-recognition software for more than six years. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

Pinellas County

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office says its facial-recognition unit conducts 5,000 searches a month and has assisted in nearly 1,000 arrests since 2004. A bulletin board in the office is lined with success stories: A teenage boy who was sending lewd messages to young girls through multiple Facebook accounts was identified, as was a suicide victim and an alleged bank robber — whose scowling image was captured by the branch’s surveillance camera.

In another case, a man reported a stolen computer but then noticed that an online photo album he long had maintained was automatically uploading new snapshots of a couple he did not recognize. When the sheriff’s office ran a search, the pictures matched faces in both the mug-shot and driver’s-license data­bases. The couple soon fingered an acquaintance who was arrested for stealing the computer and then selling it to them.

The sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes St. Petersburg and its suburbs, built its facial-recognition system over more than a decade, relying for most of that time on mug shots collected at prisons and police booking centers across the state.

The system now has partnerships with the sheriff’s offices in more than half of Florida’s counties and many other government agencies. This year the unit added the ability to search more than 20 million driver’s-license records, bringing the number of facial images in the database to 30 million, officials say.

The Pinellas County system also has access to 250,000 mug shots — though not driver’s-license images — from the Northern Virginia Regional Identification System, a joint project of Washington area jurisdictions, including some Maryland counties.

Pinellas Deputy Jeremy Dressback, a community policing officer, uses access from the laptop in his patrol car to keep track of the people he encounters on a dingy country stretch notorious for prostitution, drugs and seedy motels.

On a recent patrol, when a scruffy-looking man he did not recognize walked up to one of the motels, Dressback stopped him on suspicion of trespassing and asked for identification. The man did not have a driver’s license but gave his name — James A. Shepherd, age 33, from Kentucky — and said he was staying at the motel with his girlfriend.

Dressback pulled out a digital camera, asked permission to take a picture and then snapped a shot. When the image did not match anyone in the facial-recognition system, Dressback downloaded the picture to his laptop computer and attached it to a field report on Shepherd as a “suspicious person.”

Shepherd, who said he was a roofer returning from work, grumbled at the intrusion, even though he had agreed to have his picture taken. “I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database,” Shepherd said before adding, “But I have been arrested quite a few times.”

When his girlfriend walked by moments later — they were indeed staying at the motel — Shepherd directed her toward their room.

“Get out of here,” he said. “You’ll be in his database in 10 seconds.”

Brook Silva-Braga contributed to this report.

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Feds want what Apple Computer has on you!!!

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Apple received more than 4,000 government requests for customer data over six months

By Hayley Tsukayama, Updated: Monday, June 17, 5:48 AM E-mail the writer

Apple has released information on how many data requests it receives from U.S. law enforcement, as it joins Facebook, Microsoft and others in pushing for looser restrictions on what tech companies can share with their customers.

The effort comes in the wake of reports that the National Security Administration has a wide-ranging surveillance program that analyzes consumer information from companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

According to the statement, Apple said it has recently been authorized to reveal that it has received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from federal, state and local U.S. authorities for customer data between Dec. 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Those requests, the company said affected between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. Apple said the company’s legal team reviews each request to see if it is appropriate.

“We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve,” a statement on the company’s Web site says.

The statement does not explicitly mention how many of these requests have been made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or by the NSA. The company said the figures dealt specifically with “requests we receive related to national security.” Apple did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on that point.

The most common type of request, Apple said, comes from local authorities “investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple’s statements follows Friday statements from Facebook and Microsoft that broadly disclosed the number of FISA requests those companies have received in the last six months of 2012. The companies used similar examples of why officials may want the information, such as aiding in a search for missing children.

Apple also said that there are certain kinds of information that it does not provide to law enforcement because it simply doesn’t keep it. This, the company said, includes conversations that take place over its proprietary Messages service, or its video-conferencing FaceTime program. The company also said that it does not store data related to consumers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in a way that they can be traced back to an individual.

The statement did not mention other data Apple keeps on its servers, such as consumer e-mails, videos, photos or files stored on its servers.

New Leak Indicates Britain and U.S. Tracked Diplomats

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New Leak Indicates Britain and U.S. Tracked Diplomats

By SCOTT SHANE and RAVI SOMAIYA

Published: June 16, 2013 8 Comments

A new set of classified documents disclosed Sunday suggested that Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has provided a trove of documents to The Guardian newspaper, had obtained a wider range of materials about government surveillance than had been known, including one document revealing how American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009.

The latest disclosures, appearing again in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations was to open in Northern Ireland, where some of the leaders who were intelligence targets four years ago will be in attendance.

The newspaper reported Sunday night that Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q., the British eavesdropping agency that works closely with the N.S.A., monitored the e-mail and phones of other countries’ representatives at two London conferences, in part by setting up a monitored Internet cafe for the participants. In addition, the United States intercepted the communications of Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president and now the prime minister, the newspaper said.

The Guardian posted some G.C.H.Q. documents on its Web site with part of the contents blacked out. A spokesman for The Guardian said Sunday that the paper decided to redact the documents, and that enough was published “to show the authenticity of the report.”

The documents indicated that e-mail interception and key-logging software was installed on the computers in the ersatz Internet cafe, that foreign diplomats’ BlackBerry messages and calls were intercepted, and that 45 analysts tracked who was phoning whom at the meeting.

Richard J. Aldrich, a professor of international security at the University of Warwick and the author of a history of the G.C.H.Q., said the logos of the N.S.A. and Canadian intelligence on one of the British documents suggested that they were accessible to Mr. Snowden “under the auspices of a joint program.”

He said Mr. Snowden’s leak showed that British and American diplomats and politicians got a real-time feed of intelligence on their counterparts at major summit meetings. “Now this is integrated into summit diplomacy, almost like a newsreader getting a feed in their ear,” he said.

American intelligence officials have expressed alarm at the variety of highly classified material Mr. Snowden obtained, suggesting that his actions revealed a shocking breach in the fundamental principle that intelligence officers should have access only to the material they need to do their jobs. On Sunday, a spokesman for the British foreign service said he would not comment on intelligence matters.

Mr. Snowden, 29, who left the N.S.A. station in Hawaii this spring and is now thought to be hiding in Hong Kong, delivered hundreds of N.S.A. documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Their initial reports covered the routine collection of data on all phone calls handled by the major American telephone companies and an N.S.A. program called Prism that collects the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet services like Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Disclosures linked to Mr. Snowden now rank among the most significant breaches in the strict secrecy of the N.S.A., the largest American intelligence agency, since its creation in 1952. It suffered a handful of defections during the cold war; more recently, insiders have revealed warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States.

By contrast, the latest disclosures have exposed surveillance approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and shared with Congress.

A letter delivered to Congress on Saturday from the office of James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that the surveillance programs had helped thwart “dozens” of terrorist plots in the United States and more than 20 other countries.

While the N.S.A. collects and stores the phone records of millions of Americans each year, it examines the records only when there is suspicion of a connection to terrorism, the letter said, adding that in 2012, fewer than 300 phone records were reviewed.

The Guardian’s latest reports offered a rare window onto the everyday electronic spying that the agency does in close cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said the reports have “confirmed longstanding suspicions that N.S.A’s surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew.” He added, “We desperately need to have a public discussion about the proper limits on N.S.A.”

But he said the reports of spying on world leaders, while distressing to the eavesdroppers because it will make their targets more wary, contained no surprises. “This is just what intelligence agencies do — spy on friends and enemies alike,” he said. “Only because the shroud of secrecy that covers all of N.S.A. operations is so thick does a glimpse like this come as a shock.”

While some members of Congress have raised questions about the sweep of the N.S.A.’s collection of data on Americans, leaders of both parties have defended the programs and denounced Mr. Snowden before The Guardian published its latest report.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” former Vice President Dick Cheney praised the agency and called Mr. Snowden a criminal and a traitor. “I think it’s one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States,” he said.

The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, appearing on “Face the Nation” on CBS, said leaking information about American surveillance “in effect gives the playbook to those who would like to get around our techniques and our practices, and obviously that’s not in our interest in the long haul.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting from Washington, and John F. Burns from London.

Living With the Surveillance State

Living With the Surveillance State

By BILL KELLER

Published: June 16, 2013 326 Comments

MY colleague Thomas Friedman’s levelheaded take on the National Security Agency eavesdropping uproar needs no boost from me. His column soared to the top of the “most e-mailed” list and gathered a huge and mostly thoughtful galaxy of reader comments. Judging from the latest opinion polling, it also reflected the prevailing mood of the electorate. It reflected mine. But this is a discussion worth prolonging, with vigilant attention to real dangers answering overblown rhetoric about theoretical ones.

Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the N.S.A. but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack. Reluctantly, he concludes that a well-regulated program to use technology in defense of liberty — even if it gives us the creeps — is a price we pay to avoid a much higher price, the shutdown of the world’s most open society. Hold onto that qualifier: “well regulated.”

The N.S.A. data-mining is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards. We have a vague feeling of uneasiness about these transactions, but it rarely translates into serious thinking about where we set the limits.

Exhibit A: In last Thursday’s Times Joseph Goldstein reported that local law enforcement agencies, “largely under the radar,” are amassing their own DNA databanks, and they often do not play by the rules laid down for the databases compiled by the F.B.I. and state crime labs. As a society, we have accepted DNA evidence as a reliable tool both for bringing the guilty to justice and for exonerating the wrongly accused. But do we want police agencies to have complete license — say, to sample our DNA surreptitiously, or to collect DNA from people not accused of any wrongdoing, or to share our most private biological information? Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project and a member of the New York State Commission on Forensic Science, says regulators have been slow to respond to what he calls rogue databanks. And a recent Supreme Court ruling that defined DNA-gathering as a legitimate police practice comparable to fingerprinting is likely to encourage more freelancing. Scheck says his fear is that misuse will arouse public fears of government overreach and discredit one of the most valuable tools in our justice system. “If you ask the American people, do you support using DNA to catch criminals and exonerate the innocent, everybody says yes,” Scheck told me. “If you ask, do you trust the government to have your DNA, everybody says no.”

Exhibit B: Nothing quite says Big Brother like closed-circuit TV. In Orwell’s Britain, which is probably the democratic world’s leading practitioner of CCTV monitoring, the omnipresent pole-mounted cameras are being supplemented in some jurisdictions by wearable, night-vision cop-cams that police use to record every drunken driver, domestic violence call and restive crowd they encounter. New York last year joined with Microsoft to introduce the eerily named Domain Awareness System, which connects 3,000 CCTV cameras (and license-plate scanners and radiation detectors) around the city and allows police to cross-reference databases of stolen cars, wanted criminals and suspected terrorists. Fans of TV thrillers like “Homeland,” “24” and the British series “MI-5” (guilty, guilty and guilty) have come to think of the omnipresent camera as a crime-fighting godsend. But who watches the watchers? Announcing the New York system, the city assured us that no one would be monitored because of race, religion, citizenship status, political affiliation, etc., to which one skeptic replied, “But we’ve heard that one before.”

Exhibit C: Congress has told the F.A.A. to set rules for the use of spy drones in American air space by 2015. It is easy to imagine the value of this next frontier in surveillance: monitoring forest fires, chasing armed fugitives, search-and-rescue operations. Predator drones already patrol our Southern border for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, border surveillance may be critical in persuading Congress to pass immigration reform that would extend our precious liberty to millions living in the shadows. I for one would count that a fair trade. But where does it stop? Scientific American editorialized in March: “Privacy advocates rightly worry that drones, equipped with high-resolution video cameras, infrared detectors and even facial-recognition software, will let snoops into realms that have long been considered private.” Like your backyard. Or, with the sort of thermal imaging used to catch the Boston bombing fugitive hiding under a boat tarp, your bedroom.

And then there is the Internet. We seem pretty much at peace, verging on complacent, about the exploitation of our data for commercial, medical and scientific purposes — as trivial as the advertising algorithm that pitches us camping gear because we searched the Web for wilderness travel, as valuable as the digital record-sharing that makes sure all our doctors know what meds we’re on.

In an online debate about the N.S.A. eavesdropping story the other day, Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, pointed out that we have grown comfortable with the Internal Revenue Service knowing our finances, employees of government hospitals knowing our medical histories, and public-school teachers knowing the abilities and personalities of our children.

“The information vacuumed up by the N.S.A. was already available to faceless bureaucrats in phone and Internet companies — not government employees but strangers just the same,” Posner added. “Many people write as though we make some great sacrifice by disclosing private information to others, but it is in fact simply the way that we obtain services we want — whether the market services of doctors, insurance companies, Internet service providers, employers, therapists and the rest or the nonmarket services of the government like welfare and security.”

Privacy advocates will retort that we surrender this information wittingly, but in reality most of us just let it slip away. We don’t pay much attention to privacy settings or the “terms of service” fine print. Our two most common passwords are “password” and “123456.”

From time to time we get worrisome evidence of data malfeasance, such as the last big revelation of N.S.A. eavesdropping, in 2005, which disclosed that the agency was tapping Americans without the legal nicety of a warrant, or the more recent I.R.S. targeting of right-wing political groups. But in most cases the advantages of intrusive technology are tangible and the abuses are largely potential. Edward Snowden’s leaks about N.S.A. data-mining have, so far, not included evidence of any specific abuse.

The danger, it seems to me, is not surveillance per se. We have already decided, most of us, that life on the grid entails a certain amount of intrusion. Nor is the danger secrecy, which, as Posner notes, “is ubiquitous in a range of uncontroversial settings,” a promise the government makes to protect “taxpayers, inventors, whistle-blowers, informers, hospital patients, foreign diplomats, entrepreneurs, contractors, data suppliers and many others.”

The danger is the absence of rigorous, independent regulation and vigilant oversight to keep potential abuses of power from becoming a real menace to our freedom. The founders created a system of checks and balances, but the safeguards have not kept up with technology. Instead, we have an executive branch in a leak-hunting frenzy, a Congress that treats oversight as a form of partisan combat, a political climate that has made “regulation” an expletive and a public that feels a generalized, impotent uneasiness. I don’t think we’re on a slippery slope to a police state, but I think if we are too complacent about our civil liberties we could wake up one day and find them gone — not in a flash of nuclear terror but in a gradual, incremental surrender.

Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA

Durst: Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA

Posted: Monday, June 17, 2013 10:31 pm | Updated: 10:51 pm, Mon Jun 17, 2013.

Guest Commentary by Will Durst

Dear U.S. Citizen: Please accept our most egregiously sincere apologies for the difficulties and inconveniences the secret monitoring of your phone records and email and GPS units and foreign travel and bank accounts and yes, even your snail mail has evidently caused.

We here at the NSA strive for the perfection of our services, which depend on the chronic obliviousness of you, our valued customers. Unfortunately, due to one disgruntled deadbeat (who escaped to China to avoid government persecution- which is like joining the Army because you're tired of people telling you what to do) you now know of our continuing efforts to keep you safe. That was never our intention.

When you are even tangentially aware of the absurd lengths the National Security Agency will go to keep you and your loved ones out of harm's way, our mission has failed. If you knew half the crap we have to slog through here, your hair would curl, but that's another story altogether.

Yes, we're pretty much keeping tabs on everything everyone says and does, all the time, which we understand upsets a few of you. Folks. Don't worry. Nobody's actually listening to any of this stuff. We're just used to collecting it. If it makes you feel any better, think of this whole enterprise as an exceedingly long, government-subsidized episode of "Hoarders." You can trust us.

And seriously, anybody who didn't suspect this kind of snooping was going on is not to be trusted with knives in the kitchen without a fencing mask. Privacy is soooo 20th Century. You share the regularity of your bowel movements on Facebook, but we check around to find out who's making coded phone calls to al-Qaida and suddenly everybody's nose is out of joint? You kidding me?

Unfortunately, one of our representatives testified in front of Congress, "no, we aren't collecting data on Americans," when what he meant to say is, "yes, we ARE collecting data on Americans." James Clapper simply gave the "least untruthful answer possible." Then again, Congress knows that getting a straight answer from us is harder than bending a wire coat-hanger into a number representing pi to the sixth digit with your teeth. All for your protection.

See, the problem is, nobody knows who the enemy is anymore. Narrowing suspicion is much too time-consuming. Lot easier to wiretap the entire nation than try to pick out the one or two most devious of you. Besides, what could be more democratic than spying on everybody?

We call the process data mining. And you, the soft quarry, are producing up to a billion records a day. Which is real similar to pulverizing Everest, then sifting through the rubble for a blue pebble. It ain't easy, people. Lot of haystacks, not so many needles.

To ensure this glitch never occurs again, we are rectifying the glitcher in order to return our service to the high-level quality that you, the citizens of America, have come to expect. For the inconvenience we have caused, each household in America will receive 3 free months of HBO.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this matter, please contact your Congressperson. Thanks for your understanding, and please, don't bother looking for us. You can be sure, we'll be looking after you.

Sincerely.

Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA.

P.S. Don't forget to "like us" on Facebook.

Recipient of seven consecutive nominations for Stand-Up of the Year, Will Durst's new one-man show, "BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG," is presented every Tuesday at The Marsh, San Francisco. Go to... themarsh.org for more info. Or willdurst.com

NSA director defends sweeping surveillance program

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NSA director defends sweeping surveillance program, says plot against Wall Street thwarted

By Associated Press, Published: June 17 | Updated: Tuesday, June 18, 8:29 AM

WASHINGTON — The director of the National Security Agency said Tuesday the government’s sweeping surveillance programs have foiled some 50 terrorist plots worldwide, including one directed at the New York Stock Exchange, in a forceful defense of spy operations that was echoed by the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee.

Army Gen. Keith Alexander said the two recently disclosed programs — one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism — are critical in the terrorism fight.

Intelligence officials have disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks, and Alexander offered some information on other attempts.

He said the NSA was monitoring a known extremist in Yemen who was in contact with an individual in the United States. Identifying that person and other individuals, Alexander said, officials “were able to detect a nascent plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. ... The FBI disrupted and arrested these individuals.”

The programs “assist the intelligence community to connect the dots,” Alexander told the committee in a rare, open Capitol Hill hearing.

Alexander got no disagreement from the leaders of the panel, who have been outspoken in backing the programs since Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed information to The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the committee, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, said the programs were vital to the intelligence community and assailed Snowden’s actions as criminal.

“It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside,” Rogers said.

Ruppersberger said the “brazen disclosures” put the United States and its allies at risk.

The general counsel for the intelligence community said the NSA cannot target phone conversations between callers inside the U.S. — even if one of those callers was someone they were targeted for surveillance when outside the country.

The director of national intelligence’s legal chief, Robert S. Litt, said that if the NSA finds it has accidentally gathered a phone call by a target who had traveled into the U.S. without their knowledge, they have to “purge” that from their system. The same goes for an accidental collection of any conversation because of an error.

Litt said those incidents are then reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which “pushes back” and asks how it happened, and what the NSA is doing to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.

The hearing came the morning after President Barack Obama, who is attending the G-8 summit in Ireland, vigorously defended the surveillance programs in a lengthy interview Monday, calling them transparent — even though they are authorized in secret.

“It is transparent,” Obama told PBS’ Charlie Rose in an interview. “That’s why we set up the FISA court,” the president added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

Obama said he has named representatives to a privacy and civil liberties oversight board to help in the debate over just how far government data gathering should be allowed to go — a discussion that is complicated by the secrecy surrounding the FISA court, with hearings held at undisclosed locations and with only government lawyers present. The orders that result are all highly classified.

“We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place ... that their phone calls aren’t being listened into; their text messages aren’t being monitored, their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere,” the president said.

A senior administration official said Obama had asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to determine what more information about the two programs could be made public, to help better explain them. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

Snowden on Monday accused members of Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of the would-be New York subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, in 2009.

In an online interview with The Guardian in which he posted answers to questions, he said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs — a point Obama conceded in his interview without mentioning Snowden.

“We might have caught him some other way,” Obama said. “We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn’t go off. But, at the margins, we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” he said.

Obama repeated earlier assertions that the NSA programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties — something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he’d formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

14-year-old kid arrested for NRA shirt faces a year in jail

I wonder if 14-year-old Jared Marcum is one of the 50 or terrorists plots the NSA busted up as a result of spying on millions of Americans????

Lardieri has claimed that police in Logan City (pop. 1,779) threatened to charge Marcum with making terroristic threats during the incident that led to his arrest.

Source

The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jail

The Daily CallerThe Daily Caller

The West Virginia eighth-grader who was suspended and arrested in late April after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association appeared in court this week and was formally charged with obstructing an officer.

As CBS affiliate WTRF reports, 14-year-old Jared Marcum now faces a $500 fine and a maximum of one year in prison.

The boy’s father, Allen Lardieri, is not pleased.

“Me, I’m more of a fighter and so is Jared and eventually we’re going to get through this,” Lardieri told WTRF. “I don’t think it should have ever gotten this far.”

“Every aspect of this is just totally wrong,” Lardieri added. “He has no background of anything criminal up until now and it just seems like nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.”

Officials at Logan Middle School in Logan County, West Va. maintain that Marcum, who has since completed eighth grade, was suspended for one day because he caused a disruption after a teacher asked him to remove a shirt emblazoned with a hunting rifle and the statement “protect your right.”

“She said, ‘Are you supposed to wear that in school?’” Marcum had previously explained in an interview with local station, WOWK-TV. “I said, ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t.’”

In a move The Daily Caller can only characterize as courageous, Marcum returned to school after his suspension wearing exactly the same shirt. Students across the rural county showed their support for Marcum by wearing similar shirts on that day as well.

There are no accounts of any additional arrests or suspensions when Marcum returned to school.

Lardieri has claimed that police in Logan City (pop. 1,779) threatened to charge Marcum with making terroristic threats during the incident that led to his arrest.

In legal documents obtained by the CBS station, the arresting officer, James Adkins, reportedly fails to inform the court about any terrorist threats or any violent action. Instead, Adkins asserts that the 14-year-old boy did not follow his orders to stop talking. This verbosity somehow prevented Adkins from performing his police duties.

“In my view of the facts, Jared didn’t do anything wrong,” Ben White, Marcum’s attorney, opined, according to WTRF. “I think Officer Adkins could have done something differently.”

White has previously asserted that his client was exercising his free speech rights by wearing the shirt.

The school district’s policy doesn’t prohibit shirts promoting Second Amendment rights.

Logan police and the prosecuting attorney, Michael White, declined to answer questions.

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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.

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.”

Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife

Source

Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: June 20, 2013 178 Comments

ARCATA, Calif. — It took the death of a small, rare member of the weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California’s marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding activities were having on the environment.

While some marijuana farms divert and dry up streams, this grower uses conservation methods like a rainwater holding pond.

The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W. Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.

That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.

Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have been decimated by logging.

And local and state jurisdictions’ ability to deal with the problem has been hobbled by, among other things, the drug’s murky legal status. It is approved by the state for medical uses but still illegal under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers. Some operate within state rules, while others operate totally outside the law.

The environmental damage may not be as extensive as that caused by the 19th-century diking of the Humboldt estuary here, or 20th-century clear-cut logging, but the romantic outlaw drug has become a destructive juggernaut, experts agree.

“In my career I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Stormer Feiler, a scientist with California’s North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. “Since 2007 the amount of unregulated activities has exploded.” He added, “They are grading the mountaintops now, so it affects the whole watershed below.”

Scott Bauer, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said, “I went out on a site yesterday where there was an active water diversion providing water to 15 different groups of people or individuals,” many of them growers. “The stream is going to dry up this year.”

While it is hard to find data on such an industry, Anthony Silvaggio, a sociology lecturer at Humboldt State University, pointed to anecdotal evidence in a Google Earth virtual “flyover” he made of the industrial farm plots and the damage they cause. The video was later enhanced and distributed by Mother Jones magazine.

Brad Job’s territory as a federal Bureau of Land Management officer includes public lands favored, he said, by Mexican drug cartels whose environmental practices are the most destructive. “The watershed was already lying on the ground bleeding,” Mr. Job said. “The people who divert water in the summer are kicking it in the stomach.”

That water is crucial to restoring local runs of imperiled Coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead, which swam up Eel River tributaries by the tens of thousands before the logging era. Scott Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said, “It’s not weed that drove the Coho to the brink of extinction, but it may kick it over the edge.” By various estimates, each plant needs at least one gallon and as much as six gallons of water during a season.

The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. Marijuana is an economic staple, particularly in Humboldt County’s rural southern end, called SoHum. Jennifer Budwig, the vice president of a local bank, estimated last year that marijuana infused more than $415 million into the county’s annual economic activity, one-quarter of the total.

For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “Marijuana has had a framework that started in the 1930s with jazz musicians,” said Gregg Gold, a psychology professor at Humboldt State University. “It’s a cultural icon of resistance to authority.”

“In 2013,” he added, “you’re asking that we reframe it in people’s minds as just another agribusiness. That’s a huge shift.”

It is a thriving agribusiness. Derek Roy, a special agent enforcing endangered species protections for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said, “These grow sites continue to get larger and larger.” Things took off after 1996, when California decriminalized the use of medical marijuana, Mr. Roy said.

The older farmers say that as the fierce antidrug campaigns waned and the medical marijuana market developed, newcomers arrived eager to cash in, particularly in the past decade, according to two growers who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Marijuana is approved by California for medical uses but still illegal under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers.

“There is a gold rush,” Mr. Greacen said. “And it’s a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impacts.”

Now that Colorado and Washington voters have approved the recreational use of the drug, there is a widespread belief that the days of high prices for marijuana are nearly over.

As Mikal Jakubal, a resident of SoHum who is directing a documentary film about Humboldt County’s marijuana business, puts it, “Everyone thinks, ‘This might be the last good year.’ ” That helps fuel the willy-nilly expansion of cultivation, the tearing up of hillsides and the diversions that dry out creeks.

The worst damage is on public lands. There, extensive plantings are surrounded by d-Con-laced tuna and sardine cans placed around perimeters by the dozens, Dr. Gabriel said. Mr. Job of the land management bureau said these illegal operations have 70,000 to 100,000 plants; they are believed to be the work of Mexican drug cartels.

But small farmers have an impact, too. Mr. Bauer of the State Fish and Wildlife Department said that when he found the water diversion last week and asked those responsible about it, “these people we met with were pointing a finger all over the watershed, saying: ‘We’re not that big. There are bigger people out there.’ ”

Federal environmental agents, including Mr. Roy and Mr. Job, have brought two cases to the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco. The office declined to prosecute a case last year, they said. A new one is under review. But, they said, manpower for enforcement is limited.

Given federal prohibitions against profiting from marijuana, county officials have a limited toolbox. “We have land-use authority, that’s it,” said Mark Lovelace, a Humboldt County supervisor. He chafes at the county’s inability to establish a system of permits, for fear of running afoul of federal law. His board did just pass a resolution asking local businesses not to sell d-Con. (A representative of Reckitt Benckiser, which makes the poison, wrote a letter of protest.)

Mr. Lovelace and others contend that legalizing marijuana would open the door to regulation and put the brakes on environmental abuses.

In the meantime, the industry has begun to police itself. Some growers have benefited from a program run by a local nonprofit organization, Sanctuary Forest, that subsidizes the installation of tanks that can store water in the winter, when it is plentiful, for use in dry months.

“There may be people who grow pot in our group,” said Tasha McKee, executive director of Sanctuary Forest. “I’m sure there are. We don’t ask that question.”

A local group, the Emerald Growers Association, recently produced a handbook on sustainable practices.

“There is an identity crisis going on right now,” said Gary Graham Hughes, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center in Arcata. “The people who are really involved with this industry are trying to understand what their responsibilities are.”

Bra-shaking police search questioned

Bra-shaking police search questioned

Associated Press Fri Jun 21, 2013 8:27 AM

LAKELAND, Fla. — State and local law enforcement officials are investigating the actions of a Lakeland police officer who instructed a woman to shake out her bra for drugs during a traffic stop last month.

State Attorney Jerry Hill took the rare step of writing a complaint letter to the Lakeland Police Department this week, fearing that the practice was widespread among officers.

“This highly questionable search method is not only demeaning,” Hill wrote, “but is ineffective and possibly dangerous.”

The incident occurred May 21 when Officer Dustin Fetz stopped Zoe Brugger for driving with a broken headlight.

The Ledger of Lakeland (http://bit.ly/13V8j1H) reports Fetz asked the driver and her boyfriend for permission to search the vehicle. When they denied his request, Brugger said Fetz escorted her behind the car, where he asked her to lift her shirt above her stomach, pull her bra away from her chest and shake it out. Unsatisfied with her first attempt, Fetz made her shake her bra a second time.

No drugs were found on the woman, but Fetz persisted in searching the car — even after Brugger withdrew her consent.

When the vehicle search turned up no drugs, Fetz gave Brugger a ticket. The woman told the state attorney’s office that the officer told her, “I’m done scaring you, and now you can go home.”

Fetz told investigators that the bra-shaking search is a known technique that is used by some Lakeland) officers, but he could not recall ever formally being trained to do this.

Hill said police didn’t have reason to suspect Brugger was carrying drugs. In his letter, he said such searches could undermine future cases, citing a DUI arrest in which a woman threatened to sue an officer for sexual harassment after he asked her to shake out her bra. Even a suspect who was legally drunk was able to grasp the impropriety and the demeaning nature of this type of search, Hill wrote.

According to a report by State Attorney Investigator Mike Brown, Fetz’s action violated Brugger’s constitutional rights, but his conduct did not constitute a criminal offense.

“Looking back on the incident, (Fetz) recognizes he was overzealous,” the investigator wrote.

Police Chief Lisa Womack told the Ledger she has reviewed Hill’s letter and plans to investigate.

The department placed Fetz on paid leave for four days. He returned to work Tuesday.

A cushy jobs program for cops in high schools????

The cop's don't like that word because it sounds like they are turning America into a police state, so they call them not cops, but resource officers".

Either way it's a jobs program for cops, that creates cushy jobs for cops in high schools were they are not needed.

Each cop costs the schools $96,200 a year!!!! You could get a rent-a-cop for a third of that.

Last if the schools are so unsafe that every high school needs several cops to make it safe, maybe it is time to get rid of the lousy government schools and replace them with private schools???

I have never heard of charter schools needing armed cops who are paid $96,200 a year to make them safe.

Source

Three Glendale high schools might get police officers

By Colleen Sikorski The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:23 AM

Peoria Unified School District’s three high schools in Glendale may have school resource officers when classes open in August.

The school board unanimously approved an agreement with the city of Glendale to place resource officers in each of the schools for the 2013-14 school year, with the district paying $117,293. The district’s four high schools in Peoria already have resource officers.

“I have wanted this for a long, long time,” school board member Kathy Knecht said.

The agreement still needs approval by the Glendale City Council, which would contribute the same amount. It is expected to go to a vote Tuesday.

Steve Savoy, Peoria’s administrator of K-12 academic services, attributed the delay at the high schools in Glendale to the city’s budget issues.

Under the latest plan, the district would pay 75 percent of the cost for officers at Ironwood and Cactus high schools and Glendale would pay 25 percent.

The city would pick up the full cost for a resource officer at Raymond S. Kellis High School, to repay the district for allowing the city to use the Kellis parking lot during Arizona Cardinals football games.

The city of Peoria has paid the bulk of the costs, about $66,000 of the $96,200 cost for each school resource officer per year, in the district’s four high schools in Peoria. The school district and the city added the first resource officer in January 2009, Savoy said. The most recent was added at Liberty High School at the start of the 2012-13 school year.

Glendale police spokeswoman Tracey Breeden could not immediately say whether Glendale intends to work with other school districts to provide funding for school resource officers.

Deer Valley School District has never received city of Glendale funding for school resource officers. Since the 1990s, the district has had high-school resource officers, who were funded by a grant until 2006. Deer Valley then picked up the tab, hiring police officers at $30 to $35 an hour for all five of its high schools.

Glendale Union High School District got rid of school resource officers two years ago after losing a state grant that had paid for them.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

El lado oscuro de los analgésicos

El lado oscuro de los analgésicos

Quitan el dolor pero pueden traer complicaciones graves.

Las muertes causadas por abuso de medicamentos recetados y no recetados, es un problema grave en EU. Los analgésicos tienen muchos efectos secundarios que se desconocen, y éstos deberían ser tenidos en cuenta para saber a qué nos exponemos al tomarlos y cuándo se cae en el exceso.

Abuso de analgésicos recetados: Se cuadruplicaron las muertes en el país en los últimos años por esta causa: de 4,030 muertes en 1999 creció a 16,651 en 2010. Los Centros para el Control y Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC) informaron que 125,000 personas murieron en los últimos 10 años por exceso de Vicodin, OxyContin y Metadona.

Matan más que las drogas ilegales: Las sobredosis de analgésicos derivados del opio causan cada año 15,000 muertes en el país, tres veces más que la cocaína, heroína y todo el resto de drogas ilegales juntas, cifras alarmantes sobre un fenómeno que el Departamento de Salud califica como una "epidemia."

Causan fuerte adicción: Se trata en su mayoría de narcóticos y derivados del opio, que provocan fuerte adicción, como la oxicodona y la metadona. Ésta última es la responsable de un 30% de las muertes causadas por analgésicos, según datos de los CDC.

¿Peor que la marihuana?: Los analgésicos recetados ocupan el segundo lugar respecto al abuso de drogas, después de la marihuana, según un informe del gobierno de 2013. Unos 22 millones de estadounidenses han abusado de los analgésicos recetados desde 2002, según la Administración de Salud Mental y Abuso de Sustancias (SAMHSA).

Abuso de analgésicos: También hay un impacto importante en la salud por el abuso de los analgésicos de venta libre o sin receta. Entre los peligros latentes se incluye el hecho de que no hay un médico que monitoree la situación, se toman más tiempo de lo debido y no se toma conciencia de los peligros que encierran.

Analgésicos sin receta: Existen dos tipos principales: acetaminofén (como el de marca Tylenol) y antiinflamatorios no esteroideos (AINES) como la aspirina, el naproxeno (Aleve) y el ibuprofén (Advil, Motrin). Si éstos no alivian el dolor, el médico puede indicarle algo más fuerte.

Analgésicos con receta: Muchos AINES se encuentran disponibles en mayor dosis pero con receta médica. Los analgésicos más potentes son los narcóticos; son muy efectivos, pero tienen efectos secundarios graves, por eso sólo deben ser tomados bajo supervisión médica.

Peligrosa automedicación: Tanto los analgésicos que se compran sin receta en cualquier tienda, como los recetados por el médico, tienen efectos secundarios serios cuando se toman en altas dosis o durante mucho tiempo sin vigilancia médica. Conoce más de de cerca los problemas que puede causar el abuso.

Efectos secundarios de los analgésicos

1. Producen daño hepático: La Administración de Medicamentos y Alimentos (FDA) informó que los fármacos que contienen acetaminofén, un ingrediente activo de muchos analgésicos como el Tylenol, deben advertir a los consumidores sobre posibles daños al hígado, a través de un mensaje en las etiquetas.

2. Aumentan el riesgo coronario: Una revisión de 2013 de la Unidad de Estudios Epidemiológicos de la Universidad de Oxford, en Inglaterra, halló que las personas que toman dosis altas de los analgésicos comunes conocidos como antiinflamatorios no esteroides (AINE) se enfrentan a un mayor riesgo de padecer problemas del corazón.

3. Elevan el riesgo de ACV: Aunque los AINE se usan mundialmente para tratar afecciones inflamatorias como la artritis reumatoide, el estudio inglés halló que tomar 2,400 mg de ibuprofeno o 150 mg de diclofenac al día, aumenta el riesgo de ataques cardíacos, accidentes cerebrovasculares y muerte, en alrededor de un tercio.

4. Aumentan los defectos congénitos: Según un informe de 2013 de los CDC, las embarazadas que toman analgésicos opiáceos recetados como la codeína, hidrocodona u oxicodona, incrementarían el riesgo de defectos congénitos cardíacos en sus bebés. La espina bífida, hidrocefalia y glaucoma también serán riesgos mayores en estos bebés.

5. Causan efecto rebote: Los dolores de cabeza de rebote, es decir, que continúan reapareciendo, pueden ocurrir por el consumo excesivo de analgésicos. Los pacientes que toman analgésicos más de 3 días a la semana de manera regular, pueden desarrollar este cuadro, informa la Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina.

Aspirinas: lo bueno: Alivia dolores. Y tomar diariamente una dosis baja, lo que se conoce como la "terapia de aspirina", puede ayudar a prevenir las enfermedades cardíacas bloqueando la formación de coágulos de sangre que obstruyen las arterias y desencadenan los ataques al corazón y los derrames cerebrales.

Aspirinas: lo malo: Pero también tiene su lado negativo, informa la Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina: puede causar úlceras, sangrado estomacal e intestinal, y en raras ocasiones, derrames cerebrales hemorrágicos. Puede causar reacciones alérgicas severas, zumbido en los oídos, malestar estomacal y pérdida de la visión.

Cuidado con las combinaciones: Si tomas una aspirina diaria, no la tomes junto a otros analgésicos como el ibuprofeno (Advil y genéricos) y naproxeno (Aleve), ya que la combinación aumenta el riesgo de sangrado. Si necesitas un analgésico, considera el acetaminofeno (Tylenol). Fuente: Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina.

Analgésicos narcóticos: Los analgésicos narcóticos u opiáceos se emplean sólo para el dolor que es intenso y no se alivia con otros analgésicos. Cuando se utilizan bajo el cuidado directo de un médico, pueden ser eficaces para producir alivio, ya que funcionan bloqueando la sensación de dolor.

Problemas que causan los analgésicos: Los analgésicos narcóticos como la Codeína, Fentanilo, Meperidina, Morfina, Oxicodona, Tramadol, Hidrocodona, Hidromorfona, causan somnolencia y deterioro del juicio. Si los tomas, no bebas alcohol, ni manejes. Si se presentan náuseas o vómitos, toma los analgésicos al comer.

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.

Another drug-smuggling tunnel found in Ariz.

Another drug-smuggling tunnel found in Ariz.

Associated Press Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:00 AM

NOGALES, Ariz. — An incomplete drug smuggling tunnel has been found near the Arizona-Mexico border during an inspection of Nogales' main storm drain system.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the tunnel was discovered Tuesday while the drain running under Grand Avenue was being inspected.

Authorities found a concrete access panel embedded in the storm drain floor.

They removed the panel and found a tunnel containing tools, a core drill and forced air ventilation.

ICE investigators believe the tunnel was in the final stages of construction.

It was about 160 feet long and 2 feet wide by 3 feet tall. All but 7 feet of the tunnel is on the Arizona side of the border.

Federal authorities have shut down six cross-border smuggling tunnels in the Nogales area in fiscal year 2013.

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