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Edward Snowden - NSA freedom fighter???

Edward Snowden identified as source of NSA leaks

By Barton Gellman and Aaron Blake, Updated: Sunday, June 9, 1:00 PM E-mail the writers

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee, unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs.

Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as systematic surveillance of innocent citizens and said in an interview that “it’s important to send a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday that the NSA had initiated a Justice Department investigation into who leaked the information — an investigation supported by intelligence officials in Congress.

Snowden, whose full name is Edward Joseph Snowden, said he understands the risks of disclosing the information but felt it was important to do.

“I intend to ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden, at his request.

“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden said Sunday afternoon. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

Asked whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

Snowden said nobody was aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn’t a single event that spurred his decision to leak the information.

“It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.

Snowden said President Obama hasn’t lived up to his pledges of transparency. He blamed a lack of accountability in the Bush administration for continued abuses. The White House did not respond to a request for comment Sunday afternoon.

“It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good,’ ” Snowden said. “That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”

Snowden also expressed hope that the wNSA surveillance programsould now be open to legal challenge for the first time. Earlier this year, in Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against the mass collection of phone records because the plaintiffs could not prove exactly what the program did or that they were personally subject to surveillance.

“The government can’t reasonably assert the state secrets privilege for a program it has acknowledged. The courts can now allow challenges to be heard on that basis,” Snowden said.

Snowden’s name surfaced as top intelligence officials in the Obama administration and Congress pushed back against the journalists responsible for revealing the existence of sensitive surveillance programs and called for an investigation into the leaks.

The Guardian initially reported the existence of a program that collects data on all phone calls made on the Verizon network. Later in the week, the Guardian and The Post reported the existence of a separate program, code-named PRISM, that collects the Internet data of foreigners from major Internet companies.

Clapper, in an interview with NBC that aired Saturday night, condemned the leaker’s actions but also sought to spotlight the media who first reported the programs, calling their disclosures irresponsible and full of “hyperbole.” Earlier Saturday, he had issued a statement accusing the media of a “rush to publish.”

“For me, it is literally — not figuratively — literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities,” Clapper said.

On Sunday morning, prior to Snowden’s unmasking, Clapper got some backup from the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who appeared jointly on ABC’s “This Week” to espouse the values of the programs.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for the still-unnamed leaker and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; nether did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) agreed that whoever had leaked the information should be prosecuted, and she sought to beat back media reports that suggest the Obama administration overplayed the impact of the programs.

Greenwald, who appeared earlier on the same show, said the secrecy is the reason the programs must be laid bare.

After opponents of the programs questioned their value last week, anonymous administration officials pointed to the thwarting of a bomb plot targeting the New York City subway system in 2009. Soon after, though, reporters, including BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, noted that public documents suggested regular police work was responsible for thwarting the attack rather than a secret government intelligence program.

Feinstein confirmed that the programs were invaluable in both the New York case and another one involving an American plotting to bomb a hotel in India in 2008.

“One of them is the case of David Headley, who went to Mumbai to the Taj [Mahal] Hotel and scoped it out for the terrorist attack,” Feinstein said. “The second is Najibullah Zazi, who lived in Colorado, who made the decision that he was going to blow up a New York subway.”

Feinstein noted that she could talk about those two cases because they have been declassified, but she suggested the surveillance programs also assisted in other terrorism-related cases.

That explanation wasn’t enough to satisfy some critics of the programs. Her Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), agreed that the so-called PRISM program — which taps into the Internet usage of foreigners — has “been very effective.” But he said the collection of Americans’ phone metadata has not proven so.

“It’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we couldn’t obtain through other programs,” Udall said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Udall and two Democrats from Oregon — Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley — have emerged as key voices critical of the phone record collection.

Another chief critic of the efforts, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said he is looking at filing a lawsuit against the government and called on Americans to join in.

“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies, ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.” “If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then somebody will wake up and say things will change in Washington.

Source

Edward Snowden says motive behind leaks was to expose ‘surveillance state’

By Barton Gellman and Jerry Markon, Sunday, June 9, 1:54 PM E-mail the writers

The man who identified himself Sunday as the main source behind recent disclosures of government surveillance programs is a defense contractor and former CIA employee who says his motive was to expose what he sees as a “surveillance state” that has committed massive violations of privacy.

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old system administrator, told The Washington Post that the disclosures of top-secret National Security Administration spying have prompted a vital public debate about the line between privacy and security in the post-Sept. 11, 2001 era.

The U.S. goverment is accessing top Internet companies’ servers to track foreign targets. Reporter Barton Gellman talks about the source who revealed this top-secret information and how he believes his whistleblowing was worth whatever consequences are ahead.

The U.S. goverment is accessing top Internet companies’ servers to track foreign targets. Reporter Barton Gellman talks about the source who revealed this top-secret information and how he believes his whistleblowing was worth whatever consequences are ahead.

“Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state,” he said from Hong Kong, where he has been staying.

Snowden, a former undercover CIA technical assistant, expressed particular disappointment with the Obama administration, saying it had failed to sufficiently investigate officials in the George W. Bush administration for earlier surveillance efforts. “Excusing the prior administration from investigation wronged the public,” he said. “It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good.’ That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”

He also seemed to dare the Obama administration — already under fire for its unprecedented series of leak investigations and prosecutions — to come after him. “I’m not going to hide,’’ said Snowden, after National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday that the NSA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the latest leaks.

“Allowing the United States government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest,’’ said Snowden, who added that he acted alone in deciding to leak information. “No one, not even those closest to me, knew,’’ he said.

The Guardian, which also revealed Snowden’s identity Sunday at his request, started the cascade of national security revelations last week by reporting on the existence of a program that collects data on all phone calls made on the Verizon network. Later in the week, the Guardian and The Post reported the existence of a separate program, code-named PRISM, that collects the Internet data of foreigners from major Internet companies.

The Guardian reported Sunday that Snowden has been working at the NSA for the past four years as an employee of several outside contractors, including Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell. He told the newspaper he has had “a very comfortable life,” with a salary that reached $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he lived in Hawaii, and a loving family.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he gave the Post and others, Snowden wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Snowden told The Post that he could not “recall a single moment” in which his desire to violate his oath to protect top-secret information coalesced into the final decision to reveal that information publicly.

“It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.

Edward Snowden was a Ron Paul supporter.

Source

Edward Snowden says motive behind leaks was to expose ‘surveillance state’

By Barton Gellman and Jerry Markon, Published: June 9

Before the world knew his name, 29-year-old Edward Snowden drafted a note of explanation.

He had worked for the CIA and as a contractor for the NSA, he wrote, and had lived a “comfortable and privileged life.” But he was also deeply uncomfortable with the knowledge that had already been afforded to him in his brief career — knowledge about the U.S. surveillance that officials said they were carrying out to keep America safe.

“As I advanced and learned the dangerous truth behind the U.S. policies that seek to develop secret, irresistible powers and concentrate them in the hands of an unaccountable few, human weakness haunted me,” Snowden wrote in the note, which would accompany the first documents he leaked. “As I worked in secret to resist them, selfish fear questioned if the stone thrown by a single man could justify the loss of everything he loves.

“I have come to my answer.”

Snowden, who identified himself Sunday as the main source behind recent disclosures of sweeping government surveillance programs, worked for years inside the U.S. intelligence community. As he did so, he said, he became disillusioned with American government policies.

In an interview, he told The Washington Post that he could not “recall a single moment” in which his desire to violate his oath to protect top-secret information coalesced into the final decision to reveal that information publicly.

“It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.

According to campaign finance reports, Snowden made a $250 donation to Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign in March of that year, and gave another $250 in May. Paul has been a critic of excessive government intrusion.

Snowden, a soft-spoken “infrastructure analyst” with ties to the Washington area, said he advanced in the intelligence world through his understanding of computer programming and the Internet, though he has no visible Internet presence himself.

With wire glasses, short, dark hair and a thin goatee, he maintains an academic look. Yet he never completed his coursework at a community college in Maryland, only later obtaining his GED — an unusually light education for someone who would advance in the intelligence ranks.

For the past several months, Snowden was stationed in Hawaii, working as an NSA contractor for the firm Booz Allen Hamilton. It was there, at the NSA offices, he told the Guardian newspaper, that he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose, told his NSA supervisors he needed time off for treatment for epilepsy, and boarded a flight to Hong Kong.

A storm has followed him. The Obama administration said Sunday that the NSA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak. Booz Allen condemned its erstwhile employee, and said Snowden had worked for them for less than three months.

“News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,’’ the company said, vowing to work closely with authorities in the investigation.

Snowden, who says he is a former undercover CIA technical assistant, said he was undaunted. He also waded into the political debate he has helped trigger, expressing particular disappointment with President Obama and his administration, which he accused of failing to sufficiently investigate officials in the George W. Bush administration for earlier surveillance efforts.

“Excusing the prior administration from investigation wronged the public,” he said in a live, encrypted chat Sunday afternoon moments after his identity was made public. “It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good.’ That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”

The U.S. goverment is accessing top Internet companies’ servers to track foreign targets. Reporter Barton Gellman talks about the source who revealed this top-secret information and how he believes his whistleblowing was worth whatever consequences are ahead.

The U.S. goverment is accessing top Internet companies’ servers to track foreign targets. Reporter Barton Gellman talks about the source who revealed this top-secret information and how he believes his whistleblowing was worth whatever consequences are ahead.

The Guardian, which revealed Snowden’s identity Sunday at his request, started the cascade of national security revelations last week by reporting on the existence of a program that collects data on all phone calls made on the Verizon network. Later in the week, The Post and the Guardian reported the existence of a sep­arate program, code-named PRISM, that collects the Internet data of foreigners from major Internet companies.

Snowden has been working at the NSA for the past four years as an employee of several outside contractors. In addition to Booz Allen Hamilton, the Guardian reported that Snowden also worked for Dell, and it quoted him as saying he had “a very comfortable life,” with a salary that reached $200,000.

Snowden lived most recently in Hawaii, where a real estate agent, Kerri Jo Heim of Century 21, said she is now selling the house he rented. The three-bedroom house is in Waipahu, a short drive from the beach, and is now listed for $550,000. Snowden told the Post that he had a girlfriend with whom he lived in Hawaii.

Snowden and his girlfriend were strikingly standoffish while living in a home in the residential Royal Kunia neighborhood of Waipahu, and seemed to go out of their way to avoid conversations with passers-by, neighbor Carolyn Tijing said in a telephone interview. Tijing said that her husband went to introduce himself to Snowden and his girlfriend shortly after they moved across the street from the Tijings but that Snowden declined to exchange any pleasantries.

“It was a no-go, no conversation at all,” she said. “He just said ‘Fine’ and walked straight into his house. We thought they were just really anti-social.”

Carolyn Tijing said that the couple had erected a wall of boxes floor to ceiling inside their garage that blocked anyone’s view from the street into the two-car garage and that they always kept their cars parked in the driveway.Tijing said that she never saw anyone visit the home but that her college-aged son had seen several people stop by at late hours, between midnight and 2 a.m. Those visitors would arrive by car, stand in the driveway for a few minutes and exchange a few words with Snowden, then depart, Tijing said her son told her.

About four weeks ago, Snowden and his girlfriend apparently departed, Tijing said. The wall of boxes in the garage was gone, and a handyman arrived to clean the house. “One day they were here, the next they were gone,” Tijing said. “We never saw them leave.”

Numerous family members did not respond to phone calls and e-mails Sunday.

In the note accompanying the first document he gave The Post and others, Snowden wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Public records show residences for Snowden in the North Carolina cities of Elizabeth City and Wilmington and that his family later moved to Ellicott City, Md. — near the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Public records say his mother is a federal government employee: a deputy clerk for the U.S. District Court in Maryland.

A neighbor near the mother’s home said Sunday night that she recognized Snowden from photographs but had not seen him for many years. The neighbor confirmed that his mother has epilepsy and uses a service dog.

In 2003, according to the Guardian, Snowden enlisted in the U.S. Army, intending to join the Special Forces and fight in Iraq. But he was discharged after breaking both legs in a training accident.

His first NSA job was as a security guard for one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland. Then he began working in IT security for the CIA, he says, with his understanding of the Internet and programming helping him overcome his lack of a high school diploma.

The CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva in 2007, he said, which gave him widespread access to classified documents. Snowden said that access, along with his nearly three years around CIA officers, made him begin questioning U.S. government policies about surveillance.

After leaving the CIA in 2009 to work for a private contractor, he said, he was based at an NSA facility in Japan.

Snowden said he admires other accused leakers of government secrets, such as Pfc. Bradley E. Manning — who is accused of leaking classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks — but considers himself different.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest” he told the Guardian. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

Julie Tate, Peter Finn, Peter Hermann and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.

Leaker’s Employer Became Wealthy by Maintaining Government Secrets

Leaker’s Employer Became Wealthy by Maintaining Government Secrets

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and ERIC LIPTON

Published: June 9, 2013

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden’s employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States.

Over the last decade, much of the company’s growth has come from selling expertise, technology and manpower to the National Security Agency and other federal intelligence agencies. Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.

The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.

Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.

As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

“The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that studies federal government contracting. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”

It has gone so far, Ms. Brian said, that even the process of granting security clearances is often handled by contractors, allowing companies to grant government security clearances to private sector employees.

Companies like Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and the Computer Sciences Corporation also engage directly in gathering information and providing analysis and advice to government officials. Booz Allen employees work inside the facilities at the N.S.A., among the most secretive of the intelligence agencies. The company also has several office buildings near the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.

In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said.

Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he had no reason to believe that a private contractor was more likely to become a source to reporters than a government official, because both need a security clearance before they can handle top secret information.

“Security is so tight and procedures so strictly enforced, this is really a surprise,” he said of the leaks by Mr. Snowden. “This will have to be fully investigated, inside and out, to find out what happened here. Were there warning signs? Were there issues in his background?”

Stewart A. Baker, who served as general counsel at the N.S.A. in the 1990s and more recently as a top official at the Department of Homeland Security, said he worried that the reliance on outside contractors might, in some ways at least, make the government more vulnerable to leaks.

“Inside the government, there are structures designed to make sure that people understand that they can raise concerns about the lawfulness of particular activities in a variety of established channels,” Mr. Baker said. “You can go to the inspector general or to the Intelligence Committees, and you don’t have to pierce the veil of secrecy to get high-level attention to your concerns without exposing national secrets. It is a little less obvious to employees at a contractor.”

Booz Allen, which notes in securities filings that its business could be damaged by leaks, acknowledged in a statement that Mr. Snowden had been an employee.

The company, based in Virginia, is primarily a technology contractor. It reported revenues of $5.76 billion for the fiscal year ended in March and was No. 436 on Fortune’s list of the 500 largest public companies. The government provided 98 percent of that revenue, the company said.

Its rapid growth, fueled by government investment after the Sept. 11 attacks, led to a 2008 buyout by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, followed by a public offering in 2010.

Booz Allen has formed a particularly close relationship with the intelligence agencies, and others besides Mr. Clapper and Mr. McConnell have spent time in the company’s executive offices.

Mr. McConnell has been an advocate for increased federal spending on cybersecurity. He told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2010 that foreign governments had the capacity to bring down the country’s power grid and financial system.

“The United States is not prepared for such an attack,” he said.

The company has also had at least one previous highly publicized problem maintaining data security. In 2011, files maintained by Booz Allen were acquired by the online activist group Anonymous, which claimed to have stolen tens of thousands of encrypted military passwords.

Christopher Drew contributed reporting from New York.

NSA leaker may becharged

Source

NSA leaker may becharged

By Kevin Johnson and Zach Coleman Tue Jun 11, 2013 7:40 AM

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities were weighing criminal-prosecution strategies Monday against a former federal contractor who acknowledged disclosing information about two secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency.

Possible criminal charges against Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong after supplying highly classified documents to reporters, are “under discussion” at the Justice Department, a federal law-enforcement official said.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said criminal charges would mark the first steps necessary to pursue the 29-year-old suspect’s return to the U.S., either through extradition or other means.

Snowden took the extraordinary step Sunday of identifying himself as the source for reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about a secret system to collect communications from the largest Internet companies in the world to monitor non-U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected in terror investigations.

A separate report in the Guardian disclosed a secret court order authorizing the collections of millions of telephone records involving U.S. citizens.

In a video accompanying a Guardian report Sunday, Snowden discussed his enormous access to secret information, indicating his disclosures were meant to inform the public of the government’s vast surveillance efforts.

A survey by the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post on Monday said that a majority of Americans — 56 percent — believe the NSA’s phone-tracking program is an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, while 41 percent said it is unacceptable.

Americans were more evenly divided on whether the government should be able to monitor e-mails, with 52 percent disapproving and 45 percent approving.

The survey was conducted June 6-9 among a sampling of 1,004 adults. The margin of error for the total sampling was 3.7 percentage points.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, noting the ongoing criminal investigation, declined to give detailed comment on Snowden’s disclosures, saying only that “leaks of sensitive, classified information that cause harm to our national-security interests are a problem, a serious problem.” Information is “classified for a reason,” Carney said.

Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre also declined to comment Monday, referring to an earlier statement acknowledging that the federal inquiry into the unauthorized disclosures is in its “initial stages.”

Snowden, who left his job three weeks ago as a NSA contractor in Hawaii for Booz Allen Hamilton, told the Guardian that he fled to Hong Kong because it has “a strong tradition of free speech,” despite its control by mainland China.

But Hong Kong also maintains an extradition agreement with the U.S., with a history of success.

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who once headed the bureau’s international division, said that authorities essentially have two options in seeking Snowden’s arrest and return to the United States: a revocation of his U.S. passport or extradition.

Both options, Fuentes said, would require U.S. authorities to first file criminal charges against the leak suspect and secure the cooperation of Hong Kong officials. To revoke Snowden’s passport, the Justice Department would have to issue a criminal complaint and present it to the State Department for purposes of voiding the suspect’s passport.

Notice of the revocation, meaning that the suspect would then be illegally in the country, would be sent to Hong Kong authorities who could then deport him back to the U.S.

Formal extradition remains a more traditional option, Fuentes said. He said the FBI has an extensive relationship with Hong Kong police, dating to 1966, when the bureau established a presence there.

But some U.S. lawmakers asserted that Snowden should be pursued as a criminal, regardless of his whereabouts. “I view Mr. Snowden’s actions not as one of patriotism but potentially a felony,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Monday in a post on his Twitter account. “I hope we follow Mr. Snowden to the ends of the Earth to bring him to justice.”

Mukasey the Obnoxious

Posted on June 10, 2013 2:31 pm by Robert Robb

Mukasey the Obnoxious

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an obnoxious column in today’s Wall Street Journal. In it, he essentially says that those who are concerned about recently revealed government snooping programs are mentally ill: “Indeed, psychiatry has a term for the misplaced belief that the patient is the focus of the attention of others: delusions of reference.”

Mukasey quotes a couple of phrases from the 4th Amendment to support his view that it doesn’t limit government snooping or the ability to demand the production of private records; it merely limits the ability of the government to use such information in court.

Mukasey understandably doesn’t quote the provision of the 4th Amendment that states what it is intended to protect: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

You don’t have to be mentally ill to believe those words mean something, and that what they mean excludes the government demanding the phone records of every resident in the country.

Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks are backlash of too much secrecy

Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks are backlash of too much secrecy

By Dana Milbank, Published: June 10

Keep your distance: The director of national intelligence is having intestinal distress.

“For me, it is literally — not figuratively, literally — gut-wrenching to see this happen,” James Clapper told Andrea Mitchell over the weekend, referring to leaks about the government’s secret program to collect vast troves of phone and Internet data.

There might be a bit more sympathy for Clapper’s digestive difficulty if he hadn’t delivered a kick in the gut to the American public just three months ago.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper at a Senate hearing in March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper testified.

“It does not?” Wyden pressed.

“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

We now know that Clapper was not telling the truth. The National Security Agency is quite wittingly collecting phone records of millions of Americans, and much more.

As the administration and some in Congress vent their anger about leaks to The Post and to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, officials have only themselves to blame. It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can’t be controlled.

Edward Snowden, the leaker, did the honorable thing in revealing his identity; it would be more honorable if he would turn himself in and face the consequences for his law-breaking. But there is little honor in the way administration officials and lawmakers have avoided responsibility. Obama administration officials are blaming Snowden, while some lawmakers complain disingenuously that the administration kept them out of the loop.

“All of us are sort of asking what in the world has gone on,” a seemingly bewildered Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader, alleged Monday on CBS’s “This Morning.”

Host Norah O’Donnell asked whether he had known about the program before the leaks.

“Well,” Cantor replied, “there are a variety of — of classified programs that exist for us to, again, guard against a terrorist threat. And . . . ”

Asked whether the Obama administration’s surveillance went further than the George W. Bush administration’s, Cantor said that “these are questions we don’t know the answers to.”

“How do you not know the answer?” O’Donnell asked.

Good question. All 535 members of Congress had authorization to learn all about the programs. Senators even received a written invitation in 2011 to view a classified report. Likewise, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Monday that members “could have gotten a briefing whenever they wanted to.”

But apparently few bothered. Worse, lawmakers quashed efforts to allow even modest public disclosure of the broad contours of the program. Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, lists the various ways in which the administration, Congress and the courts denied the public any right to know:

The Justice Department and the DNI promised a new effort to declassify opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; Justice official Lisa Monaco, now Obama’s counterterrorism director, said all significant FISA rulings would be reviewed for declassification. But no new opinions were declassified under the initiative.

The House last year turned back attempts to require public reports on the general outlines of the government’s surveillance programs. The various disclosure proposals, offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott (Va.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), were defeated by the Judiciary Committee.

In the Senate, amendments to provide modest disclosures and declassifications, offered by Wyden and fellow Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.) during the FISA renewal in December, were all defeated.

The FISA court itself colluded in the secrecy. After senators asked the court to provide declassified summaries of its decisions, the chief FISA judge, Reggie B. Walton, responded with a letter on March 27 citing “serious obstacles” to the request.

“It was a shoddy performance all around,” Aftergood said Monday. “The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”

Not optimal, but probably inevitable. Officials who denied the public a responsible debate on surveillance will now have a debate on Snowden’s terms — and there’s no use in bellyaching about it.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Security contractor was determined to shine a light

By Shashank Bengali and David S. Cloud, Washington Bureau

June 10, 2013, 9:16 p.m.

WASHINGTON — He was a high school dropout, sometime junior college student and failed Army recruit.

But Edward Joseph Snowden found his calling in America's spy services, using his computer skills to rise from a lowly security position to life as a well-paid private contractor for the National Security Agency. At age 29, he rented a bungalow with his girlfriend north of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and claimed to earn $200,000 a year.

On Monday, hours after he admitted disclosing a trove of intelligence secrets to the media, Snowden checked out of the glitzy Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, where he had holed up for weeks, and dropped out of sight. Whether he has gone into hiding, is seeking asylum with a sympathetic government, or been taken into custody by U.S. or Chinese authorities is unclear.

U.S. intelligence officials scrambled to evaluate the damage and worried about whether Snowden would give away, among other intelligence secrets he claimed to know, the locations of every CIA base overseas and identities of its undercover officers. The FBI is investigating and has begun interviewing his family. House and Senate intelligence committees called urgent closed-door hearings for Tuesday.

Before fleeing, Snowden gave a 12-minute videotaped interview to the Guardian, the British newspaper that broke many of his scoops. In soft-spoken tones, he said he was determined to shine a light on what he called the federal government's almost unlimited tracking of private citizens' phone calls and Internet usage.

"I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he said to the camera.

Snowden started life in Elizabeth City, a river port along North Carolina's coast. His family soon moved to a gray clapboard home in Ellicott City, a Baltimore suburb near the NSA's vast headquarters at Ft. Meade. He told the Guardian that he struggled in high school and eventually dropped out. A neighbor, Joyce Kinsey, recalled him as a quiet boy who often was on his computer.

His parents are divorced. His father, Lonnie Snowden, was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, according to public records, and lives in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, part of the old Rust Belt north of Philadelphia. His mother, Elizabeth Snowden, is chief deputy clerk in charge of administration and information technology at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

Two people who identified themselves as FBI agents visited the home of Snowden's father and stepmother Monday afternoon in Upper Macungie Township near Allentown, Pa. Lonnie Snowden, 52, told ABC News that he last saw his son months ago for dinner and that they parted with a hug.

Susan Gross, a spokeswoman for Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Md., said an Edward Joseph Snowden took classes there intermittently from 1999, when Snowden was about 15, through fall 2005. He earned a GED, a high school equivalency credential, but did not get a college degree or certificate.

In May 2004, Snowden enlisted in the Army, hoping to join the Special Forces. He took advantage of an option that allowed recruits to try out directly for the elite force without prior service. He reported to Ft. Benning, Ga., but was discharged four months later, the Army said Monday.

Recruits designated for Special Forces normally go through eight to 10 weeks of basic training, followed by an advanced infantry training course and then Special Forces assessment and selection. Snowden told the Guardian that he left the Army after he broke both legs in a training accident.

An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. S. Justin Platt, confirmed Snowden's service but said no records indicate he completed even basic training. Platt said he could not comment on Snowden's claim that he broke his legs in training because it involved medical records.

The next year, Snowden got his start in intelligence by landing a job as a security specialist at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, a spokesman confirmed. The center, run by the NSA, is "dedicated to addressing the language needs of the intelligence community," according to a university website.

After that, Snowden said, his computer skills helped him get a job with the CIA in information technology.

In 2007, he said, the CIA posted him for two years to Geneva, Switzerland, to maintain security for the agency's computer network. He lived in an apartment block on the banks of the Rhone River where the U.S. consulate often housed employees, according to Radio Television Suisse.

The CIA considers Geneva an important spying base because it hosts so many foreign diplomats and financial institutions.

Snowden said he began to grow disillusioned with the CIA while in Switzerland. He claimed that CIA officers deliberately got a Swiss banker drunk, and then offered to fix his drunk-driving arrest if he agreed to disclose secret financial information. He didn't say whether the banker agreed, but the scheme is straight from a CIA playbook.

"I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good," he said.

Still, Snowden continued to move up the ranks in the intelligence community. His high-level security clearance made him easily employable in the private sector, and in 2009, he said, he left the CIA to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a military base in Japan.

That's when he first saw the astonishing breadth of the agency's surveillance capabilities, he said.

Snowden became a firm proponent of civil liberties, affixing a sticker to his laptop promoting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for Internet users' rights.

In 2012, he made two contributions totaling $500 to the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican congressman from Texas, according to federal records. Snowden listed his employer as Dell, the Texas-based computer company. A Dell spokeswoman declined to answer questions Monday about Snowden's employment.

Sometime that year, Snowden moved to Honolulu. Last March, he took a job with Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor, as an infrastructure analyst at the NSA's huge mountaintop facility on Oahu. He rented a single-story blue bungalow in Waipahu, an upscale suburb 10 miles from the NSA facility.

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who contributed to last week's stories in both the Guardian and the Washington Post based on documents Snowden said he provided, told Salon on Monday that she was contacted anonymously by email in January this year. She denied that she encouraged Snowden to leak national security secrets.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "I didn't know where he worked, I didn't know he was NSA, I didn't know how — nothing. There was no like, 'Oh, do you think you …', no nudging. ... There's no connection here. We were contacted, we didn't know what he was up to, and at some point he came forward with documents."

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

david.cloud@latimes.com

Colby Itkowitz and Daniel Patrick Sheehan of the Allentown Morning Call and Matthew Hay Brown of the Baltimore Sun contributed to this report.

Edward Snowden fired by Booz Allen after admitting leak

By Debbi Wilgoren, Tuesday, June 11, 7:43 AM E-mail the writer

The consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton said Tuesday that it had formally terminated Edward J. Snowden, the self-confessed source of leaked, classified National Security Agency documents about secret U.S. surveillance programs.

Booz Allen said Snowden was paid $122,000 a year for his work as a systems administrator on contract to the NSA, substantially less than the $200,000 a year he told reporters from The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper that he made. Snowden was employed by Booz Allen for less than three months.

Justice Department could request extradition of self-declared leaker, according to treaty.

Federal investigators are examining how Snowden, 29, was able to gain access to what should be highly compartmentalized information, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

Snowden worked at an NSA Threat Operations Center in Hawaii, one of several such facilities that are tasked with detecting threats to government computer systems. He has previously worked for the CIA, U.S. officials said.

Snowden leaked documents to The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper regarding distinctly different operations: the NSA’s collection of data from U.S. phone call records and its surveillance of online communications to and from foreign targets.

On Sunday, speaking from what he said was a hotel room in Hong Kong, he announced himself to the world as the source of the information, saying: “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

A hotel receptionist in the city said Snowden had been staying there but checked out Monday. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Edward Snowden fired by security firm after NSA leaks

Tribune wire report

9:57 a.m. CDT, June 11, 2013

WASHINGTON -- Contracting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp said on Tuesday it has fired Edward Snowden, who admitted to releasing information on the U.S. government's broad monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet data, for violating the firm's ethics and policies.

The 29-year-old Snowden worked as an infrastructure analyst for the company.

The firm said it terminated Snowden on Monday "for violations of the firm's code of ethics and firm policy," according to a statement on its website. He was paid at a rate of $122,000, it added.

The Obama administration has launched an internal review to assess damage to national security from Edward Snowden's public release of top secret details of National Security Agency eavesdropping programs, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Reuters.

The review is separate from an initial criminal leak investigation which has been opened by the Justice Department, the official said.

The administration's review will examine the extent of damage to national security programs from the unauthorized disclosures of details of NSA's collection of phone call and email data, the official said.

It will be coordinated by the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the Director of National Intelligence's office, the official said.

A former U.S. official said that among the issues such a review would address is whether the leaks have led to losses of sources or methods and to the alienation of those who have cooperated. The review also probably will document intelligence generated by each program, the former official said.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has specialized in representing government employees under investigation, said the review also would likely look for chatter among intelligence targets to see if they have changed tactics due to the leaks.

Snowden provided information for published reports last week that revealed the NSA's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data in one of the most significant security leaks in U.S. history.

The disclosures have some U.S. lawmakers calling for the extradition and prosecution of the ex-CIA employee even as supporters defend his actions and pledge support.

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Contracting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp said on Tuesday it has fired Edward Snowden, who admitted to releasing information on the U.S. government's broad monitoring of American's phone and Internet data, for violating the firm's ethics and policies.

The firm said it terminated Snowden on Monday "for violations of the firm's code of ethics and firm policy," according to a statement on its website. He was paid at a rate of $122,000, it added.

The Obama administration has launched an internal review to assess damage to national security from Edward Snowden's public release of top secret details of National Security Agency eavesdropping programs, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Reuters.

The review is separate from an initial criminal leak investigation which has been opened by the Justice Department, the official said.

The administration's review will examine the extent of damage to national security programs from the unauthorized disclosures of details of NSA's collection of phone call and email data, the official said.

It will be coordinated by the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the Director of National Intelligence's office, the official said.

A former U.S. official said that among the issues such a review would address is whether the leaks have led to losses of sources or methods and to the alienation of those who have cooperated. The review also probably will document intelligence generated by each program, the former official said.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has specialized in representing government employees under investigation, said the review also would likely look for chatter among intelligence targets to see if they have changed tactics due to the leaks.

Snowden provided information for published reports last week that revealed the NSA's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data in one of the most significant security leaks in U.S. history.

The disclosures have some U.S. lawmakers calling for the extradition and prosecution of the ex-CIA employee even as supporters defend his actions and pledge support.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel; Editing by Vicki Allen)

Editorial: The NSA leaks and national security

Editorial: The NSA leaks and national security

Not helping terrorists, but empowering democracy

June 11, 2013

After the leaks that revealed the surprising ways in which the National Security Agency is monitoring the communications of Americans as well as people abroad, President Barack Obama addressed the ensuing uproar: "I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, by contrast, said it was "literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities."

So which is it: Valuable information for public discussion, or devastating blow to our national security?

Americans generally prefer to know more rather than less about what their government is doing. But they also understand that some information has to be kept secret because exposing it would clearly jeopardize lives — troop movements in wartime, for example, or the names of CIA informants who have penetrated a hostile government.

Edward Snowden, the government contractor who turned over the information to the British newspaper The Guardian and The Washington Post, said he did so because the "public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong." The likelihood of genuine harm to security will determine whether he's ultimately judged by history — if not by the courts — to be a noble truth-teller or a destructive traitor.

From the evidence available so far, the revelation is to the good. The reason it unleashed such a storm of controversy is that the American people had no idea the extent of the surveillance that has been going on. No one realized that virtually every phone call made in this country is archived by the NSA for possible investigation. No one knew that it was intercepting the contents of email and other communications among foreigners located overseas.

So the disclosures must have been a huge help to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, right? Well, not exactly. It's hardly news to them that using email or cellphones can have fatal consequences. That assumption is why Osama bin Laden, holed up in Abbottabad, Pakistan, trusted only the most primitive means of communication: a human courier.

Everyone always knew that intelligence agencies could access phone records and read emails with judicial authorization. So any halfway competent terrorist would assume the need for great caution in these media.

What is puzzling in the reaction from Clapper and others is that they offer no concrete examples of how the leaks endanger us. Michael Mukasey, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that had the headline, "Leaking Secrets Empowers Terrorists." But he offered no supporting evidence or hypothetical examples — only the claim that when "we tell terrorists how we can detect them, we encourage them to find ways to avoid detection."

In this instance, though, they already knew how we can detect them — and they had to assume that we might be using those methods. And it's not as though they can easily employ a safe and satisfactory alternative. If terrorists stop communicating by phone or computer, they will find it exceedingly hard to plan any attack that involves more than two or three people.

Are the programs exposed by Snowden useful or even critical to averting the next Boston Marathon bombing or the next 9/11, as the administration claims? Possibly. Americans ought to keep an open mind on that question. More information is bound to come out on how these programs have operated and what their results have been.

As that happens, it will get easier to intelligently debate their value — and whether they are worth the cost in personal privacy. In a democratic nation with a constitutional government, that's an important process. It is happening now only

Tyrants pretend to protect our rights!!!!

A Real Debate on Surveillance

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: June 10, 2013 294 Comments

For years, as the federal surveillance state grew into every corner of American society, the highest officials worked to pretend that it didn’t exist. Now that Americans are learning what really takes place behind locked doors, many officials claim they are eager to talk about it. “That’s a conversation that I welcome having,” President Obama said on Saturday. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that she was open to holding a public hearing on the subject now, a hearing next month, a hearing every month.

This newfound interest in openness is a little hard to take seriously, not only because of the hypocrisy involved but because neither official seems to want to do more than talk about being open. If the president wants to have a meaningful discussion, he can order his intelligence directors to explain to the public precisely how the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of domestic telephone data works. Since there’s not much point in camouflaging the program anymore, it’s time for the public to get answers to some basic questions.

Are the calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put innocent people under suspicion? Why is data from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity? How long is the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations? Why was a private contractor like Edward Snowden allowed to have access to it? So far, no one at the White House seems interested in a substantive public debate.

Ms. Feinstein said on ABC News’s “This Week” program on Sunday that a secret court order on the phone-data program (leaked by Mr. Snowden) didn’t tell the full story. Another court document explained the strictures on the program, but that wasn’t leaked, she said, sounding almost regretful that it remains under seal. Ms. Feinstein doesn’t have the authority to release it herself, but she could at least demand that the administration make it public.

While they’re at it, some of the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that made these data-collection programs possible could be released. Ms. Feinstein was rebuffed when she asked the court for redacted summaries of its opinions; as chairwoman, she should use her power to demand that the administration find ways to make the court even slightly more transparent.

For years, members of Congress ignored evidence that domestic intelligence-gathering had grown beyond their control, and, even now, few seem disturbed to learn that every detail about the public’s calling and texting habits now reside in a N.S.A. database.

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican of Wisconsin, wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. last week, saying that, as the author of the Patriot Act, he didn’t believe that the collection of phone records was consistent with his interpretation of the law. But, over the years, Mr. Sensenbrenner has been repeatedly warned by critics that the law was so broad that it was subject to precisely this kind of abuse.

Senator Feinstein has held several closed-door briefings for lawmakers. If she wants to hold hearings that are useful to the public, she should focus on the laws that fostered the growth of domestic spying, and the testimony should not consist of blithe assurances that the government can be trusted. The public needs explanations of how an overreaching intelligence community pushed that trust to the brink.

NSA surveillance whistle-blower: Hero or villain?

Source

NSA surveillance whistle-blower: Hero or villain?

By Eugene Robinson Washington Post Writers Group

Tue Jun 11, 2013 7:44 AM

WASHINGTON -- The important thing right now isn’t whether Edward Snowden should be labeled hero or villain. First, let’s have the debate he sparked over surveillance and privacy. Then, we can decide how history should remember him.

Snowden is the 29-year-old intelligence analyst and computer geek who has been leaking some of the National Security Agency’s most precious secrets to journalists from the Washington Post and the Guardian. He is now on the lam, having checked out of the Hong Kong hotel where he was holed up for several weeks as he orchestrated a worldwide media splash that shows no sign of ending.

Snowden betrayed his employer, the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and his promise not to divulge classified information. He paints what he did as an act of civil disobedience, but he has decided to seek political asylum abroad rather than surrender to authorities and accept the consequences. In published interviews, he comes across as grandiose to the point of self-parody, a legend in his own mind.

He is an imperfect messenger, to say the least. But his message should not be ignored.

Did you know that the NSA is compiling and storing a massive, comprehensive log of our domestic phone calls? I didn’t. Nor did I know that the agency sucks in huge volumes of e-mail traffic and other electronic data overseas — not just communications originating in trouble spots such as Pakistan but also in countries such as Germany and Britain.

I would have thought that anyone who accused the U.S. government of “omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance,” as Snowden did in an exchange with Post contributor Barton Gellman, was being paranoid. Now, I’m not so sure.

As President Barack Obama noted, nobody is eavesdropping on the phone calls of U.S. citizens and residents. I’m not certain this could be said about e-mail communications in other countries, some of which take privacy as seriously as we do. British Foreign Secretary William Hague felt obliged Monday to reassure Parliament that “our intelligence-sharing work with the United States is subject to ministerial and independent oversight” and to legislative scrutiny.

But we have oversight of intelligence operations in this country, too. The problem is that the system works more or less like a rubber stamp.

In its 34 years of existence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved more than 30,000 government requests for surveillance authority while rejecting a grand total of 11. That is not what I’d call oversight.

The NSA’s snooping is also subject to scrutiny by the Intelligence Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The chairmen of those panels have been among the NSA’s most vocal supporters in recent days. But since so much of the committees’ work is classified, they say they can’t tell us why.

And as for Obama, he said last week that “I welcome this debate, and I think it’s healthy for our democracy.” Why, then, didn’t he launch the discussion rather than wait for Snowden’s leaks?

In the coming debate, someone should explain why a midlevel computer guy working for a private contractor had access to so many of the NSA’s most closely held secrets. Someone should explain why the intelligence court is evidently so compliant. Someone should explain — perhaps in French, German and Spanish — why our allies’ e-mails are fair game for the agency’s prying eyes.

But here’s the big issue: The NSA, it now seems clear, is assembling an unimaginably vast trove of communications data, and the bigger it gets, the more useful it is in enabling analysts to make predictions.

It’s one thing if the NSA looks for patterns in the data that suggest a nascent overseas terrorist group or an imminent attack.

It’s another thing altogether if the agency observes, say, patterns that suggest the birth of the next tea party or Occupy Wall Street movement.

Is that paranoia? Then, reassure me. Let’s talk about the big picture and decide, as citizens, whether we are comfortable with the direction our intelligence agencies are heading. And let’s remember that it was Snowden, not our elected officials, who opened this vital conversation.

Reach Robinson at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Libertarianism is in vogue

Libertarianism is in vogue. Again.

By Chris Cillizza, Sunday, June 9, 10:52 AM E-mail the writer

Looking for the hot new(ish) thing in American politics? Try libertarianism.

Yes, that long-dismissed political philosophy that eschews government intervention in favor of individual liberty is again coming into vogue, particularly among young voters.

Two issues highlight the growing libertarian strain in the country.

The first is legalizing marijuana. For the first time in more than four decades of polling on the subject, a Pew Research Center survey found in April that a majority of Americans (52 percent) favored legalizing it. Among millennials — those born after 1980 — the numbers were significantly higher, with 65 percent supporting legalization.

The second is same-sex marriage. In a March Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58 percent of all respondents said that gay marriage should be legal, including a whopping 81 percent of those ages 18 to 29.

Polls aside, an analysis of actual votes in the 2012 presidential election also suggests that libertarianism is on the rise. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s 2012 presidential nominee and the former Republican governor of New Mexico, received nearly 1.3 million votes on Election Day — the first time the party’s nominee had ever taken more than a million votes. (Johnson won 0.99 percent of the overall votes cast, the all-time second highest for a Libertarian candidate, behind Ed Clark in 1980, who took 1.06 percent.)

More telling, however, was then-Rep. Ron Paul’s showing in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Paul, who was the Libertarian Party’s 1988 presidential nominee and continued to espouse the party principles in 2008 and 2012 despite running as a Republican, was the fourth-highest vote-getter in last year’s primary process, winning more than 2 million votes in a campaign fueled by the active support of young voters. Perhaps as importantly, the Texas congressman raised $41 million for his campaign, the vast majority of that total coming from online donations.

Now, consider all of those data points in light of the still-breaking news of the widespread collection of phone records and Internet data by the National Security Agency, a series of programs that President Obama and his top advisers have described as a necessity to combat terrorism. Combine the growing libertarian strain in the country with the controversy over the government’s encroachment into all aspects of our lives and you begin to see the potency of the message heading into 2016.

All of which brings us to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), son of Ron and the elected official who most clearly embodies the rising tide of libertarianism within the country and within his party.

Paul is responsible for the single most memorable moment in politics this year when he took to the Senate floor in March to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director. Paul’s goal was to highlight the U.S. policy on drones and to raise questions about the possibility of the government targeting U.S. citizens on American soil.

Before it was all over, roughly 13 hours after it had begun, Paul had been joined on the Senate floor by a who’s who of Republican Party luminaries, including Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), the party’s 2016 favorite for president; Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Republican leader in the chamber; and Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the most recent head of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. Libertarianism had won a victory on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

For his part, Paul has been careful to avoid being labeled as a flat-out libertarian — a categorization that badly hurt his father’s chances at actually being a contender in 2012, considering his strongly stated noninterventionist foreign-policy beliefs. Instead, Rand Paul has sought to create a sort of Republicanism with libertarian principles that fits more comfortably within the bounds of the GOP.

“The way we’re going to compete is by running people for office who can appreciate some issues that attract young people and independents: civil liberties, as well as a less aggressive foreign policy, not putting people in jail for marijuana, a much more tolerant type of point of view,” Paul told Spencer Ackerman during an interview for Wired magazine late last month. (Paul went on to predict that embracing such a view would make Republicans politically competitive in California, which seems a bit far-fetched, at least at the moment.)

Paul’s 2016 candidacy — and he will run for president in three years’ time — will test just how much libertarianism Republicans want in the Grand Old Party. But for a party badly in need of finding new voters open to their message, embracing libertarianism — at least in part — might not be a bad avenue for Republicans to explore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

http://www.gnupg.org/

The free version of PGP

http://www.pgpi.org/

More free PGP software

http://www.symantec.com/encryption

The commercial version of PGP

http://cryptography.org/getpgp.htm

Where to get PGP

http://www.openpgp.org/

http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/

Obama Africa trip to cost $60 to $100 million

I think this article shows that modern American Presidents are royal rulers that live in luxury with police state protections that far surpass anything a royal Roman Emperor could have dreamed about.

Source

Source: President Obama Africa trip could cost $60 million

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura The Washington Post Fri Jun 14, 2013 10:22 AM

When President Obama makes his first extended trip to sub-Saharan Africa this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances.

Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The elaborate security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander in chief on trips abroad.

Any journey by the president, such as one scheduled next week for Northern Ireland and Germany, is an immense and costly logistical challenge. But the trip to Africa is complicated by a confluence of factors that could make it one of the most expensive of Obama’s tenure, according to people familiar with the planning.

The first family is making back-to-back stops from June 26 to July 3 in three countries where U.S. officials are providing nearly all the resources, rather than depending heavily on local police forces, military authorities or hospitals for assistance.

The president and first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document.

But officials said Thursday that the safari had been canceled in favor of a trip to Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.

When The Post first asked White House officials about the safari last week, they said no final decision had been made. A White House official said Thursday that the cancellation was not related to The Post’s inquiries.

“We do not have a limitless supply of assets to support presidential missions, and we prioritized a visit to Robben Island over a two-hour safari in Tanzania,” said spokesman Josh Earnest. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t do both.” [Well $60 to $100 million for a stinking trip to Africa is close to a limitless supply of assets]

Internal administration documents circulated in April show that the Obama family was scheduled to go to both Robben Island and the safari park, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also made trips to multiple African nations involving similarly laborious preparations. Bush went in 2003 and 2008, bringing his wife on both occasions. Bush’s two daughters went along on the first trip, which included a safari at a game preserve on the Botswana-South Africa border.

“Even in the most developed places of Western Europe, the level of support you need for mass movements by the president is really extraordinary,” said Steve Atkiss, who coordinated travel as special assistant for operations to Bush. “As you go farther afield, to less-developed places, certainly it’s more of a logistical challenge.”

White House and Secret Service officials declined to discuss the details of the security operations, and administration aides cautioned that the president’s itinerary is not finalized.

Obama’s overseas travels come as government agencies, including the Secret Service, are wrestling with mandatory, across-the-board spending cuts. The service has had to slice $84 million from its budget this year, and this spring the agency canceled public White House tours to save $74,000 a week in overtime costs.

Many details about foreign presidential trips are classified for national security reasons, and there is little public information about overall costs. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that Clinton’s 1998 trip to six African nations cost the U.S. government at least $42.7 million. Most of that was incurred by the military, which made 98 airlift missions to transport personnel and vehicles, and set up temporary medical evacuation units in five countries.

That figure did not include costs borne by the Secret Service, which were considered classified.

Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, according to one person familiar with the journey, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. The Secret Service planning document, which was provided to The Post by a person who is concerned about the amount of resources necessary for the trip, does not specify costs.

“The infrastructure that accompanies the president’s travels is beyond our control,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “The security requirements are not White House-driven, they are Secret Service-driven.”

Current and former government security officials involved in presidential trips said White House staff also help determine what’s required, because they plan the visits and parameters. The Secret Service and military respond to that itinerary by providing what their agencies consider the required security.

White House officials said the trip was long overdue, marking Obama’s first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa aside from a 22-hour stopover in Ghana in 2009. The emerging democracies on the itinerary are crucial partners in regional security conflicts, Rhodes said.

Obama will hold bilateral meetings with each country’s leader and seek to forge stronger economic ties at a time when China is investing heavily in Africa. He also will highlight global health programs, including HIV/AIDS prevention.

The first lady, who toured South Africa and Botswana without the president in 2011, will headline some events on her own during the week. The stops will add to the logistical challenges, because she will require her own security detail and vehicles, the planning document shows.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan declined to discuss details of the journey. “We always provide the appropriate level of protection to create a secure environment,” he said.

According to the Secret Service document, Obama will spend a night in Dakar, Senegal, two nights in Johannesburg, a night in Cape Town and one night in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Among the 56 vehicles for the trip are parade limousines for the president and first lady, a specialized communications vehicle for secure telephone and video connections, a truck that jams radio frequencies around the presidential motorcade, a fully loaded ambulance that can handle biological or chemical contaminants and a truck for X-ray equipment.

The Secret Service transports such vehicles, along with bulletproof glass, on most trips, including those inside the United States, White House officials said. But with quick stops in three countries, the agency will need three sets of each, because there is not enough time to transfer the equipment, according to the planning document.

One hundred agents are needed as “post-standers” — to man security checkpoints and borders around the president — in each of the first three cities he visits. Sixty-five are needed to meet up with Obama in Dar es Salaam. Before the safari in Mikumi National Park was canceled this week, an additional 35 post-standers had been slated to protect the Obamas and their two daughters there, according to the document.

In addition, 80 to 100 additional agents will be flown in to work rotating shifts, with round-the-clock coverage, for Obama’s and his family’s security details, counterassault teams and logistics coordinators.

The planning document does not provide a total number of how many individual agents will be involved in the trip; some will work in more than one location.

Officials said the Secret Service does not want the president traveling anywhere without a top-rated trauma center nearby. The White House medical unit makes decisions about which foreign hospitals meet its standards when it makes advance visits to the locations for planned trips, officials said.

In much of the developing world, the U.S. Navy provides a “floating hospital” on an aircraft carrier or amphibious ship nearby, officials said.

“This is what you need to support the American presidency,” Atkiss said of the requirements, “regardless of who the president is.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

Don't count on the secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to protect our Constitutional rights.

Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected by the secret FISA courts, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters. National security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence.

Source

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: June 13, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

By Raphael Satter

Associated Press

Posted: 06/14/2013 09:29:47 AM PDT

LONDON -- Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.

But given the revelations spilling out into the media, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying by the U.S. agency.

For some, it's a matter of indifference who or what is rifling through their electronic records. Others, mindful of spy agencies' history of abuse, are more concerned.

Here are some basic tips to avoid having your personal life turned into an intelligence report:

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ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS

Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe -- not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.

To beat the snoops, experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

[The government probably can still decrypt and read your emails, but the only question is how long will it take them to decrypt the data, and how much will it cost them. If you are committing a victimless less crime that should be legal, play it safe and don't send it over the internet. On the other hand it's a great idea to use PGP to encrypt your weekly grocery shopping list and useless chit chat you talk to friends about. Make it expensive for the government to spy on you an collect useless information.]

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USE TOR

Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.

Disadvantages: Browsing the web with TOR can be painfully slow. And some services -- like file swapping protocols used by many Internet users to share videos and music -- aren't compatible.

[If you ask me TOR sounds pretty useless. The data you send on the internet is already split into packets and some times the packets travel different paths to get to the final destination]

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DITCH THE PHONE

Your everyday cell phone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cell phone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cell phone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.

An even bigger issue is that cell phones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give the NSA a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cell phones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home. [And remember cell phones are just RADIO TRANSMITTERS. Everything you say is broadcast on the radio, and ANYBODY can listen in. Grab one of those old TV sets with 81 channels and tune in to the high end of the dial. Hear that junk. It's cell phone calls. If you can hear it on an old TV set, the government can also listen in.]

Disadvantages: Not having a cell phone handy when you really need it. Other alternatives, like using "burner" phones paid for anonymously and discarded after use, rapidly become expensive.

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CUT UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS

The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. So stick to cash, or, if you're more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around.

Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online currency, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.

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DON'T KEEP YOUR DATA IN AMERICA OR WITH AMERICAN COMPANIES

U.S. companies are subject to U.S. law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials -- not just at the NSA -- can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.

If you don't like the sound of PRISM, National Security Letters, or anything to do with the Patriot Act, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.

Disadvantages: Silicon Valley's Internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What's more, there's no guarantee that European spy agencies don't have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.

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STEER CLEAR OF MALICIOUS SOFTWARE

If they can't track it, record it, or intercept it, an increasing number of spies aren't shy about hacking their way in to steal your data outright. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, warned the Guardian that his agency had been on a worldwide binge of cyberattacks.

"We hack everyone everywhere," he said.

Former officials don't appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as "commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries' network." In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that "we are the best at doing it. Period."

Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus program, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.

Disadvantages: Keeping abreast of all the latest updates and warily scanning emails for viruses can be exhausting.

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SO WILL ALL THIS KEEP MY DATA SAFE FROM SPYING?

Safer, maybe.

Using anonymity services and encryption "simply make it harder, but not impossible for a dedicated investigator to link your activities together and identify you," Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said in an email.

"Someone can always find you ---- just depends on how motivated they are (and how much information they have access to)."

No effective check on government snooping

Source

No effective check on government snooping

The United States has a serious problem with domestic intelligence gathering. The federal government is grossly overreaching. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is now an established failure at preventing overreach.

After 9/11, legislation was passed relaxing some of the restrictions on domestic surveillance. But those restrictions weren’t abolished.

Under the business records section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, the FBI can ask the FISC to approve an order to produce documents “to obtain foreign intelligence information.” ”Foreign intelligence information” is defined as relating to foreign espionage within the United States or a terrorist attack by a foreign power.

So, how do you get from that to an order requiring telephone companies to turn over the records of every U.S. customer? Logically, you can’t. Legally, you shouldn’t.

FISA is specifically supposed to exclude the ability to snoop on “U.S. persons.” The only exception is supposed to be when gathering information on a U.S. person’s activities is “necessary” to thwarting a terrorist attack or tracking foreign spies.

Despite these restrictions, the federal government is collecting the phone records of every American. And although the FISA authority to obtain business records reposes in the FBI, the records are turned over to the National Security Agency which warehouses them for analysis.

NSA is an agency of the Defense Department. Its legal mission is to conduct electronic surveillance outside the United States. Its role in domestic intelligence gathering is supposed to be sharply limited. Yet it is warehousing the phone records of every American.

The legality of the other surveillance program recently revealed, PRISM, is more difficult to evaluate. According to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who partially declassified the program, it is limited to intercepting the electronic communications of foreign persons for information relevant to terrorism or foreign spying. That is what FISA is supposed to permit.

But, from news accounts, it appears that the federal government has some sort of automatic access to data streams for collections that aren’t specifically approved or ordered by the FISC. That kind of broad, standing authorization isn’t contemplated by the law.

Does it matter?

The courts have held, incorrectly in my judgment, that there isn’t a Fourth Amendment protection for information you give to third parties. So, if you have a cell phone, the government can demand, without demonstrating probable cause, that the telephone company turn over a record of what numbers you called, what numbers called you, and where you were when calls were made or received.

However, in considering the constitutional question, no court has contemplated the Fourth Amendment implications of the government demanding that information continuously on every American. The Fourth Amendment is intended to protect “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” It’s hard to reconcile that right with a government that, without any reason to believe that it will produce any information relevant to any legitimate government purpose, demands continuous access to your phone records.

Moreover, Congress has passed a law statutorily limiting the federal government’s ability to demand such records under FISA to when it will produce “foreign intelligence information.” Every phone call made in the United States does not contain “foreign intelligence information.”

Supposedly, the data warehouse just sits there until there is a specific terrorist threat being investigated and then impersonal algorithms tease the data to yield informative patterns. Actually getting the content of any communications requires another court order.

But abuses of intelligence gathering powers have been more the rule than the exception in American history. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was in part a sophisticated blackmail operation and in part a private investigative agency in service to powerful politicians. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed to curb domestic spying abuses by the NSA.

Thwarting terrorist attacks requires intelligence more than anything else. But surely the federal government is not so incompetent that its intelligence gathering has to begin with the phone records of every American.

ACLU sues Obama administration over NSA surveillance

ACLU sues Obama administration over NSA surveillance

By Morgan Little

June 11, 2013, 1:57 p.m.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced Tuesday that it has filed a federal lawsuit against key members of President Obama’s national security team over the National Security Agency’s telephone surveillance, the first legal challenge to the newly disclosed intelligence gathering system.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, argues that the NSA’s ongoing, daily collection of virtually all Verizon telephone records is unconstitutional and should be stopped.

"This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said in a statement. "It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.”

As a Verizon customer, the ACLU claims that the NSA’s seizure of telephone records “compromises sensitive information about its work” and harms its ability to freely communicate.

The Guardian newspaper last week published an order, marked “Top Secret,” from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that requires Verizon to turn over all “telephony metadata,” or records of each call, over a three-month period. Lawmakers later said the program has been in operation nonstop for seven years under similar court orders.

The White House has come under harsh criticism for the NSA’s deal with Verizon, as well as the so-called PRISM program, which was designed to secretly obtain emails, photos, documents and other online material from foreign nationals. A former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, has claimed responsibility for leaking both programs.

The administration has strongly defended the surveillance systems, saying they are approved by Congress and the courts, and thus within the law.

Obama "believes as commander-in-chief that the oversight structures that are in place to ensure that there is the proper review of the kinds of programs that we have in place, authorized by Congress through the Patriot Act, and FISA do strike that balance,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

Lawmakers concerned over US surveillance programs

Source

Lawmakers concerned over US surveillance programs

KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press, By KIMBERLY DOZIER and LARA JAKES, Associated Press

Updated 8:42 am, Wednesday, June 12, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers voiced their confusion and concern over the sweeping secret surveillance programs revealed recently, after receiving an unusual briefing on the government's yearslong collection of phone records and Internet usage.

"People aren't satisfied," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said as he left the briefing Tuesday. "More detail needs to come out."

The phalanx of FBI, legal and intelligence officials who briefed the entire House was the latest attempt to soothe outrage over National Security Agency programs that collect billions of Americans' phone and Internet records. Since they were revealed last week, the programs have spurred distrust in the Obama administration from around the world.

House members were told not to disclose information they heard in the briefing because it is classified.

While many rank-and-file members of Congress have expressed anger and bewilderment, there is apparently very little appetite among key leaders and intelligence committee chiefs to pursue any action. Most have expressed support for the programs as invaluable counterterror tools and some have labeled the leaker who disclosed them a "traitor."

That man, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said in an interview published Wednesday that he had fled to Hong Kong not to hide from justice but to "reveal criminality." Snowden said he would ask "the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide his fate."

"I am neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American," he told the South China Morning Post.

Congressional leaders and intelligence committee members have been routinely briefed about the spy programs, officials said, and Congress has at least twice renewed laws approving them. But the disclosure of their sheer scope stunned some lawmakers, shocked foreign allies from nations with strict privacy protections and emboldened civil liberties advocates who long have accused the government of being too invasive in the name of national security.

Some lawmakers complained that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had misled a Senate committee in March by denying that the NSA collects data on millions of Americans. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., called for Clapper to resign immediately.

"Congress can't make informed decisions on intelligence issues when the head of the intelligence community willfully makes false statements," Amash, a tea partyer, wrote on Facebook.

Some Congress members acknowledged they'd been caught unawares by the scope of the programs, having skipped previous briefings by the intelligence committees.

"I think Congress has really found itself a little bit asleep at the wheel," Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said.

Many leaving the forum declared themselves disturbed by what they'd heard — and in need of more answers.

"Congress needs to debate this issue and determine what tools we give to our intelligence community to protect us from a terrorist attack," said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and a backer of the surveillance. "Really it's a debate between public safety, how far we go with public safety and protecting us from terrorist attacks versus how far we go on the other side."

He said his panel and the House Judiciary Committee will examine what has happened and see whether there are recommendations to be made for the future.

The Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee will get to question the head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, on Wednesday, and the Senate and House intelligence committees will be briefed on the programs again Thursday.

The country's main civil liberties organization wasn't buying the administration's explanations, filing the most significant lawsuit against the massive phone record collection program so far. The American Civil Liberties Union and its New York chapter sued the federal government Tuesday in New York, asking a court to demand that the Obama administration end the program and purge the records it has collected.

The ACLU is claiming standing as a customer of Verizon, which was identified last week as the phone company the government had ordered to turn over daily records of calls made by all its customers.

Polls of U.S. public opinion show a mixed response to the controversy. A poll by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center conducted over the weekend found Americans generally prioritize the government's need to investigate terrorist threats over the need to protect personal privacy.

But a CBS News poll conducted June 9-10 showed that while most approve of government collection of phone records of Americans suspected of terrorist activity and Internet activities of foreigners, a majority disapproved of federal agencies collecting the phone records of ordinary Americans. Thirty percent agreed with the government's assessment that the revelation of the programs would hurt the U.S.' ability to prevent future terrorist attacks, while 57 percent said it would have no impact.

A law enforcement official said prosecutors were building a case against Snowden on Tuesday and weighing what charges might be brought. But it was unlikely Snowden would be charged with treason, which carries the death penalty as a punishment and therefore could complicate extradition from foreign countries. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there had been no final decision on charges.

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Associated Press writers Donna Cassata, Frederic Frommer, Alan Fram, Andrew Miga, Pete Yost and Connie Cass contributed to this report.

Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

NUEVA YORK, EU.- Envueltos en el escándalo de vigilancia en internet del Gobierno de Estados Unidos, Facebook y Google, dos íconos de la era digital, sufren un golpe a su reputación que los ha dejado en una posición cuando menos incómoda frente a sus usuarios.

Ambas compañías, al igual que Microsoft, dueña de Skype; AOL; Yahoo!; PalTalk y Apple, desmintieron rotundamente su colaboración con el programa PRISM, a través del cual la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad (NSA, por sus siglas en inglés) monitorea las conversaciones en la red de redes.

En días recientes, el diario británico The Guardian reveló la existencia de PRISM gracias a un subcontratista de la agencia, Edward Snowden, quien filtró los documentos a la prensa y que huyó a Hong Kong.

Pero las desmentidas de Larry Page, CEO de Google, y Mark Zuckerberg, líder de Facebook, en las que afirman que no brindaron acceso directo a sus servidores, estuvieron lejos de despejar las dudas que azotan la credibilidad de ambas empresas.

“Es más probable que no estén autorizadas a revelar su participación, a confirmar una cosa o la otra”, afirmó a REFORMA Dave Naass, vocero de Electronic Frontier Foundation, un grupo que pelea por la privacidad de los usuarios de internet.

Naass dijo que la semántica de los comunicados de ambos empresarios fue escogida para evitar reconocer la participación en un programa clasificado, y que lo más probable es que las compañías estaban al tanto del monitoreo.

La otra alternativa es que los servicios de Inteligencia vulneraron la seguridad de las empresas sin que estas se enteraran, algo que también sería perjudicial para la reputación de ambos gigantes.

Muchos usuarios descargaron en las redes sociales el malestar con ambas compañías. En Twitter, que se negó a participar del programa de monitoreo, circulaba ayer una fotografía que mostraba a nueva “política de seguridad de Facebook”. Una de las nuevas opciones para compartir información incluía un nuevo grupo: “Amigos y la CIA”; o “Sólo yo y la CIA”.

“Facebook es una sucursal del FBI”, se quejó Phil Wang, en uno de los cientos de comentarios que los usuarios de la red social dejaron en el mensaje que Zuckerberg publicó luego de puntillosos reportes periodísticos, uno de ellos en The New York Times, en los que se explicaba cómo se tejió la colaboración de las compañías con el Gobierno.

Con todo, aún es una incógnita si las empresas deberán enfrentar consecuencias más severas como un menor tráfico. Gracias a la penetración de los celulares inteligentes, los estadounidenses pasan en promedio 32 minutos al día en Facebook, según un informe de la consultora IDC. Google es el principal motor de búsqueda del mundo.

Ilya Shapiro, del Instituto Cato, un centro de estudios libertario de Washington, dijo que no se puede descartar que las empresas enfrenten reclamos por colaborar con Washington y entregar información privada de sus usuarios.

“Pero eso depende del acuerdo de privacidad, ese contrato que nadie lee”, matizó Shapiro a REFORMA.

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

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NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: June 14, 2013 at 10:50

Computer programmers believe they know how to build cryptographic systems that are impossible for anyone, even the U.S. government, to crack. So why can the NSA read your e-mail?

Last week, leaks revealed that the Web sites most people use every day are sharing users’ private information with the government. Companies participating in the National Security Agency’s program, code-named PRISM, include Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During the 1990s, a “cypherpunk” movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for governments to spy on ordinary users’ private communications.

The government seemed to believe this story, too. “The ability of just about everybody to encrypt their messages is rapidly outrunning our ability to decode them,” a U.S. intelligence official told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. The government classified cryptographic software as a munition, banning its export outside the United States. And it proposed requiring that cryptographic systems have “back doors” for government interception.

The cypherpunks won that battle. By the end of the Clinton administration, the government conceded that the Internet had made it impossible to control the spread of strong cryptographic software. But more than a decade later, the cypherpunks seem to have lost the war. Software capable of withstanding NSA snooping is widely available, but hardly anyone uses it. Instead, we use Gmail, Skype, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger and other applications whose data is reportedly accessible through PRISM.

And that’s not a coincidence: Adding strong encryption to the most popular Internet products would make them less useful, less profitable and less fun.

“Security is very rarely free,” says J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. “There are trade-offs between convenience and usability and security.”

Most people’s priority: Convenience

Consumers have overwhelmingly chosen convenience and usability. Mainstream communications tools are more user-friendly than their cryptographically secure competitors and have features that would be difficult to implement in an NSA-proof fashion.

And while most types of software get more user-friendly over time, user-friendly cryptography seems to be intrinsically difficult. Experts are not much closer to solving the problem today than they were two decades ago.

Ordinarily, the way companies make sophisticated software accessible to regular users is by performing complex, technical tasks on their behalf. The complexity of Google, Microsoft and Apple’s vast infrastructure is hidden behind the simple, polished interfaces of their Web and mobile apps. But delegating basic security decisions to a third party means giving it the ability to access your private content and share it with others, including the government.

Most modern online services do make use of encryption. Popular Web services such as Gmail and Hotmail support an encryption standard called SSL. If you visit a Web site and see a “lock” icon in the corner of your browser window, that means SSL encryption is enabled. But while this kind of encryption will protect users against ordinary bad guys, it’s useless against governments.

That’s because SSL only protects data moving between your device and the servers operated by Google, Apple or Microsoft. Those service providers have access to unencrypted copies of your data. So if the government suspects criminal behavior, it can compel tech companies to turn over private e-mails or Facebook posts.

That problem can be avoided with “end-to-end” encryption. In this scheme, messages are encrypted on the sender’s computer and decrypted on the recipient’s device. Intermediaries such as Google or Microsoft only see the encrypted version of the message, making it impossible for them to turn over copies to the government.

Software like that exists. One of the oldest is PGP, e-mail encryption software released in 1991. Others include OTR (for “off the record”), which enables secure instant messaging, and the Internet telephony apps Silent Circle and Redphone.

But it’s difficult to add new features to applications with end-to-end encryption. Take Gmail, for example. “If you wanted to prevent government snooping, you’d have to prevent Google’s servers from having a copy of the text of your messages,” Halderman says. “But that would make it much harder for Google to provide features like search over your messages.” Filtering spam also becomes difficult. And end-to-end encryption would also make it difficult for Google to make money on the service, since it couldn’t use the content of messages to target ads.

A similar point applies to Facebook. The company doesn’t just transmit information from one user to another. It automatically resizes users’ photos and allows them to “tag” themselves and their friends. Facebook filters the avalanche of posts generated by your friends to display the ones you are most likely to find the most interesting. And it indexes the information users post to make it searchable.

These features depend on Facebook’s servers having access to a person’s private data, and it would be difficult to implement them in a system based on end-to-end encryption. While computer scientists are working on techniques for creating more secure social-media sites, these techniques aren’t yet mature enough to support all of Facebook’s features or efficient enough to serve hundreds of millions of users.

Other user headaches

End-to-end encryption creates other headaches for users. Conventional online services offer mechanisms for people to recover lost passwords. These mechanisms work because Apple, Microsoft and other online service providers have access to unencrypted data.

In contrast, when a system has end-to-end encryption, losing a password is catastrophic; it means losing all data in the user’s account.

Also, encryption is effective only if you’re communicating with the party you think you’re communicating with. This security relies on keys — large numbers associated with particular people that make it possible to scramble a message on one end and decode it on the other. In a maneuver cryptographers call a “man in the middle” attack, a malicious party impersonates a message’s intended recipient and tricks the sender into using the wrong encryption key. To thwart this kind of attack, sender and recipient need a way to securely exchange and verify each other’s encryption keys.

“A key is supposed to be associated closely with a person, which means you want a person to be involved in creating their own key, and in verifying the keys of people they communicate with,” says Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University. “Those steps tend to be awkward and confusing.”

And even those who are willing to make the effort are likely to make mistakes that compromise security. The computer scientists Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar explored these problem in a famous 1999 paper called “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt.” They focused on PGP, which was (and still is) one of the most popular tools for users to send encrypted e-mail.

PGP “is not usable enough to provide effective security for most computer users,” the authors wrote.

Users expect software to “just work” without worrying too much about the technical details. But the researchers discovered that users tended to make mistakes that compromise their security. Users are supposed to send other people their “public key,” used to encode messages addressed to them, and to keep their private key a secret. Yet some users foolishly did the opposite, sending others the private key that allowed eavesdroppers to unscramble e-mail addressed to them. Others failed to make backup copies of their private encryption keys, so when their hard drives crashed, they lost access to their encrypted e-mail.

Using PGP is such a hassle that even those with a strong need for secure communication resist its use. When Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the details of the PRISM program, first contacted Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian in February, he asked the journalist to set up PGP on his computer so the two could communicate securely. He even sent Greenwald a video with step-by-step directions for setting up the software. But Greenwald, who didn’t yet know the significance of Snowden’s leaks, dragged his feet. He did not set up the software until late March, after filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was also in contact with Snowden, met with Greenwald and alerted him to the significance of his disclosures.

Going with the flow

Felten argues that another barrier to adopting strong cryptography is a chicken-and-egg problem: It is only useful if you know other people are also using it. Even people who have gone to the trouble of setting up PGP still send most of their e-mail in plain text because most recipients don’t have the capability to receive encrypted e-mail. People tend to use what’s installed on their computer. So even those who have Redphone will make most of their calls with Skype because that’s what other people use.

Halderman isn’t optimistic that strong cryptography will catch on with ordinary users anytime soon. In recent years, the companies behind the most popular Web browsers have beefed up their cryptographic capabilities, which could make more secure online services possible. But the broader trend is that users are moving more and more data from their hard drives to cloud computing platforms, which makes data even more vulnerable to government snooping.

Strong cryptographic software is available to those who want to use it. Whistleblowers, dissidents, criminals and governments use it every day. But cryptographic software is too complex and confusing to reach a mass audience anytime soon. Most people simply aren’t willing to invest the time and effort required to ensure the NSA can’t read their e-mail or listen to their phone calls. And so for the masses, online privacy depends more on legal safeguards than technological wizardry.

The cypherpunks dreamed of a future where technology protected people from government spying. But end-to-end encryption doesn’t work well if people don’t understand it. And the glory of Google or Facebook, after all, is that anyone can use them without really knowing how they work.

Hong Kong rally backs Snowden, denounces allegations of U.S. spying

Hong Kong rally backs Snowden, denounces allegations of U.S. spying

12:30 p.m. CDT, June 15, 2013

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A few hundred rights advocates and political activists marched through Hong Kong on Saturday to demand protection for Edward Snowden, who leaked revelations of U.S. electronic surveillance and is now believed to be holed up in the former British colony.

Marchers gathered outside the U.S. consulate shouting slogans denouncing alleged spying operations aimed at China and Hong Kong, but the numbers were modest compared to rallies over other rights and political issues.

"Arrest Obama, free Snowden," protesters shouted outside the slate grey building as police looked on. Many waved banners that said: "Betray Snowden, betray freedom", "Big brother is watching you" and "Obama is checking your email".

Some blew whistles in support of Snowden, 29, the American former CIA contractor who has acknowledged being behind leaks of the surveillance programs by the National Security Agency.

The procession moved on to government headquarters in the city, which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997 but enjoys far more liberal laws on dissent and freedom of expression.

About a dozen groups organized two rallies, including the city's two largest political camps. Leaders of major political parties sought explanations for Snowden's allegations of spying.

Hong Kong's largest pro-Beijing political party, the DAB, demanded an apology from Washington, clarification of "illegal" espionage activities and an immediate halt to them.

"I think the Hong Kong government should protect him," the DAB's vice-chairwoman, Starry Lee, said outside the consulate.

Snowden reportedly flew to Hong Kong on May 20. He checked out of a luxury hotel on Monday and his whereabouts remain unknown. Snowden has said he intends to stay in Hong Kong to fight any potential U.S. moves to extradite him.

China has avoided any explicit comment on its position towards Snowden. A senior source with ties to the Communist Party leadership said Beijing was reluctant to jeopardize recently improved ties with Washington.

Snowden told the South China Morning Post this week that Americans had spied extensively on targets including the Chinese University of Hong Kong that hosts an exchange which handles nearly all the city's domestic web traffic. Other alleged targets included government officials, businesses and students.

Snowden pledged not to "hide from justice" and said he would place his trust in Hong Kong's legal system. Some legal experts, however, say an extradition treaty between Hong Kong and the United States has functioned smoothly since 1998.

It is unclear whether Chinese authorities would intervene over any U.S. attempts to extradite Snowden, though lawyers say Beijing has rarely interfered with extradition cases.

His arrival comes at a sensitive time for Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying, whose popularity has sunk since taking office last year amid a series of scandals and corruption probes into prominent figures. Leung has offered no comment on Snowden.

Interest among residents into the case is growing and numbers could rise if extradition proceedings are launched.

Demonstrations on issues ranging from denunciations of pro-communist education policy imposed by Beijing, high property prices and a growing wealth gap have attracted large crowds.

A vigil marking the anniversary of China's June 1989 crackdown on democracy advocates drew tens of thousands this month and a record 180,000 last year.

Diplomats and opposition figures in the city have warned of growing behind-the-scenes meddling by Beijing in Hong Kong's affairs, as well as deep-rooted spying activities.

(Additional reporting by James Pomfret and Anne-Marie Roantree; Writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Ron Popeski)

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

Associated Press Sun Jun 16, 2013 1:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Current and former top U.S. officials on Sunday defended the government’s collection of phone and Internet data following new revelations about the secret surveillance programs, saying the operations were essential in disrupting terrorist plots and did not infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.

In interviews on Sunday television talk shows, guests ranging from President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA and National Security Agency head Michael Hayden said the government’s reliance on data collection from both Americans and foreign nationals was constitutional and carefully overseen by executive, legislative and court authorities.

All three branches of government, using “aggressive internal checks inside the administration, from inspectors general and routine audits, are overseeing how we do these programs,” McDonough said. He added, “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking.”

The latest reassurances came as a new Washington Post report Sunday described the massive intertwined structure of four major data collection programs that have been set up by the government since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Post report follows earlier stories based on documents provided by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Two secret programs, the Post reported in its new disclosures, are aimed at phone and Internet metadata, while two more target contents of phone and Internet communications.

Metadata includes logs and timing of phone calls and lists of Internet communications, but does not include the actual contents of communications. Even without knowing those contents, intelligence officials can learn much from metadata, including likely locations and patterns of behavior.

A previously reported surveillance program aimed at the phone logs and location information of millions of Americans is called Mainway, the Post reported. A second program targeting the Internet contact logs and location information of foreign users is called Marina.

A third program, which intercepts telephone calls and routes their contents to government listeners, is called Nucleon.

A fourth program, Prism, exposed recently by Snowden, forces major Internet firms to turn over the detailed contents of Internet communications. Prism is aimed at foreign users but sometimes also sweeps up the content of Americans’ emails and other Internet communications, officials have acknowledged.

“The metadata story does touch upon Americans in a massive way with phone records but not the content. The Prism story is about foreigners and it is about content,” Hayden told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said that any phone metadata from Americans swept up in the surveillance is held under careful safeguards, kept in a “lockbox” that can only be accessed if it becomes relevant to terror investigations. U.S. officials also said Saturday that gathered data is destroyed every five years.

“This is a lock box with only phone numbers, no names, no addresses in it, we’ve used it sparingly,” Rogers said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But one Congressional critic of the secrecy surrounding the government’s surveillance raised doubts about the effectiveness of the widespread collection of Americans’ phone metadata.

“I don’t think collecting millions and millions of Americans’ phone calls — now this is the metadata, this is the time, place, to whom you direct the calls — is making us any safer,” said Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat. Udall said he would introduce a bill this week to narrow the reach of that collection to only “those who have a link to terrorism.”

Hayden said he worried that news reports about the programs have often provided erroneous information, “much to the harm of a rational national debate.” He did not specify those concerns.

The disclosures, provided in recent days by both the Post and The Guardian newspaper, came from classified documents exposed by Snowden, 29, who was working as a private contractor with the NSA and later said he grew disenchanted by what he saw as a growing secret American surveillance apparatus. After working with the two newspapers, Snowden turned up in Hong Kong, prompting concern that he might cooperate with Chinese authorities.

“I am very, very worried that he still has additional information that he hasn’t released yet, the Chinese would welcome the opportunity and probably be willing to provide immunity for him or sanctuary for him, if you will, in exchange for what he presumably knows,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Cheney added that he has “trouble believing” Snowden had access to all the materials he has disclosed, suggesting the possibility that Snowden had an accomplice inside U.S. security circles.

“I think you have to ask that question,” Cheney said.

McDonough, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” declined to speculate on Snowden’s dealings with China or his access to secret documents, citing a law enforcement investigation. But he cautioned against “some of the hyperbole that now is being thrown around from him and from others involved in this debate that would somehow cast a pall on the intelligence community.”

But McDonough also disputed Snowden’s claim that he had the ability to listen in on any phone conversation, including the president’s.

“That’s incorrect,” McDonough said.

Uncle Sam wants to know more about your Facebook page

Facebook reveals number of requests under government Internet surveillance program

By Brandon Bailey

Mercury News

Posted: 06/14/2013 08:45:50 PM PDT

MENLO PARK -- For the first time, Facebook late Friday disclosed the number of requests it received for user data from all government entities, and became the first Silicon Valley company to include in that figure the number of ultrasecret national security requests.

In a blog post, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot revealed that for the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. -- including local, state, and federal authorities, and including criminal and national security-related requests -- was between 9,000 and 10,000.

run the gamut -- everything from a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.

The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9,000 to 10,000 requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts, he noted.

But with more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, Ullyot added, "this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S., state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months."

Reports surfaced last week that government officials were collecting huge amounts of private Internet and telephone data -- disclosures enabled by leaks from a former National Security Agency contractor. Since then, Ullyot said, Facebook has been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities, urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders the company is required to comply with.

Google (GOOG) followed up Tuesday by announcing it has asked the FBI and Department of Justice for permission to begin reporting how many data requests the company receives from the government under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. FISA, the authority used by the government for its secret PRISM program aimed at tracking online activities of some Internet users, requires companies to keep those requests secret.

"We're pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) -- which until now no company has been permitted Facebook on Friday became the first Silicon Valley company to disclose how many requests for user data it has received under the U.S. government's ultrasecret foreign-intelligence surveillance laws. (Robert Galbraith / Reuters) to do," Ullyot wrote. As of Friday, he said, the government will only authorize Facebook to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range.

Ullyot called the initial step "progress," and said the company is continuing to push for even more transparency, "so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds."

Civil liberties groups that have criticized the government's data-gathering efforts say that such disclosures are helpful, but they have also complained that the broad ranges that the companies have reported are too vague and do not provide a full picture of government surveillance.

Until now, Facebook has not disclosed any data about government information requests, saying it was not allowed to provide a complete picture of those requests because of government secrecy rules.

Google has previously disclosed certain types of requests, including so-called "National Security Letters" issued under the Patriot Act, but it has not been allowed to say anything about requests issued under FISA.

Facebook's move revealed a split within the tech industry: Microsoft issued a similar report Friday that also provided a total number of government data requests that included an unspecified number of FISA requests. But Google criticized that approach, saying it was not helpful for the government to require the companies to provide only a single total for all types of requests.

"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests. We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters," Google said in a statement reported by several tech blogs. "Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."

Another tech company, Twitter, echoed Google's concern. Twitter legal director Benjamin Lee posted a tweet on his personal account late Friday, saying "We agree with @google: It's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests -- including FISA disclosures -- separately."

Mercury News Staff Writer Tracy Seipel contributed to this report. Contact Brandon Bailey at bbailey@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Associated Press Fri Jun 14, 2013 9:32 PM

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s top attorney said Friday night that after negotiations with national security officials the company has been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.

Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.

Facebook was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.

Ullyot said the company wanted to reveal the information because of “confusion and inaccurate reporting” on the issue, and to show that only “a tiny fraction of one percent” of its 1.1 billion users have been affected.

In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.

The companies have sought to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named “PRISM” that was revealed in leaks last week.

“We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a statement from Google said. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.”

Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users’ data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.

“We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested,” Ullyot said.” And we respond only as required by law.”

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

Source

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.

Follow Eric on Twitter and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com. Join the conversation on The Daily Caller

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

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.”

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

Source

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

By Richard A. Serrano and Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

richard.serrano@latimes.com

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Obscure untested oversight board will protect our rights

Source

Obama relying on untested oversight board

Associated Press Tue Jun 18, 2013 11:55 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feds charge freedom fighter Snowden with treason!!!!

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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'

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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???

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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

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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?

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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

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.

Around the Bay Area, you're being watched

Source

Around the Bay Area, you're being watched

By Josh Richman and Angela Woodall Staff writers

Posted: 06/30/2013 01:29:21 AM PDT

Across the Bay Area -- from Pittsburg [California] to San Francisco, from Tiburon to Gilroy -- you're being watched.

And it's not just the National Security Agency secretly vacuuming up your personal data. Local police agencies are increasingly adopting Big Data technologies such as automatic license-plate readers that gather information about everyone, whether they've broken the law or not.

A lot of the information ends up on the 14th floor of a federal office building in San Francisco, where a "fusion center" run by state and local law enforcement agencies combines the data with a plethora of personal information about you, from credit reports to car rentals to unlisted phone numbers to gun licenses.

"No one has any idea of the scale of information being gathered," said Mike Katz-Lacabe, of San Leandro, who discovered this in a very personal way.

A San Leandro school board member, Katz-Lacabe said a comment he heard about license-plate readers at a city council meeting prompted him to file public-records requests that revealed not only that his Toyota Tercel's license plate had been photographed all over town, but also that it and all kinds of other information were being collated at the fusion center. "I was a little shocked," he said.

Along with many of the nation's 77 other fusion centers, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as an antiterrorism intelligence hub. And like many of the other centers, it has morphed into a huge data center whose purpose is to solve and prevent all kinds of crimes -- from terrorist bombings to car thefts.

Authorities insist there's nothing for law-abiding people to worry about. They say they're just using the latest technology to gather and consolidate information they've used for years -- extra eyes and ears in an age of skimpy budgets and understaffed beats.

Police are also beefing up their use of video surveillance. The latest Bay Area trend allows patrol officers to view surveillance video 24/7 on their smartphones. Many Bay Area police agencies now have at least some cruisers fitted with automatic license-plate readers to scan every car they pass. This and reams of other data from 15 other counties are fed to the fusion center, where analysts search for patterns indicating suspicious activity.

Mike Sena, the Northern California fusion center's director, said his agency is simply centralizing law-enforcement information that was fragmented in the past.

"Before it would be hit or miss," he said in his office at the center, which overlooks San Francisco's Civic Center. He's quick to reject any analogies between his agency and the NSA: "We're not some big spy shop."

California's six fusion centers have been credited with tracking down men who made bomb threats to Delta Air Lines and the U.S. Embassy in Italy; foiling an attempted kidnapping in Sacramento; and helping to quickly find a suspicious tractor-trailer reportedly headed for New York's Times Square -- though the truck, when found, was deemed harmless.

But some Bay Area police collect data for more prosaic purposes.

Tiburon in 2010 installed cameras on the only two roads in and out of town so police now record the license plate of every car that enters and leaves, creating what some say is a virtual gated community.

Police Chief Michael Cronin said he had to convince the Town Council and residents that Pittsburg Police Lt. Ron Raman uses a video camera surveillance monitoring station in Pittsburg, Calif., it wasn't unduly intrusive because it captures only plates and not images of the cars' occupants. Property crimes, he said, have decreased by about a third since the well-publicized cameras were installed.

The Piedmont City Council likes the idea: It voted June 3 to spend $679,000 to install 39 license-plate readers at 15 points around the city. And Menlo Park's police chief says he wants to do the same.

Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said the more data that's accrued and the longer it's kept, the more potential for abuse exists. "It has very limited efficacy and real potential for harm," she said.

Other "eyes" are watching you, too.

Video cameras have become commonplace in many homes and almost every business, ATM or public building. Yet many people might not realize that police across the Bay Area use their own video surveillance systems to keep tabs on public areas, too.

A consultant's recent report to the Oakland Police Department urged it to "significantly increase the camera-monitoring capabilities of the OPD in commercial areas throughout the city to provide identifications and evidence in robbery, burglary and some shooting cases. Cameras would be monitored and recorded at the Domain Awareness Center that is currently under construction."

An Oakland police spokeswoman didn't return repeated emails and phone calls seeking details about the department's camera program.

Pittsburg police officers can now watch live video from 89 cameras throughout the city on their smartphones while out on their beats. Lt. Ron Raman said the cameras essentially let officers extend their enforcement and investigative reach.

Gilroy police Capt. Jim Gillio said the city's Downtown Merchants Association paid half of the $50,000 cost for a six-camera system, of which three cameras have been installed, so emergency dispatchers can tilt, pan and zoom in if something's happening. Gillio said the system has helped spot stolen cars and once let dispatchers quickly see that a reported kidnapping actually hadn't happened.

Richmond police Capt. Mark Gagan said "no police manager would say one technology or one method is a panacea for all crimes," but his department's 42 cameras -- placed in violent areas as well as areas often fouled by quality-of-life issues such as garbage dumping, vandalism and prostitution -- help a thinly spread police force stay atop of what's going on and have led to many arrests. Retired police officers, who both "understand what suspicious or predatory behavior looks like" and know the city's geography well, monitor the live feeds 12 to 16 hours a day, he said.

Felix Hunziker, a 47-year-old architect and Richmond resident who's involved with the North & East Neighborhood Council's residents' patrol, said he's "pretty much good with it because we do have problems in our city, and the cameras are useful tools. ... They have been useful in solving crimes; they may be a deterrent, as well."

Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Pablo, Pinole, Martinez and other Bay Area cities have cameras, too, but most don't mention it on their websites. You wouldn't know about the cameras unless you specifically asked police or city officials.

San Francisco's policy prohibits police from monitoring their cameras in real time; officers review recordings only after a crime has occurred. But after the Boston Marathon bombing in April, the chief asked that the policy be modified during big events. He also asked for more cameras.

UC Berkeley researchers' 2008 analysis of San Francisco's cameras found they had no deterrent effect on violent crime, though certain property crimes -- such as pickpocketing, purse-snatching and thefts from cars -- did decrease in areas where the cameras are located.

Camera systems already in place can have software added later that will recognize people's faces or specific objects, making all that recorded footage much more searchable and potentially invasive. It's a booming business: Intelligent video surveillance and analytics software is a $13.5 billion industry projected to almost triple to $39 billion by 2020, according to a March report from Homeland Security Research, a market research firm.

Legal doctrines supporting the government's collection of information in public spaces date to the 1960s, long before police could easily record so many aspects of our lives, said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

"The technology simply didn't exist to allow for the government to have a camera on every street corner and record that information forever," Kadidal said. "It doesn't matter whether they actually use it to prosecute people. ... Just knowing that the information is out there casts a huge chilling effect across society."

Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.

How to live off the grid

Don’t want to be watched? It’s easy: Just don’t do anything, go anywhere or talk to anybody. But if you still want to live your life, there are several things you can do to reduce your exposure to government and law-enforcement snooping: Ditch the smartphone. Even with the “location services” function switched off, your phone still might use local cell towers and Wi-Fi hot spots to determine its location so long as there’s a battery in it. And, of course, your carrier is logging who you call and for how long — data we now know the government collects. If you can’t stand being out of touch, buy a “burner” prepaid phone with no contract and use a prepaid calling card to pay for calls.

Get rid of your credit and debit cards. Using a credit or debit card that’s in your name is like turning on a big neon “I’M OVER HERE, AND THIS IS WHAT I’M BUYING” light above your head. Instead, use cash to buy gift cards from companies like Visa or American Express.

Ride a bike or take public transit. Driving without a license plate can lead to a ticket for driving without registration; driving with someone else’s license plate can get you arrested. So if you want to avoid all those automatic license-plate readers out there, start pedaling or hop a bus or train.

Encrypt your online communications and hide your IP address. From email to video chats, you can choose services and applications that will make it very hard — though perhaps not impossible — for anyone but the intended recipient to see, or to trace where your computer activity originates. Protect your data. Online or on your own computer, use long, random passwords; use different passwords for every website; change your passwords often; and store those passwords in an encrypted “password safe” app. Also consider using file or disk encryption software. And to avoid malware spies, use the latest version of your operating system and firewall software while keeping your most sensitive information on devices not connected to the Internet at all.

Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government

Well maybe they should stop rubber stamping all the unconstitutional search warrants the FBI, DEA, BATF, TSA, Homeland Security and other Federal police agencies ask them to approve.

Source

Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government

By Carol D. Leonnig, Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman, Published: June 29 E-mail the writers

Recent leaks of classified documents have pointed to the role of a special court in enabling the government’s secret surveillance programs, but members of the court are chafing at the suggestion that they were collaborating with the executive branch.

A classified 2009 draft report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general relayed some details about the interaction between the court’s judges and the NSA, which sought approval for the Bush administration’s top-secret domestic surveillance programs. The report was described in The Washington Post on June 16 and released in full Thursday by The Post and the British newspaper the Guardian.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took the highly unusual step Friday of voicing open frustration at the account in the report and court’s inability to explain its decisions.

“In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” Kollar-Kotelly said in a statement to The Post. It was her first public comment describing her work on the intelligence court.

The inspector general’s draft report is among the many documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, touching off a roiling national debate about the proper balance between the government’s reach into Americans’ lives and the effort to protect the nation in the Internet age.

The document portrays the surveillance court as “amenable” to the government’s legal theory to “re-create” authority for the Internet metadata program that had initially been authorized by President George W. Bush without court or congressional approval. The program was shut down in March 2004 when acting Attorney General James B. Comey and senior leaders at the Justice Department threatened to resign over what they felt was an illegal program.

Kollar-Kotelly disputed the NSA report’s suggestion of a fairly high level of coordination between the court and the NSA and Justice in 2004 to re-create certain authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that created the court in response to abuses of domestic surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s.

“That is incorrect,” she said. “I participated in a process of adjudication, not ‘coordination’ with the executive branch. The discussions I had with executive branch officials were in most respects typical of how I and other district court judges entertain applications for criminal wiretaps under Title III, where issues are discussed ex parte.”

The perception that the court works too closely with the government arises in large part from the tribunal’s “ex parte” nature, which means that unlike in a traditional court, there is no legal sparring between adversaries with the judge as arbiter. Instead, a Justice Department official makes the case for the government agency seeking permission to carry out surveillance inside the United States. No one speaks for the target of the surveillance or the company that is ordered to allow its networks to be tapped or to turn over its customers’ data.

Some critics say the court is a rubber stamp for government investigators because it almost never has turned down a warrant application. However, that high batting average doesn’t take into account changes the court requires in some requests and other applications that the government withdraws.

For about 30 years, the court was located on the sixth floor of the Justice Department’s headquarters, down the hall from the officials who would argue in front of it. (The court moved to the District’s federal courthouse in 2009.) “There is a collaborative process that would be unnatural in the public, criminal court setting,” said a former Justice official familiar with the court.

Kollar-Kotelly, who was the court’s chief judge from 2002 to 2006, said she could not comment further on the matter because “the underlying subjects” in the report generally remain classified by the executive branch.

Other judges on the court have confided to colleagues their frustration at the court’s portrayal, according to people familiar with their discussion.

The inspector general’s report, combined with persistent refusals by the government to declassify the opinions, have left the public in the dark about the court’s legal justifications for approving the broad surveillance programs.

“The court is a neutral party, not a collaborator or arm of the government,” said one government official close to the court. “But the information out there now leaves people wondering how and why the court endorsed these programs.”

The court historically has authorized in secret hearings classified warrants to wiretap the calls and monitor the movements of suspected criminals. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, far-reaching programs to gather Internet and telephone content and metadata were launched under presidential authority, without congressional action or approval from the surveillance court.

The Internet metadata portion of that program had to be revamped after Comey and other Justice officials threatened to resign. Metadata are information indicating facts such as an e-mail’s sender and recipient and its time and date, but not its content.

In May 2004, the NSA briefed Kollar-Kotelly on the technical aspects of that program’s collection, according to the report. She also met with the NSA director, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, on two successive Saturdays during the summer of 2004 to discuss the issue, the report said.

“It was very professional,” Hayden said in an interview. “We of course had to explain to her what it was we had been doing, what it was we wanted to do, how we would do it, what kind of safeguards we felt able to put in. We left it to her judgment whether there was proportionality in terms of was this worth doing, in the balance between security and liberty.”

He said in response to her concerns, the agency made some technical adjustments so that “the odds were greater that you’d pick up fewer protected communications of U.S. persons.”

Said Hayden: “She wasn’t in league with us. We were down there presenting what we thought was appropriate.”

On July 14, 2004, the surveillance court for the first time approved the gathering of information by the NSA, which created the equivalent of a digital vault to hold Internet metadata. Kollar-Kotelly’s order authorized the metadata program under a FISA provision known as the “pen register/trap and trace,” or PRTT.

The ruling was a secret not just to the public and most of Congress, but to all of Kollar-Kotelly’s surveillance court colleagues. Under orders from the president, none of the court’s other 10 members could be told about the Internet metadata program, which was one prong of a larger and highly classified data-gathering effort known as the President’s Surveillance Program, or PSP.

But the importance of her order — which approved the collection based on a 1986 law typically used for phone records — was hard to overstate.

“The order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk Internet metadata that it had under the PSP,” the inspector general’s report said, with some minor caveats including reducing the number of people who could access the records.

On May 24, 2006, Kollar-Kotelly signed another order, this one authorizing the bulk collection of phone metadata from U.S. phone companies, under a FISA provision known as Section 215, or the ”business records provision,” of the USA Patriot Act.

As with the PRTT order, the Justice Department and NSA “collaboratively designed the application, prepared declarations and responded to questions from court advisers,” the inspector general’s report said. “Their previous experience in drafting the PRTT order made this process more efficient.”

The court also agreed in 2007 to permit the government to collect the content of e-mails and phone calls to and from the United States when “there is probable cause to believe” that one of the parties is a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist group. That program, known today as PRISM and described in documents obtained by The Washington Post, eventually was authorized by Congress.

Kollar-Kotelly could be a stern taskmaster when she thought the NSA was overstepping its bounds. In 2004, she temporarily shut down the government’s surveillance program when she learned of a key NSA failure, The Post reported in 2006. The agency was not properly walling off information gained in warrantless surveillance and may have been using the information to obtain court warrants, which was forbidden. In 2005, the problem resurfaced and she issued a strong warning to the government that it had to fix the problem or would face trouble obtaining court warrants.

Kollar-Kotelly “understood the problems that the government, particularly the Defense Department and the intelligence community, were facing in trying to keep this country safe,” said Robert L. Deitz, former NSA general counsel under Hayden.

But, he said, the court was no rubber stamp. “The judges ask searching questions,” he said. “If they don’t get the right answer, they don’t stamp things ‘reject.’ They say, ‘I’m not signing this.’ Then we go back and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do this the following way.’ ”

Still secret are the 2004 decision accompanying the PRTT court order and the legal opinion accompanying the 2006 business records order.

A former senior Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity, said he believes the government should consider releasing declassified summaries of relevant opinions.

“I think it would help” quell the “furor” raised by the recent disclosures, he said. “In this current environment, you may have to lean forward a little more in declassifying stuff than you otherwise would. You might be able to prepare reasonable summaries that would be helpful to the American people.”

Lawmakers and civil-liberties advocates have been pushing the Obama administration for several years to declassify these opinions and other opinions from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that explain the legal justification for these programs.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has led an effort to review these opinions to see what, if anything, can be declassified. But Robert S. Litt, ODNI general counsel, has argued that declassification can be difficult when so much of the legal reasoning is intertwined with facts that need to remain secret lest they tip off enemies about surveillance methods.

Still, the former official explained, segregating relevant facts from classified material is routinely done in criminal proceedings under the Classified Information Procedures Act. In those cases, the government can extract the information that is relevant to the defense, the judge approves it, and it is provided to the defense.

“This is not unheard-of in the unclassified world, and some kind of summary document can be generated,” the former official said. “Maybe that’s a middle ground that can be done.”

Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.

Ex-Pentagon general Cartwright target of leak probe

Source

Report: Ex-Pentagon general Cartwright target of leak probe

Published: June 28, 2013 at 10:05 AM

WASHINGTON, June 28 (UPI) -- A former Joint Chiefs of Staff official is under investigation for allegedly leaking information about a U.S. covert cyberattack, sources told NBC News.

Retired Marine Gen. James Hoss Cartwright, who was Joint Chiefs vice chairman, allegedly leaked information about a U.S. virus attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, the sources said.

Cartwright, 63, is the latest individual targeted because of alleged leaks. The government has prosecuted or charged eight people under the Espionage Act.

The New York Times reported in 2012 that President Barack Obama ordered a cyberattack in 2010 using the Stuxnet virus, which temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.

The Times story included details of a covert Olympic Games operation, which Cartwright ran under President George Bush and Obama.

Details in the story included meetings in the White House Situation Room and the way the virus was introduced to an Iranian nuclear facility.

As soon as the story appeared, Congressional leaders demanded an investigation.

Two sources told NBC that prosecutors were able to identify Cartwright as a suspected leaker without resorting to a subpoena of reporters' phone records.

Cartwright declined to comment on the allegations, NBC News said.

Kerry tries to quell European outrage over NSA eavesdropping

Source

Kerry tries to quell European outrage over NSA eavesdropping

By Frank Jordans and Sarah DiLorenzo

Associated Press

July 01, 2013

PARIS (AP) — French President Francois Hollande demanded on Monday that the United States immediately stop its alleged eavesdropping on European Union diplomats and suggested that the widening surveillance scandal could derail negotiations for a free-trade deal potentially worth billions.

The Obama administration is facing a breakdown in confidence from key allies over secret programs that reportedly installed covert listening devices in EU offices. Many European countries had so far been muted about revelations of the wide net cast by US surveillance programs aimed at preventing terrorist attacks, but their reaction to the latest reports indicate Washington’s allies are unlikely to let the matter drop without at least a strong show of outrage.

The White House wouldn’t comment on the new reports, but officials said President Barack Obama has not spoken to his counterparts in Europe about the revelations since they were published Sunday in a German weekly.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he didn’t know the details of the allegations, but tried to downplay them, maintaining that many nations undertake various activities to protect their national interests. He failed to quell the outrage from allies, including France, Germany and Italy.

‘‘We cannot accept this kind of behavior from partners and allies,’’ Hollande said on French television on Monday.

He insisted the US explain its practices and end the eavesdropping immediately. And he issued a veiled threat that France would dig in its heels on sensitive negotiations to ink a free-trade deal that would link countries that make up nearly half of the global economy. The deal would likely serve as a model for all future such agreements worldwide.

‘‘We can only have negotiations, transactions, in all areas, once we have obtained these guarantees for France, but that goes for the whole European Union and I would say for all partners of the United States,’’ he said.

Europe’s outage was triggered by a Sunday report by German news weekly Der Spiegel that the US National Security Agency bugged diplomats from friendly nations — such as the EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. The report was partly based on an ongoing series of revelations of US eavesdropping leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In a sign of the distrust the report had sowed, the German government launched a review of its secure government communications network and the EU’s executive, the European Commission, ordered ‘‘a comprehensive ad hoc security sweep.’’

‘‘Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable,’’ German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin. ‘‘We’re not in the Cold War anymore.’’

Germany has been among the European countries most anxious to reach a trade deal with the US, and it will likely try to strike a careful balance in its criticism of Washington.

It is the second time, however, the free-trade talks have hung in the balance because of French concerns. Two weeks ago, as the EU was deciding on its mandate for the talks, France led an all-out campaign to keep cultural industries off the table that almost scuttled the negotiations.

The European Commission also demanded an explanation. Their foreign affairs chief spoke to Kerry on Monday about the reports at a security conference in Southeast Asia.

‘‘I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs with national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that,’’ Kerry said on the sidelines in Brunei, adding that he had been busy with meetings about the Mideast peace process and wasn’t familiar with the specifics of the most recent claims.

‘‘And all I know is that that is not unusual for lots of nations. But beyond that, I'm not going to comment any further until I have all the facts and find out precisely what the situation is,’’ he said.

It’s unclear how widespread similar practices actually are. But some in Europe have raised concerns that US efforts include economic espionage. When asked whether Germany spies on its allies, Seibert responded: ‘‘It’s not the policy of the German government to eavesdrop on friendly states in their embassies. That should be obvious.’’

Italy also stepped up its criticism of the surveillance on Monday, with Foreign Minister Emma Bonino saying Italy had asked the Americans for the ‘‘necessary clarifications for this very thorny issue.’’ In a statement, Bonino said the Americans had promised to provide clarification to both the EU and individual member states.

Italy has largely downplayed earlier reports of Snowden’s revelations, even that the US had spied on G-20 members, in part because Italians are so used to being listened in on by their own government. Italy is the most wiretapped Western democracy, with transcripts of telephone intercepts of politicians and criminals routinely splashed on front pages.

Despite the rhetoric, the threat to the trade negotiations is likely to be minimal. For one, technical negotiations often proceed at a level largely detached from political considerations and so far, there have been no EU plans to let the first round of the trans-Atlantic free trade talks from fall victim to discord over the snooping scandal. Such talks traditionally need to develop a momentum of their own and would suffer huge delays if they were held up each time there was political strike between the parties.

The US government is organizing the first round from July 8-12 in Washington.

France is far less eager for a deal than Germany, and Hollande could face pressure from parties on the left that he often needs to pass legislation. The country’s ecology party — which has two ministers in government — said Snowden should be given political asylum in France. France’s far left party, Leftist Front, also called for asylum. Snowden has been in a no man’s land at Moscow’s airport for days.

According to the Der Spiegel report on Sunday, the NSA planted bugs in the EU’s diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building’s computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU’s mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said.

It also reported that the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters in Brussels to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior officials’ calls and Internet traffic at a key EU office nearby.

The Spiegel report cited classified US documents taken by Snowden that the magazine said it had partly seen. It did not publish the alleged NSA documents it cited nor say how it obtained access to them.

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. AP correspondents Geir Moulson in Berlin, Elena Becatoros in Athens, Raf Casert in Brussels, Deb Riechmann in Brunei, Nicole Winfield in Rome and Lara Jakes in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. now tries to rationalize spying on allies

U.S. now tries to rationalize spying on allies

By LARA JAKES and FRANK JORDANS

July 1, 2013

The U.S. says it gathers the same kinds of intelligence as other nations to safeguard against foreign terror threats, pushing back on fresh outrage from key allies over secret American surveillance programs that reportedly installed covert listening devices in European Union offices.

Facing threatened investigations and sanctions from Europe, U.S. intelligence officials plan to discuss the new allegations — reported in Sunday’s editions of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel — directly with EU officials.

But “as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” concluded a statement issued Sunday from the national intelligence director’s office.

It was the latest backlash in a nearly monthlong global debate over the reach of U.S. surveillance that aims to prevent terror attacks. The two programs, both run by the National Security Agency, pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day. Reports about the programs have raised sharp concerns about whether they violate public privacy rights at home and abroad.

The concerns came as the former head of the CIA and NSA urged the White House to make the spy programs more transparent to calm public fears about the American government’s snooping.

Several European officials — including in Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and the EU government itself — said the new revelations could scuttle ongoing negotiations on a trans-Atlantic trade treaty that, ultimately, seeks to create jobs and boost commerce by billions annually in what would be the world’s largest free trade area.

“Partners do not spy on each other,” said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. “We cannot negotiate over a big trans-Atlantic market if there is the slightest doubt that our partners are carrying out spying activities on the offices of our negotiators. The American authorities should eliminate any such doubt swiftly.”

European Parliament President Martin Schulz, said he was “deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices.” And Luxembourg Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Jean Asselborn said he had no reason to doubt the Der Spiegel report, and rejected the notion that security concerns trump the broad U.S. surveillance authorities.

“We have to re-establish immediately confidence on the highest level of the European Union and the United States,” Asselborn told The Associated Press.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU’s diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building’s computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU’s mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said. It also reported that the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters in Brussels to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior officials’ calls and Internet traffic at a key EU office nearby.

The report in Der Spiegel cited classified U.S. documents taken by NSA leaker and former contractor Edward Snowden that the magazine said it had partly seen. It did not publish the alleged NSA documents it cited, nor say how it obtained access to them. But one of the report’s authors is Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who interviewed Snowden while he was holed up in Hong Kong.

The Guardian newspaper also published an article Sunday alleging NSA surveillance of the EU offices, citing classified documents provided by Snowden. The Guardian said one document lists 38 NSA “targets,” including embassies and missions of U.S. allies like France, Italy, Greece, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

In Washington, the statement from the national intelligence director’s office said U.S. officials planned to respond to the concerns with their EU counterparts and through diplomatic channels with specific nations. It did not provide further details.

NSA Director Keith Alexander last week said the government stopped gathering U.S. citizens’ Internet data in 2011. But the NSA programs that sweep up foreigners’ data through U.S. servers to pin down potential threats to Americans from abroad continue.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” former NSA and CIA Director Mike Hayden downplayed the European outrage over the programs, saying they “should look first and find out what their own governments are doing.” But Hayden said the Obama administration should try to head off public criticism by being more open about the top-secret programs so that “people know exactly what it is we are doing in this balance between privacy and security.”

“The more they know, the more comfortable they will feel,” Hayden said. “Frankly, I think we ought to be doing a bit more to explain what it is we’re doing, why, and the very tight safeguards under which we’re operating.”

Hayden also defended a secretive U.S. court that weighs whether to allow the government to seize the Internet and phone records from private companies. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is made up of federal judges but does not consider objections from defense attorneys in considering the government’s request for records.

Last year, the government asked the court to approve 1,789 applications to spy on foreign intelligence targets, according to a Justice Department notice to Congress dated April 30. The court approved all but one — and that was withdrawn by the government.

Critics have derided the court as a rubber stamp approval for the government, sparking an unusual response last week in The Washington Post by its former chief judge. In a statement to the newspaper, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly disputed a draft NSA inspector general’s report that suggested the court collaborated with the executive branch instead of maintaining judicial independence. Kollar-Kotelly was the court’s chief judge from 2002 to 2006, when some of the surveillance programs were underway.

Some European counties have much stronger privacy laws than does the U.S.

In Germany, where criticism of the NSA’s surveillance programs has been particularly vocal, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger likened the spying outlined in the Der Spiegel report to “methods used by enemies during the Cold War.” German federal prosecutors are examining whether the reported U.S. electronic surveillance programs broke German laws.

Green Party leaders in the European Parliament called for an immediate investigation into the claims and called for existing U.S.-EU agreements on the exchange of bank transfer and passenger record information to be canceled. Both programs have been labeled as unwarranted infringements of citizens’ privacy by left-wing and libertarian lawmakers in Europe.

The dispute also has jeopardized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and some of it its most unreliable allies, including China, Russia and Ecuador.

Snowden, who tuned 30 last week, revealed himself as the document leaker in June interviews in Hong Kong, but fled to Russia before China’s government could turn him over to U.S. officials. Snowden is now believed to be holed up in a transit zone in Moscow’s international airport, where Russian officials say they have no authority to catch him since he technically has not crossed immigration borders.

It’s also believed Snowden is seeking political asylum from Ecuador. But Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa signaled in an AP interview Sunday that it’s unlikely Snowden will end up there. Correa portrayed Russia as entirely the masters of Snowden’s fate, and the Kremlin said it will take public opinion and the views of human rights activists into account when considering his case. That could lay the groundwork for Snowden to seek asylum in Russia.

Outgoing National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said U.S. and Russian law enforcement officials are discussing how to deal with Snowden, who is wanted on espionage charges. “The sooner that this can be resolved, the better,” Donilon said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has a different take on what to do with Snowden. “I think it’s pretty good that he’s stuck in the Moscow airport,” Pelosi, D-Calif, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” ”That’s OK with me. He can stay there, that’s fine.”

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Raf Casert in Brussels, Greg Keller in Paris, Frances D’Emilio in Rome, Jovana Gec in Zabgreb, Croatia, Lynn Berry in Moscow and Michael Weissenstein in Portoviejo, Ecuador, contributed to this report.

___

Lara Jakes and Frank Jordans can be reached on Twitter at https://twitter.com/larajakesAP and http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

Germany Compares Reported U.S. Bugging To 'Cold War'

Germany Compares Reported U.S. Bugging To 'Cold War'

By LARA JAKES and FRANK JORDANS 06/30/13 05:20 PM ET EDT AP

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration faced a breakdown in confidence Sunday from key foreign allies who threatened investigations and sanctions against the U.S. over secret surveillance programs that reportedly installed covert listening devices in European Union offices.

U.S. intelligence officials said they will directly discuss with EU officials the new allegations, reported in Sunday's editions of the German news weekly Der Spiegel. But the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency urged the White House to make the spy programs more transparent to calm public fears about the American government's snooping.

It was the latest backlash in a nearly monthlong global debate over the reach of U.S. surveillance that aims to prevent terror attacks. The two programs, both run by the NSA, pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day. They have raised sharp concerns about whether they violate public privacy rights at home and abroad.

Several European officials – including in Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and the EU government itself – said the new revelations could scuttle ongoing negotiations on a trans-Atlantic trade treaty that, ultimately, seeks to create jobs and boost commerce by billions annually in what would be the world's largest free trade area.

"Partners do not spy on each other," said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. "We cannot negotiate over a big trans-Atlantic market if there is the slightest doubt that our partners are carrying out spying activities on the offices of our negotiators. The American authorities should eliminate any such doubt swiftly."

European Parliament President Martin Schulz said he was "deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices." And Luxembourg Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Jean Asselborn said he had no reason to doubt the Der Spiegel report and rejected the notion that security concerns trump the broad U.S. surveillance authorities.

"We have to re-establish immediately confidence on the highest level of the European Union and the United States," Asselborn told The Associated Press.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU's diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building's computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU's mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said. It also reported that the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters in Brussels to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior officials' calls and Internet traffic at a key EU office nearby.

The Spiegel report cited classified U.S. documents taken by NSA leaker and former contractor Edward Snowden that the magazine said it had partly seen. It did not publish the alleged NSA documents it cited nor say how it obtained access to them. But one of the report's authors is Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who interviewed Snowden while he was holed up in Hong Kong.

Britain's The Guardian newspaper also published an article Sunday alleging NSA surveillance of the EU offices, citing classified documents provided by Snowden. The Guardian said one document lists 38 NSA "targets," including embassies and missions of U.S. allies like France, Italy, Greece, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

In Washington, a statement from the national intelligence director's office said U.S. officials planned to respond to the concerns with their EU counterparts and through diplomatic channels with specific nations.

However, "as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations," the statement concluded. It did not provide further details.

NSA Director Keith Alexander last week said the government stopped gathering U.S. citizens' Internet data in 2011. But the NSA programs that sweep up foreigners' data through U.S. servers to pin down potential threats to Americans from abroad continue.

Speaking on CBS' "Face the Nation," former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden downplayed the European outrage over the programs, saying they "should look first and find out what their own governments are doing." But Hayden said the Obama administration should try to head off public criticism by being more open about the top-secret programs so "people know exactly what it is we are doing in this balance between privacy and security."

"The more they know, the more comfortable they will feel," Hayden said. "Frankly, I think we ought to be doing a bit more to explain what it is we're doing, why, and the very tight safeguards under which we're operating."

Hayden also defended a secretive U.S. court that weighs whether to allow the government to seize Internet and phone records from private companies. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is made up of federal judges but does not consider objections from defense attorneys in considering the government's request for records.

Last year, the government asked the court to approve 1,789 applications to spy on foreign intelligence targets, according to a Justice Department notice to Congress dated April 30. The court approved all but one – and that was withdrawn by the government.

Critics have derided the court as a rubber-stamp approval for the government, sparking an unusual response last week in The Washington Post by its former chief judge. In a statement to the newspaper, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly refuted a draft NSA inspector general's report that suggested the court collaborated with the executive branch instead of maintaining judicial independence. Kollar-Kotelly was the court's chief judge from 2002 to 2006, when some of the surveillance programs were under way.

Some European counties have much stronger privacy laws than does the U.S. In Germany, where criticism of the NSA's surveillance programs has been particularly vocal, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger likened the spying outlined in the Der Spiegel report to "methods used by enemies during the Cold War." German federal prosecutors are examining whether the reported U.S. electronic surveillance programs broke German laws.

Green Party leaders in the European Parliament called for an immediate investigation into the claims and called for existing U.S.-EU agreements on the exchange of bank transfer and passenger record information to be canceled. Both programs have been labeled as unwarranted infringements of citizens' privacy by left-wing and libertarian lawmakers in Europe.

The dispute also has jeopardized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and some of it its most unreliable allies, including China, Russia and Ecuador.

Snowden, who tuned 30 last week, revealed himself as the document leaker in June interviews in Hong Kong, but fled to Russia before China's government could turn him over to U.S. officials. Snowden is now believed to be holed up in a transit zone in Moscow's international airport, where Russian officials say they have no authority to catch him since he technically has not crossed immigration borders.

It's also believed Snowden is seeking political asylum from Ecuador. But Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa signaled in an AP interview Sunday that it's unlikely Snowden will end up there. Correa portrayed Russia as entirely the masters of Snowden's fate, and the Kremlin said it will take public opinion and the views of human rights activists into account when considering his case. That could lay the groundwork for Snowden to seek asylum in Russia.

Outgoing National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said U.S. and Russian law enforcement officials are discussing how to deal with Snowden, who is wanted on espionage charges. "The sooner that this can be resolved, the better," Donilon said in an interview on CNN.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has a different take on what to do with Snowden. "I think it's pretty good that he's stuck in the Moscow airport," Pelosi, D-Calif., said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "That's ok with me. He can stay there, that's fine."

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Raf Casert in Brussels, Greg Keller in Paris, Frances D'Emilio in Rome, Jovana Gec in Zagreb, Croatia, Lynn Berry in Moscow and Michael Weissenstein in Portoviejo, Ecuador, contributed to this report.

___

Lara Jakes and Frank Jordans can be reached on Twitter at and

Links: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

By RON NIXON

Published: July 3, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.

In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.

In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.

Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.

[I am sorry, there appears to be a bug in the software at the NY Times web site and I couldn't get the second page of this 2 page article to display. So if you really want to see it go to this URL and try again and click here or go to the start of the article and try to get to the second page from there ]

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”

But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”

For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.

The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things, obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.

In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.

“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.

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

When you create a web page and you want to keep the information private from the world you can put a tag like this in the HTML

<META name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

I suspect when Google's robots gather information for the local police, FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet soup of Federal police forces that the robots ignore the meta tag.

Or perhaps they do honor the meta tag for the information they allow the general public to search for, but give ALL the information to the American police state.

Also I have also wondered if Google's robots index and catalog the comments put on their web pages. Browsers don't display the comments in web pages but are used to document the web pages by programmers and web masters.

I suspect Google's robots index and catalog the comments in web pages and give them to Uncle Sam's spies at the NSA and other Federal agencies.

Last I suspect that NSA or other Federal agencies now has their own robots that routinely scan the internet like Google's robots do.

I know on several of my web pages I get a daily visit or two from several IP addresses in Shady Side, Maryland (76.114.149.166 and 76.114.145.234) which I suspect is a government agency spying on me. Also I get visits from several other IP address, on a less frequent basis which I also suspect are police agencies spying on me. Maybe that Shady Grove, Maryland. I always get the names mixed up.

You can put a sign on your yard and home that says

"No Trespassing"

I wonder if you could put a sign like that you your web pages that said something like

"Police keep out - No trespassing"

Source

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

By JAMES RISEN and NICK WINGFIELD

Published: June 19, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS???

Remember Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who introduced a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana. Kyrsten Sinema is now a US Congresswoman.

I guess the title of this article should have been "Vote for me and I will give you free stuff"

Source

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 6:27 PM

The first-term congresswoman reflects on her first six months in Washington.

After six months in Congress, what’s the No. 1 thing you’ve learned about the place?

I’ve learned I can still get a lot done for Congressional District 9 even though leaders in Congress aren’t accomplishing much. [I suspect Kyrsten Sinema means that she has accomplished tons of stuff while her fellow slackers have accomplished nothing. Of course if you ask me I would have said none of them have accomplished anything - well other then robbing us blind and micro-managing our lives]

In our district office, social workers help constituents solve problems every day. In our D.C. office, we help businesses access federal agencies, support local groups seeking federal grant funding, and advocate for the issues important to CD9 residents and businesses. [Translation - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?

I’ve always believed that relationships are key to solving problems.

In the Legislature, my relationships with Republicans and Democrats alike helped me serve my constituents well. In Congress, I’m working to build bipartisan relationships as well, though it’ll take a bit longer to make friends with all 537 of my colleagues! [Kyrsten, you didn't answer the question. It was "What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?" - But I guess the main purpose of this article is to tell the voters that if they vote for you, you will give them free stuff, so who cares if you answer the question]

What’s the biggest frustration? The biggest satisfaction?

Unfortunately, issues that shouldn’t be partisan, like military sexual trauma and college affordability, have been stymied by political posturing in Congress. Leaders in Congress should stop playing games and get to work solving our country’s challenges.

However, our office has been able to make a tremendous difference in the lives of CD9 residents.

For example, we recently helped Glen in Phoenix, who has a brain tumor. Last month, Glen had to choose to either buy expensive medicine to treat his tumor or buy a replacement bed for his home.

We worked with local charities and the pharmaceutical company to help him get both a bed and his life-saving medication. [Again - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

As a member of the minority party, it’s hard to get a bill passed. What have you been able to accomplish?

Congress is pretty divided right now and sadly, they’re not getting much done.

I’m proud to be one of the founding members of the United Solutions Caucus. We’re a group of 38 freshmen, Democrats and Republicans, working together to solve our fiscal crisis and reduce our debt and deficit. [Don't make me laugh Kyrsten, when it comes to taxing and spending in the Arizona legislator you were number #1. I am sure that in the US Congress you are also the #1 Congresswoman when it comes to taxing and spending. You reduce our debt??? Again don't make me laugh!!! Kyrsten, as the debt goes up you will probably cause it to increase more then any other Congressperson!!!!]

We’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which cuts $200 billion in wasteful spending. Earlier this year, I helped pass the Violence Against Women Act.

Are there any issues you’re working on with other Arizona members? [Well other then that "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

I’m working with Reps. Matt Salmon and Raul Grijalva on a bill to prevent the NSA from gathering innocent civilians’ private data. [Give me a break Kyrsten, on every election sign of your you have the fact that you are supported by the police unions on the signs. I find it hard to believe that you are trying to reduce the police state, when the police unions helped you get elected!!!] Reps. Ron Barber, Ann Kirkpatrick and I are working on legislation to help veterans get quicker and better access to VA services. [More of the old "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

You and Salmon, a Republican, have made several joint appearances. What’s the connection?

Our offices work closely together on constituent cases, and Matt and I share similar views on issues like global competitiveness, increasing foreign investment in Arizona companies, and increasing trade and exports. Plus, he’s a good guy and we get along.

What will immigration reform look like when the House is finished with it?

It’s too early to predict, but I’m committed to a bill that secures our border [so you do support the police state - 20,000 new Border Patrol cops???], creates a workable plan for a future flow of workers into the United States, and settles the status of “dreamers” and hard-working families living in the U.S. Compromise must be a part of any viable solution, and I hope the House is ready to get to “yes.” I certainly am! [Kyrsten, when a politician like you says "compromise" it means "if you vote for my pork, I will vote for your pork". Kyrsten with that in mind, I suspect you know how to compromise better then any other Congressman or Senator in Washington D.C.]

Critics of immigration bill say pork was added

A government welfare program for police officers???

The bill hires 20,000 NEW BP cops, increasing the number of cops in the Border Patrol from 20,000 to 40,000

Source

Critics of immigration bill say pork was added

By Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 11:23 PM

As debate rages over the sweeping immigration-reform package passed last month by the Senate, critics of the bill are accusing its backers of adding pork-barrel giveaways to win votes, an age-old complaint about Capitol Hill lawmaking.

They’re calling a provision that benefits Alaska’s fishing industry “the Alaska Seafood Special,” singling out its aid for Las Vegas tourism, and denigrating billions in border-security enhancements in southern Arizona as pork for Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

One politician’s pork, however, is another’s prudent or even essential spending.

Backers of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” bill say this line of attack is an attempt to paint it as a rerun of President Barack Obama’s controversial health-care overhaul of 2010, which remains infamous in Republican circles for parochial provisions such as the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” inserted at the behest of then-Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.

Supporters say, for example, that it is unfair to portray the bill’s $46.3 billion in border-security measures as pork because that spending relates directly to a central responsibility of the federal government.

Any backroom deal-making, they say, is minor by historical standards.

Still, the criticism has put McCain and Flake — Arizona Republicans with reputations as two of Capitol Hill’s fiercest foes of earmarks and wasteful spending — in the awkward position of defending the legislation against charges of pork. McCain and Flake were two of the Gang of Eight’s four Republican members and helped negotiate the bipartisan compromise, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already settled in the United States.

“Let’s be honest: There was some of the old-style politics,” Flake told The Arizona Republic. “I can tell you, though, I’ve been around this process, and it’s very rare that you get a bill that is this all-encompassing with so few parochial provisions like that.”

Questioned provisions

The landmark immigration bill, which the Senate passed June 27 on a 68-32 vote, picked up support last month after its proposed spending on U.S.-Mexican border security was dramatically increased.

An amendment by Republican Sens. John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee would add, among other things, 350 miles of pedestrian fencing to the 350 miles already in place on the border and nearly double the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, from about 20,000 to 40,000.

The bill also orders the purchase of certain kinds of border technology and equipment, such as certain makes and models of the Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.’s Black Hawk helicopter, leaving Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with limited flexibility to choose alternatives.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., quipped on the Senate floor that “there are federal contracting firms high-fiving at the prospect of all of the spending.”

Other parochial additions also have drawn scrutiny. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Mark Begich, D-Alaska, pressed for and received special consideration for the Alaska seafood industry. The legislation identifies fish-processing in the state as a “shortage occupation,” giving it an advantage under the bill’s proposed new W-Visa program for lesser-skilled workers.

“We might as well call this the Alaska Seafood Special,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a critic of the Alaska provision and the overall immigration bill.

In a written statement, Begich said he and Murkowski worked together “to make sure this bill protects Alaska seafood processors by ensuring a steady source of seasonal staffing in order to keep our Alaska economy strong.”

Attention also has focused on a $1.5 billion, two-year job program for unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., got included in the immigration bill.

Opponents characterized it as more ill-advised spending reminiscent of Obama’s 2009 economic-stimulus package.

Flake said the Sanders program is paid for by revenue generated by the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., an immigration-reform supporter, got funding extended for national travel-promotion efforts that benefit Las Vegas.

Other items in the legislation have been linked to Gang of Eight members.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham secured more visas for the meat industry in his home state of South Carolina; and Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., made sure the cruise-ship and ski industries important to their respective home states also received special consideration under the bill’s new visa system.

In an interview, McCain said he doesn’t view the immigration bill as containing any traditional pork. Some of the provisions that have drawn criticism were attempts to fairly address bona fide needs of unique labor forces, he said.

“There may have been a little of that (parochialism and making deals for votes), but overall, they were legitimate requirements,” McCain told The Republic. “Honestly, I was not involved in any of that, because of my principles. But, for example, the Alaska one was sold to me based on the unique circumstances concerning them. Then, there were a couple of other provisions that had to do with groups of unique people.”

‘It’s not pork’

Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, decried the bill as “a litany of de facto earmarks, carve-outs and pet spending initiatives” and seemed to suggest that McCain and Flake were hypocrites for accepting $250 million to boost immigration-related prosecutions in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector in Arizona.

“There are nine Border Patrol sectors, but the Tucson Sector is the surprise beneficiary of $250 million in a special earmark in this bill,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor.

“I would just ask the simple question: Don’t all of the border sectors need increased funding for prosecutions? Well, I believe the answer is yes, and so carving out the Tucson Sector for special treatment, I believe, is entirely inappropriate. So, we see that even longtime opponents of earmarks are now co-sponsoring legislation that is filled with de facto earmarks, including one that benefits their states alone.”

McCain and Flake flatly rejected the argument that the border measures are pork for Arizona. The two have long stressed that the Tucson Sector is the nation’s busiest for undocumented immigration and covers the part of the border most in need of attention.

“It’s the federal government’s responsibility to secure the border, and these appropriations and the items that are put on the border are to fulfill that purpose,” said Flake, who while serving in the House was instrumental in enacting a moratorium on earmarks. “It’s not pork.”

Steve Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, agreed that the Senate-passed flood of border spending, although it may be overkill, doesn’t fit the classic definitions of earmarks or pork. However, the makers of the bill’s mandated technology, such as Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, or VADER system, clearly would come out as big winners if the bill became law, he said.

The bill would require the purchase of six VADER systems, which rely on aerial drones, at an estimated total price of $55.8 million.

“This isn’t really being done by Corker and Hoeven to benefit their constituents, per se,” Ellis said. “They’re not bringing back the bacon to Tennessee and North Dakota.”

‘It’s political cover’

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the bill, suggested that the border-security amendment is a different kind of payoff for senators. The Washington, D.C.-based center backs more enforcement and overall reductions in immigration.

“They were buying votes there, too, but in a different way,” Krikorian said. “This was so Corker and Hoeven and a couple of others could posture about how tough they are on border security. In other words, it’s political cover.”

Other provisions clearly were intended to win over specific senators, such as the Alaska one critics have been calling the “Crab-husker Kickback” and “the Alaska Purchase,” Krikorian said.

“When you have a 1,200-page bill, it’s going to be full of that kind of junk,” he said.

“The amnesty bill is based on these kinds of corrupt bargains. There’s really no other way to put it.”

Immigrant-rights advocates, who support the bill even though they believe its border-security elements are excessive, aren’t buying the pork criticism.

Foes of the bill, which still must pass the Republican-controlled House in some form, are trying to fuel conservative skepticism by emphasizing the legislation’s length, as Krikorian did, and claiming it is stuffed with sweetheart deals, said Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-reform organization America’s Voice.

“They’re doing everything they can to equate this bill to ‘Obamacare,’ ” Sharry said. “It’s such a tired strategy.”

Android security flaw gives Homeland Security easy access to your phone????

Android security flaw gives NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, FBI, BATF, DEA, TSA, IRS, ICE, La Migra, ATF and a whole slew of other alphabet police agencies easy access to your phone????

Source

Android security flaw affects 99 percent of phones, researcher says

By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: July 5 E-mail the writer

Security researchers believe they have found a major security flaw in the Google’s Android mobile operating system, which could affect up to 99 percent of Android phones now in consumers’ hands.

In results published Wednesday by the Bluebox Security research firm, chief technology officer Jeff Forristal said the flaw gave hackers a “master key” into the Android system.

Google declined to comment on the report.

The problem lies in the security verification process that has been used on the Google Play applications store since the release of Android 1.6. It could leave up to 900 million devices open to hackers. The flaw, the research firm said, is a weakness in the way that Android applications verify changes to their code. The weakness would allow hackers to “turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan” without flagging the attention of Google’s app store, a mobile phone or the person using an application.

The result, researchers said, would be that anyone who breaks into an app this way would have access to the data that app collects and — if an app made by the device manufacturer gets exploited — could even “take over normal functioning of a phone.”

In the post, Forristal said that Bluebox reported the security flaw to Google in February. In an interview with CIO, he said that some manufacturers have already released fixes for the problem, specifically naming the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Security is a common concern on Android phones, in part because the open nature of the system also means that it’s easy for anyone to find out how it works. Android is the OS of choice for 75 percent of the world’s smartphones, IDC reported in May. But a report released in March from the F-Secure security firm found that 79 percent of all mobile malware found in 2012 was running on Android phones.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that so many smartphone manufacturers use their own versions of the Android operating system, making it more difficult to get system updates that may include security fixes out to customers.

Related stories:

As smartphone market matures, makers race to wow consumers

‘Fragmentation’ leaves Android phones vulnerable to hackers, scammers

Majority of mobile malware on Android phones, security firm says

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Lincoln’s Surveillance State

President Lincoln was reading our telegraphs????

Don't laugh, at the time it was considered a high-tech police state.

Source

Lincoln’s Surveillance State

By DAVID T. Z. MINDICH

Published: July 5, 2013

COLCHESTER, Vt. — BY leaking details of the National Security Agency’s data-mining program, Edward J. Snowden revealed that the government’s surveillance efforts were far more extensive than previously understood. Many commentators have deemed the government’s activities alarming and unprecedented. The N.S.A.’s program is indeed alarming — but not, from a historical perspective, unprecedented. And history suggests that we should worry less about the surveillance itself and more about when the war in whose name the surveillance is being conducted will end.

In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.”

I came across this letter in the 1990s in the Library of Congress while researching Stanton’s wartime efforts to control the press, which included censorship, intimidation and extrajudicial arrests of reporters. On the same day he received control of the telegraphs, Stanton put an assistant secretary in charge of two areas: press relations and the newly formed secret police. Stanton ultimately had dozens of newspapermen arrested on questionable charges. Within Stanton’s first month in office, a reporter for The New York Herald, who had insisted that he be given news ahead of other reporters, was arrested as a spy.

Having the telegraph lines running through Stanton’s office made his department the nexus of war information; Lincoln visited regularly to get the latest on the war. Stanton collected news from generals, telegraph operators and reporters. He had a journalist’s love of breaking the story and an autocrat’s obsession with information control. He used his power over the telegraphs to influence what journalists did or didn’t publish. In 1862, the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of “telegraphic censorship” and called for restraint on the part of the administration’s censors.

When I first read Stanton’s requests to Lincoln asking for broad powers, I accepted his information control as a necessary evil. Lincoln was fighting for a cause of the utmost importance in the face of enormous challenges. The benefits of information monitoring, censorship and extrajudicial tactics, though disturbing, were arguably worth their price.

But part of the reason this calculus was acceptable to me was that the trade-offs were not permanent. As the war ended, the emergency measures were rolled back. Information — telegraph and otherwise — began to flow freely again.

So it has been with many wars: a cycle of draconian measures followed by contraction. During the First World War, the Supreme Court found that Charles T. Schenck posed a “clear and present danger” for advocating opposition to the draft; later such speech became more permissible. During the Second World War, habeas corpus was suspended several times — most notably in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack — but afterward such suspensions became rare.

This is why, if you are a critic of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, it is imperative that the war on terror reach its culmination. In May, President Obama declared that “this war, like all wars, must end.” If history is any guide, ending the seemingly endless state of war is the first step in returning our civil liberties.

Until then, we will continue to see acts of governmental overreach that would make even Stanton blush. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,” Mr. Snowden told The Guardian. And unlike Stanton’s telegraph operation, which housed just a handful of telegraphers, the current national security apparatus is huge. An estimated 483,000 government contractors had top-secret security clearances in 2012. That’s a lot of Snowdens to trust with your information.

David T. Z. Mindich, a professor of media studies, journalism and digital arts at Saint Michael’s College, is the author of “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.”

Arizona court ruling upholds DUI test for marijuana

Source

Arizona court ruling upholds DUI test for marijuana

Posted on February 14, 2013 by admin

Associated Press Wed Feb 13, 2013 5:10 PM

PHOENIX — An appeals court has issued a ruling that upholds the right of authorities to prosecute pot smokers in Arizona for driving under the influence even when there is no evidence that they are actually high.

The ruling by the Court of Appeals focuses on the chemical compounds in marijuana that show up in blood and urine tests after people smoke pot. One chemical compound causes drivers to be impaired; another is a chemical that stays in people’s systems for weeks after they’ve smoked marijuana but doesn’t affect impairment.

The court ruled that both compounds apply to Arizona law, meaning a driver doesn’t have to actually be impaired to get prosecuted for DUI. As long as there is evidence of marijuana in their system, they can get a DUI, the court said.

The ruling overturns a decision by a lower court judge who said it didn’t make sense to prosecute a person with no evidence they’re under the influence.

The lower court judge cited the proliferation of states easing their marijuana laws, but the Court of Appeals ruling issued Tuesday dismissed that by saying Arizona’s medical marijuana law is irrelevant regarding DUI.

The Legislature adopted the decades-old comprehensive DUI law to protect public safety, so a provision on prohibited substances and their resulting chemical compounds should be interpreted broadly to include inactive compounds as well as active ones, the Court of Appeals said.

The case stems from a 2010 traffic stop in Maricopa County. The motorist’s blood test revealed only a chemical compound that is found in the blood after another compound produced from ingesting marijuana breaks down.

According to testimony by a prosecution criminalist, the compound found in the man’s blood doesn’t impair the ability to drive but can remain detectable for four weeks.

The man’s lawyer argued Arizona’s DUI law bars only marijuana and “its metabolite,” so only the first derivative compound that actually impairs drivers is prohibited.

Two lower court judges agreed, with one upholding the other’s dismissal of the case against the motorist, Hrach Shilgevorkyan.

Superior Court Commissioner Myra Harris’ ruling noted that several states have decriminalized pot, and that a growing number of states, including Arizona, have legalized medical marijuana.

“Residents of these states, particularly those geographically near Arizona, are likely to travel to Arizona,” Harris said in her 2012 ruling upholding the dismissal. “It would be irrational for Arizona to prosecute a defendant for an act that might have occurred outside of Arizona several weeks earlier.”

However, the Court of Appeals sided with prosecutors who appealed, saying that allowing the testing for marijuana’s active compound would unduly restrict law enforcement.

The ruling said it serves the Legislature’s intention to have a flat ban on driving under the influence to interpret the DUI law’s reference to a prohibited substance and “its metabolite” as covering both a substance’s active and inactive compounds.

Michael Alarid III, a lawyer for Shilgevorkyan, said he’ll ask the Arizona Supreme Court to consider an appeal.

He added the testing issue is increasingly important because people legally using pot in two Western states — Washington and Colorado — that last year approved marijuana decriminalization laws could be convicted of DUI if arrested while driving in Arizona weeks later.

Feds planned to arm drones

Feds to murder dope dealers & Mexicans with drones????

Feds to murder dope dealers & Mexicans with drones????

I have posted a number of articles where I made snide comments like "I wonder when the police will start using drone air strikes on American soil to murder drug dealers and blow up suspect drug houses"

Looks like that part of the American police state could be just around the corner.

Sadly the Feds may also use drones against brown skinned folks who sneak across the border too.

Here is a quote from the article:

"According to the document, titled 'Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System,' the weapons would be used against “targets of interest,” described as people or vehicles carrying smugglers or undocumented migrants"

Feds planned to arm drones

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jul 4, 2013 12:17 AM

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed plans at least three years ago to mount weapons on drones operated by Customs and Border Protection — though the agency denied Wednesday that it has any current plans to use armed drones.

The plans, outlining the idea of mounting “expendables or non-lethal weapons” on CBP drones, are disclosed in a 2010 document signed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and first posted Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit focused on cyberspace free speech, privacy and consumer-rights issues.

According to the document, titled “Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System,” the weapons would be used against “targets of interest,” described as people or vehicles carrying smugglers or undocumented migrants.

The DHS and CBP declined to answer specific questions about the document, but issued a statement Wednesday that “CBP has no plans to arm its unmanned-aircraft systems with non-lethal weapons or weapons of any kind.”

However, civil-rights advocates are concerned that Napolitano signed off on a document positing plans to place even “non-lethal” weapons on drones.

“We’ve never seen this before in any proposals to fly drones domestically,” said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney for the foundation, which first requested the documents last summer and then filed suit in October.

She said the foundation obtained the document last month.

In June, departing FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged in a Senate hearing that his agency has deployed surveillance drones, even though it hasn’t yet drafted regulations for their use.

“Weaponizing drones, even with non-lethal weapons, creates too much of a danger to the public,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. “And it is an open question what a ‘non-lethal’ weapon is. … Something that could incapacitate a person in the middle of a desert could be hugely problematic. We think that, in the United States, drones should be used for surveillance alone, and only under strong legal protections.”

The DHS document was heavily redacted, with pages of text blacked out. None of the material released details what “expendables” or “non-lethal” weapons would be.

Currently, the CBP operates 10 drones. It plans to have 17 by 2017. The “Gang of Eight” immigration bill passed by the Senate last week calls for the CBP and its subagency, the Border Patrol, to operate drones 24 hours a day, seven days a week along the southern border. If some version of that bill passes the House, as many as 24 additional drones could be deployed.

By law, to ensure that drone operations don’t pose a safety risk to civil aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration must issue “certificates of authorization” for all unmanned- aerial-vehicle operations.

In response to a query from The Arizona Republic, the FAA issued a statement Wednesday saying that it “has not approved any certificates of authorization for law-enforcement agencies that authorize armed operations.”

The FAA hadn’t responded by deadline when asked whether it has received requests to authorize armed operations.

In February, at a drone convention in northern Virginia, the FAA official charged with regulating unmanned aircraft said that FAA rules bar using weapons on drones.

“We currently have rules in the books that deal with releasing anything from an aircraft, period. Those rules are in place, and that would prohibit weapons from being installed on a civil aircraft,” including on unmanned aircraft, the FAA’s Jim Williams said, according to the Washington Times.

Williams couldn’t be reached Tuesday or Wednesday. When asked for the regulation Williams cited, an agency spokesman gave a regulation that says: “No pilot in command of a civil aircraft may allow any object to be dropped from that aircraft in flight that creates a hazard to persons or property. However, this section does not prohibit the dropping of any object if reasonable precautions are taken to avoid injury or damage to persons or property.”

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of a book on drone use, “Legitimate Target,” said that the Obama administration hasn’t articulated a clear policy on either domestic or overseas drone use and that neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have been eager to limit the executive branch in this area.

“This is the new Wild West,” he said. “They have no clear criteria, no articulation of the threat, no articulation of what constitutes a legitimate target.”

Meanwhile, flight logs of CBP drones obtained and posted Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that the CBP has lent its drones more than 200 times in recent years to other federal and state agencies, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Forest Service and state law-enforcement agencies in Minnesota, North Dakota and Texas, among others.

Desplegaría EU 40 helicópteros en la frontera: WP

Let's face it the "War on Drugs" is all about $$$MONEY$$$

Source

Desplegaría EU 40 helicópteros en la frontera: WP

Revela ‘The Washington Post’ que de aprobarse la enmienda de seguridad fronteriza en la Cámara de Representantes, la industria armamentista se vería beneficiada.

Una flotilla de 40 helicópteros sería desplegada en la frontera con México si la enmienda de seguridad incluida en la iniciativa de reforma migratoria es adoptada por la Cámara de Representantes estadunidense, reveló este martes The Washington Post.

Sin embargo, las adquisiciones ordenadas bajo la misma representarán una bonanza para algunas de las mayores empresas del ramo de defensa gracias a las especificaciones contenidas en la propuesta de los senadores republicanos Bob Corker y John Hoeven.

Algunos de los beneficiarios incluyen empresas como Bell, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky y American Eurocopter, de acuerdo con un listado de parte del equipo que el Departamento de Seguridad Interna (DHS) deberá adquirir si la enmienda es adoptada por la cámara baja.

El periódico The Washington Post recordó que la enmienda fue introducida a fin de que un mayor número de republicanos aprobara la iniciativa en el Senado, con la esperanza de mejorar sus prospectos en la Cámara de Representantes, donde enfrenta serias resistencias.

Críticos del proyecto, como el senador republicano por Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, calificaron las enmiendas como un paquete de estímulo para empresas de este ramo.

"El dinero de los contribuyentes debería mejorar la seguridad fronteriza y no ofrecer un estímulo para contratistas, por desgracia eso es lo que hace la iniciativa del Senado", dijo el legislador al diario.

La enmienda ordena la adquisición de 15 helicópteros Black Hawk fabricados por Sikorsky con un costo superior cada uno a los 17 millones de dólares, algunos de los cuales tiene tecnología digital.

El Departamento de Seguridad Interna (DHS) deberá adquirir también ocho helicópteros livianos fabricados por American Eurocopter, con un precio de tres millones de dólares cada uno, así como 17 helicópteros UH-1N fabricados por Bell.

The Washington Post enfatizó que en este caso se trata de un modelo tan viejo que la compañía no lo fabrica más.

La iniciativa también establece la adquisición de seis sistemas de radar fabricados por Northrop Grumman, cada uno de los cuales tiene un costo de 9.3 millones de dólares.

La enmienda representó una adición de 38 mil millones de dólares a los ocho millones considerados en un inicio.

El grueso de esa partida, 30 mil millones de dólares serán destinados para la contratación de más de 19 mil agentes de la patrulla fronteriza en la próxima década, que se sumarán a los 21 mil que en la actualidad están en servicio.

Aunque la enmienda permite al DHS sustituir el equipo a adquirir si así lo determina conveniente, organismos civiles de supervisión estimaron que esas especificaciones resultarán en compras directas y no resultado de un proceso de licitación.

"Los legisladores han puesto sus huellas a favor de productos específicos y eso es difícil de ignorar para una agencia", dijo el vicepresidente del grupo Taxpayers for Common Sense, Steven Ellis.

Cops have hand held fingerprinting machines to ID you

Almost always the next thing that happens is the cops steal my wallet and search it looking for an ID card which I don't carry, and in the process violating my 4th Amendment rights too.

I have not been stopped yet by a pig with one of these handheld finger printing devices but I suspect when I am, and when I refuse to voluntarily submit to finger printing, I will be physically restrained then my finger prints will be forcefully taken against my will.

I won't resist because I would rather be alive, then be murdered by some pig for thinking I have "constitutional rights"

I was falsely arrested on June 25, 2013 in Chandler and videotaped about 9 minutes of the false arrest. In the video at this URL http://tinyurl.com/chandlerarrest you can Chandler piggy G Pederson telling me that I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights in that case after I mentioned that in Miranda v Arizona the Supremes said that when a person takes the 5th the police must "immediately cease questioning" the person.

Source

Valley police departments utiliizing digital fingerprinting

By Michelle Mitchell The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jul 8, 2013 11:22 PM

A hand-held device that resembles a cellphone and taps fingerprint databases to help police officers identify people in the field is catching on with several departments in the Valley.

Officers say the devices are a valuable tool — particularly when they encounter people who aren’t carrying ID cards or who give false information.

“With these finger scanners ... you’re talking less than a minute (and) you know who you’re dealing with,” Chandler Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.

“The safety factor and the time-saving factors are just amazing.”

Not everyone is as sold on them, however, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has voiced privacy concerns.

The devices also raise concerns about identity theft and how that personal information is stored and transferred, particularly if a person is not charged with a crime, said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.

The devices are not designed to store fingerprint data — although they could be modified to do that — but to transfer the information through the officer’s existing in-car computer system, said Robert Horton, spokesman for manufacturer MorphoTrak.

Police departments in Mesa, Tempe and Phoenix began a pilot program last year using the MorphoTrak scanners.

Tempe and Mesa have now expanded those pilot programs.

“We were sold on how fantastic they are,” Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley said.

“It gives us a very quick response.”

Tempe had 14 scanners during the pilot and recently purchased 30 more.

Other departments have signed on, including Chandler, which bought 36 scanners; Scottsdale, which purchased 10, and Peoria, which bought five as a trial.

Chandler police skipped a smaller-scale pilot after hearing about their effectiveness from Mesa police officers through the East Valley Gang and Criminal Information Fusion Center, Favazzo said.

The cost of the scanners varies, but Valley cities paid about $1,200 to $1,800 per unit.

The devices allow officers in the field to scan a person’s fingerprints and compare them to local, state and federal databases.

The scanners will save officers time when someone does not have identification or provides false information, Favazzo said.

Without these devices, officers run variations of the name and birth date provided in an attempt to locate a driver’s license, warrant or other information about the person, Favazzo said.

If that does not work, officers will take the person to the station, [i.e. -falsely arrest them and make them prove they are not a criminal before releasing them] fingerprint them and wait for identity information.

“It will also let us know right away if we are dealing with a violent felon before we ever transport them,” Favazzo said.

The Tempe Police Department recently discovered by using the mobile fingerprint scanner that a man they had encountered was wanted by the FBI, Pooley said.

“We would have ended up letting this guy go,” he said.

Police departments find that the devices save them money by not having to transport people to the station and that they act as a force multiplier by keeping officers on the street, MorphoTrak’s Horton said.

The device will scan two fingerprints and the officer will receive a response in 30 seconds to several minutes, he said.

The Phoenix Police Department, which received three scanners last year as part of a pilot program, still is evaluating whether to expand the program, Sgt. Tommy Thompson said.

“Obviously as technology advances, we want to be involved in those advances, but we want to make sure they meet our needs and they’re a useful tool,” Thompson said.

Officers say they are sensitive to privacy concerns expressed by the ACLU. [Yea, sure. Like in my case where I am always told I don't have any stinking 5th Amendment right to refuse police questioning, which is almost always followed by an illegal search of my wallet in which the cop is hoping to find my ID]

Mesa officers are not trying to collect personal information, Sgt. Tony Landato said. [That's 100 percent BS. That is the WHOLE purpose of the fingerprint scanners - to get person information about the person - i.e. name and date of birth so the cops can search for outstanding warrants]

“We’re not taking a census,” Landato said. “We’re just trying to ensure the accuracy of the information that we’re taking down.

“If we can do this in a way that’s quicker for the officer and quicker for the citizen, then, hey, we both win.”

The state and FBI fingerprint databases that the scanners check do not contain citizenship or immigration-status information, although that could be possible in the future if the scanners are connected to Department of Homeland Security databases, Horton said.

The state ACLU’s Soler said departments should create policies that inform people who are not under arrest that they have the right to refuse submitting their fingerprints. [Yea, sure. Like I am always lied to by the police and told I don't have any 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer police questions]

“It’s critical that we think about these things before rolling out these new high-tech systems, and more often than not that doesn’t happen,” she said. “In this day and age when the technology so far outpaces the privacy laws, the individuals end up giving up a lot in terms of their privacy.”

The use of fingerprint scanners falls under existing Mesa Police Department policy, Landato said.

“We’re not going to fingerprint somebody unless we’ve got them under arrest or we have their consent,” he said. [Yea, I'm am 100 percent positive that is a big lie!!!!! I was also falsely arrested by the Mesa Police who also told me I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights. See false arrest by Mesa Police and lawsuit against Mesa Police]

Tempe police are writing a policy that would require officers to get consent from a person who is not under arrest, Pooley said. [Yea, sure. I also sure the Tempe for false arrest]

“Right now, there’s no authority that can compel a person to put their fingers on one of these gadgets, short of them being arrested,” said Sigmund Popko, clinical professor of law at Arizona State University. [Rubbish, what are you going to do when a cop with a gun and a badge forces you to give him your fingerprints??? Resist and be killed????]

While drivers are required to provide a license if they are pulled over, a passenger or pedestrian who is not in violation of a law would not be required to provide identification or fingerprints, said attorney John Phebus, vice chair of the criminal-justice section of the State Bar of Arizona. [Of course the police routinely lie to these people and tell them they are required to]

“Most people don’t know you can say no,” Phebus said. “When you’re in that moment, it’s awful hard to say no.”

Reach the reporter at michelle .mitchell@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7983.

RELATED INFO

Handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners About the scanner

What it does: The MorphoIDent handheld device scans a person’s fingerprints and transfers the information to a police officer’s phone or computer via Bluetooth or USB. It compares prints with state and federal fingerprint databases and reports a name and date of birth if a match is found.

Manufacturer: MorphoTrak, based in Alexandria, Va.

Cost: Varies, but Valley departments have paid $1,200 to $1,800 per device.

Dimensions: About 5 inches by 3 inches. Weight is about 5 ounces.

Who’s using the devices

Several Valley police departments are testing or using handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners:.

Chandler: 36 scanners, expected to be in use by August.

Glendale: 2 scanners (pilot), not yet deployed.

Tempe: 44 scanners, 14 currently in use.

Peoria: 5 scanners (pilot), purchased two months ago, not yet deployed.

Phoenix: 3 scanners (pilot), in use since the fall.

Scottsdale: 10 scanners, expected to be in use by late July.

The Laws You Can’t See

Sadly government bureaucrats do this ALL the time and come up with silly reasons on why they don't have to obey the US and State government constitutions.

An example of that is how the BATF has made an arbitrary decision that anybody that uses medical marijuana is not allowed to purchase a gun and doesn't have any Second Amendment rights. The IRS doesn't the same thing when it arbitrarily declares you to be a tax evader and assumes you are guilty till you prove your innocence, rather then the expected "innocent till proved guilty"

At the state level the police and DMV have ruled that you give up your 5th Amendment right against self incrimination when you get a drivers license and that you MUST submit to alcohol and drug tests if stopped by the police for DUI.

The good news is on that the Arizona courts have recently ruled that is a bunch of BS.

Source

The Laws You Can’t See

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: July 8, 2013 225 Comments

In the month since a national security contractor leaked classified documents revealing a vast sweep of Americans’ phone records by the federal government, people across the country have disagreed about the extent to which our expectation of personal privacy must yield to the demands of national security.

Under normal circumstances, this could be a healthy, informed debate on a matter of overwhelming importance — the debate President Obama said he welcomed in the days after the revelations of the surveillance programs.

But this is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.

As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.

But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.

The few public officials with knowledge of the surveillance court’s work either censor themselves as required by law, as Senator Ron Wyden has done in his valiant efforts to draw attention to the full scope of these programs, or they offer murky, even misleading statements, as the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., did before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.

When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.

Even before the latest revelations of government snooping, some members of Congress were trying to provide that check. In a letter to the court in February, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three others asked that any rulings with a “significant interpretation of the law” be declassified. In response, the court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, wrote that the court could provide only summaries of its rulings, because the full opinions contained classified information. But he balked at releasing summaries, which he feared would create “misunderstanding or confusion.” It is difficult to imagine how releasing information would make the confusion worse.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently reintroduced a bill that would require declassification. It was defeated in December. In light of the national uproar over the most recent revelations, the leadership in Congress should push to pass it and begin to shine some light on this dark corner of the judicial system.

We don’t know what we’ll find. The surveillance court may be strictly adhering to the limits of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Or not. And that’s the problem: This court has morphed into an odd hybrid that seems to exist outside the justice system, even as its power grows in ways that we can’t see.

Man charged in Casa Grande blast wants evidence suppressed

The 4th Amendment requires judges to have "probable cause" to issue a search warrant, but that is routinely ignored by judges who will rubber stamp a search warrant for any cop on anything.

"the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation"

Source

Man charged in Casa Grande blast wants evidence suppressed

The Associated Press Tue Jul 9, 2013 9:52 AM

Lawyers for an Iraqi man charged with detonating a homemade explosive device outside a Social Security Administration office in Arizona are asking a judge to throw out evidence collected by investigators during searches of his home and car.

Attorneys for Abdullatif Ali Aldosary say the search warrant used by investigators wasn’t supported by probable cause to believe he damaged federal property with an explosive.

Authorities say Aldosary researched bomb-making materials and gathered chemicals before detonating an explosive outside the agency’s Casa Grande office on Nov. 30.

No one was injured in the blast.

He has pleaded not guilty to maliciously damaging federal property with explosives, being a felon in possession of a gun and ammunition and attempted interference with the administration of the federal agency.

Files of bin Laden raid stashed within CIA

Source

Files of bin Laden raid stashed within CIA

Agency now can shield info on SEAL operation

Jul. 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — The top U.S. special operations commander, Adm. William McRaven, ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

An acknowledgment by McRaven was quietly removed from the final version of an inspector general’s report published weeks ago. A spokesman for the admiral declined to comment. The CIA, noting that the bin Laden mission was overseen by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta before he became defense secretary, said the SEALs were effectively assigned to work temporarily for the CIA, which has presidential authority to conduct covert operations.

“Documents related to the raid were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the direction of the CIA director,” agency spokesman Preston Golson said in an emailed statement. “Records of a CIA operation such as the (bin Laden) raid, which were created during the conduct of the operation by persons acting under the authority of the CIA Director, are CIA records.”

Golson said it is “absolutely false” that records were moved to the CIA to avoid the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. Effort to protect identities

The records transfer was part of an effort by McRaven to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general’s draft report.

But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell The Associated Press that it couldn’t find any documents inside the Defense Department that AP had requested more than two years ago, and would represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny.

“Welcome to the shell game in place of open government,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private research institute at George Washington University. “Guess which shell the records are under. If you guess the right shell, we might show them to you. It’s ridiculous.”

McRaven’s directive sent the only copies of the military’s records about the raid to the CIA. The agency has special authority to prevent the release of “operational files” in ways that can’t effectively be challenged in federal court.

The Federal Records Act would not permit agencies “to purge records just on a whim,” said Dan Metcalfe, who oversaw the U.S. government’s compliance with the Freedom of Information Act as former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy. “I don’t think there’s an exception allowing an agency to say, ‘Well, we didn’t destroy it. We just deleted it here after transmitting it over there.’ High-level officials ought to know better.”

It was not immediately clear exactly which Defense Department records were purged and transferred, when it happened or under what authority, if any, they were sent to the CIA. No government agencies the AP contacted would discuss details of the transfer. Follow-up to 'Zero Dark Thirty'

The AP asked for files about the mission in more than 20 separate requests, mostly submitted in May 2011 — several were sent a day after President Barack Obama announced that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been killed in a firefight.

McRaven’s unusual order would have remained secret had it not been mentioned in a single sentence on the final page in the inspector general’s draft report. That report examined whether the Obama administration gave special access to Hollywood executives planning a film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the raid. The draft report was obtained and posted online last month by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.

McRaven described steps he took to protect the identities of the SEALs after the raid, directing that their names and photographs not be released.

“This effort included purging the combatant command’s systems of all records related to the operation and providing these records to another government agency,” according to the draft report. The sentence was dropped from the report’s final version.

Current and former Defense Department officials knowledgeable about McRaven’s directive and the inspector general’s report told AP the description of the order in the draft report is accurate. The reference to “another government agency” was code for the CIA, they said. These individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Latinos now less likely to report crimes to police, poll says

Latinos now less likely to report crimes to police, poll says

May 07, 2013|By Brian Bennett

WASHINGTON – Many Latinos say they are less likely than before to report crimes because local police are increasingly involved in enforcing immigration laws, leading to a sharp increase in deportations, according to a new study.

About 44% of Latinos surveyed said they were less likely now to contact police if they were victims of a crime because they fear officers will inquire about their immigration status or the status of people they know. The figure jumps to 70% among Latinos who are in the country unlawfully.

“There is fear that is really widespread,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor of urban planning and policy at University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of the study.

The report, “Insecure Communities: Latino Perceptions of Police Involvement in Immigration Enforcement,” is based on a telephone survey of 2,004 Latinos in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Phoenix. The results are scheduled to be released Tuesday.

The survey was sponsored by the think tank PolicyLink of Oakland and conducted by Lake Research Partners, a polling firm in Washington, D.C., between Nov. 17 and Dec. 10.

“Over the last four years or so, the extent of deportations has seeped into the community’s consciousness,” Theodore said. “Trust has been undermined and that potentially has lasting implications.”

The Obama administration deported 409,849 people in fiscal year 2012, a 40% increase from 2007. Officials have attributed the increase in part to a fingerprint sharing program in local jails that notifies federal immigration agents when people arrested are in the country unlawfully or overstayed their visas.

Some officials have warned that the fingerprint sharing program, called Secure Communities, has deterred some crime victims from coming forward to aid police.

“This report highlights how local law enforcement's greater role in immigration enforcement has created mistrust between the Latino community and local police, making all of our communities less safe from crime," said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.). Polis will host a panel discussion about the report on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Colorado last week repealed a state law that had required police to report individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.

“This confirms what police experts have been saying for decades,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, a Latino nonprofit civil rights organization based in Los Angeles. “We have to have policies that make it clear there will be a separation between local police and immigration enforcement.”

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Twitter: @bybrianbennett

Extraen drogas del cuerpo a mujer en Arizona

I find this scary that the cops can now get doctors to slice and dice people looking for drugs inside them.

Source

Extraen drogas del cuerpo a mujer en Arizona

por CRISTINA SILVA - 06/29/2013

The Associated Press

PHOENIX, Arizona, EE.UU. - Un médico extrajo quirúrgicamente un paquete de metanfetamina de medio kilogramo de peso de la zona pélvica de una mujer después que supuestamente trató de pasarla de México a Arizona, informó el viernes una portavoz del Servicio Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza.

Claudia Ibarra, de 31 años, fue detenida esta semana en Puerto de San Luis cuando un agente federal sospechó del extraño intento de contrabando. Ibarra, que cruzó la frontera sola a pie, es ciudadana estadounidense de la ciudad fronteriza de Yuma.

Ibarra fue sometida a un registro en la frontera y entonces trasladada a una instalación médica cercana, donde el médico detectó y le extrajo el paquete de drogas. La mujer fue detenida por mostrar señales comunes de tráfico de drogas, dijo la portavoz Teresa Small, quien declinó ofrecer más detalles.

"Cuando la estaban cateando se dieron cuenta que tenía algo ahí", dijo Small.

La metanfetamina, envuelta en un preservativo y cinta adhesiva negra, estaba insertada en el cuerpo de Ibarra, quien fue entregada a la rama de investigaciones de la Policía de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas.

Las autoridades dijeron que no es inusual que los traficantes de drogas las escondan dentro del cuerpo, ya sea tragándose el paquete o a través de otros medios. Un oficial médico fue encargado de extraerle el paquete porque si se rompía la metanfetamina podía haber matado a Ibarra.

No se sabía si Ibarra tiene un abogado o ha sido arrestado anteriormente por tráfico de drogas.

Trazan plan para asegurar la frontera

Source

Trazan plan para asegurar la frontera

Washington, EU

por Agencia Reforma - Jul. 4, 2013 01:28 PM

La Voz

El plan para reforzar la frontera con México incluido en la reforma migratoria aprobada recientemente en el Senado de Estados Unidos especifica qué tipo de armamento y tecnología tiene que ser adquirida.

El plan incluye, por ejemplo, la compra de 6 sistemas de radar aéreo de la compañía Northrop Grumman valorados en 9.3 millones de dólares.

Además prevé la adquisición de 15 helicópteros "Black Hawk" de la empresa Sikorsky, cada uno de los cuales cuesta 17 millones de dólares.

También se contempla adquirir 8 helicópteros ligeros de la compañía American Eurocopter, cuyo precio de mercado asciende a 3 millones de dólares por pieza.

La compra de otros 17 helicópteros UH-1N de la compañía Bell, un modelo que además ya no se produce, también vienen mencionados en la reforma migratoria del Senado.

Con la excepción de casos como los descritos, la mayor parte del equipo no aparece detallado con el nombre de la empresa en cuestión, sino por su modelo genérico.

Así, por ejemplo, se plantea comprar 4 mil 595 sensores automáticos de tierra y 104 dispositivos de detección de isótopos radiactivos.

Lo que preocupa a analistas y a críticos es que no se estén respetando las reglas básicas de las licitaciones públicas, que en teoría no deberían manifestar preferencias por una marca o modelo.

Algunas voces han sugerido que los promotores del plan de blindaje fronterizo están más preocupados por beneficiar a ciertas empresas que por atajar la inmigración ilegal.

"Los fondos de los contribuyentes deberían gastarse en mejorar la seguridad fronteriza, no en ofrecer estímulos a los contratistas", dijo el republicano Tom Coburn, senador por Oklahoma.

Las expectativas de las empresas de armamento y seguridad de Estados Unidos han quedado muy dañadas en los últimos años por la retirada de las tropas de Afganistán e Irak.

Fuentes del Departamento de Seguridad consultadas por The Washington Post dijeron, por el contrario, que el plan está basado en sugerencias de la Agencia de Frontera y Aduanas realizadas en 2010.

En teoría, el Departamento de Seguridad podría escoger sus propios contratistas al margen de lo que diga la ley si así lo considera necesario, siempre que informe de ello al Congreso con 60 días de antelación.

Yahoo seeks to reveal its fight against NSA Prism requests

Exclusive: Yahoo seeks to reveal its fight against NSA Prism requests

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/11/2013 06:10:53 AM PDT

SUNNYVALE -- In a rare legal move, Yahoo (YHOO) is asking a secretive U.S. surveillance court to let the public see its arguments in a 2008 case that played an important role in persuading tech companies to cooperate with a controversial government data-gathering effort.

Releasing those files would demonstrate that Yahoo "objected strenuously" to government demands for customers' information and would also help the public understand how surveillance programs are approved under federal law, the company argued in a filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this

Yahoo's argument against the data-gathering was rejected in a 2008 ruling that gave the government powerful leverage to persuade other tech companies to comply with similar information demands, according to legal experts. But under federal law, the court's ruling and the arguments by Yahoo and other parties have been treated as classified information. Until last month, Yahoo was not even allowed to say it was a party in the case.

If Yahoo succeeds in unsealing some of the court files, legal experts say, it would be a historic development and an important step toward illuminating the arguments behind the controversial Internet surveillance program known as Prism, which was revealed last month by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, along with other government data-gathering efforts.

"This is the first time we've seen one of these companies making this broad an argument in favor of transparency in the FISA court," said Alex Abdo, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who works on national security issues. FISA is the acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the surveillance court to review and approve secret government data-gathering efforts.

Only a handful of the court's opinions have ever been unsealed, Abdo said, although civil liberties groups have pressed for more disclosure.

"Revealing what went on in the court is critical to having a democracy," said Jennifer Stisa Granick, a civil liberties expert at Stanford law school's Center for Internet and Society.

In light of news reports that the surveillance court has issued broad opinions on constitutional issues in secret, Granick added, "If Yahoo is successful in revealing what the court did and why, then we will know more about the laws our government is purportedly operating under, which sadly we don't currently know."

Yahoo's move is the latest effort by some of Silicon Valley's leading Internet companies to convince the public that the companies didn't just invite the government to peruse customer files or give authorities broad access to users' email, Internet chats and other online activities.

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft have also challenged secrecy rules by filing lawsuits seeking permission to reveal, in broad numbers, how many requests for information they have received under national security programs.

While the companies may be legitimately concerned about customers' privacy, they also have a strong commercial incentive, Granick noted.

"Obviously, Yahoo wants this information released because it wants users to feel that it's trustworthy," she said. "If Yahoo can show that it fought strenuously and really did its best to try to protect its users, that may make people feel more comfortable about Yahoo having their data."

Experts say the 2008 case sent a strong message to other tech companies that might have wanted to resist government data requests.

"When you get presented with an order you don't think is constitutional and the government says, 'We have this secret court opinion that it is constitutional,' then you are pretty much stuck," said Mark Rumold, an attorney who has worked on surveillance court issues for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Yahoo was prohibited from discussing its appeal until last month, when The New York Times reported that unnamed sources said Yahoo had unsuccessfully fought the data requests on constitutional grounds.

After that news report, Yahoo persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which rejected its appeal five years ago, to declassify the fact that Yahoo was the company in that case. Yahoo's attorney, Marc Zwillinger, confirmed his involvement in the case this week.

While the court found the government's effort was constitutional, Zwillinger wrote in a blog post, "I think there are better ways to protect the rights of U.S. persons who may be affected by this surveillance. If more of the court's analysis, and the parties' briefs, are made available, the public and Congress can make a more informed decision as to whether this is the program they want to have in place."

Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Phoenix & Tempe Police uses Federal money to spy on protesters

In the article the protests are people who want to make the world a better place to live and doing it by protesting. They are not criminals who will cause the downfall of Western civilization as the police seem to make them out to be.

Of course part of the problem is the cops love this stuff, because it creates high paying jobs for themselves.

While I have a lot of disagreements with the Occupy Phoenix and Occupy Wall Street protesters I certainly support their right to protest 100 percent. And I actually agree with some of their gripes.

And last but not least as H. L. Mencken said:

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

Inside the Phoenix PD's Use of Federal Anti-Terrorism Resources to Track Valley Protesters

By Monica Alonzo Thursday, Jun 20 2013

It's mid-October 2011, and Occupy Phoenix protesters sit in a city park, some with their arms locked, most chanting: "We are the 99 percent!"

They are part of a movement gaining momentum across the United States whose mission is to denounce corporate greed. Their civil disobedience also is intended to deride a government influenced by the same wealthy corporations it bails out of financial crises.

About 1,000 people from across the Valley gather on October 15 at Cesar Chavez Plaza in downtown Phoenix. The throng stays in the civic space until it closes early in the evening and cops usher people out. Several hundred protesters aren't ready to call it a night, though, and move to Margaret T. Hance Park.

Night falls, and this park closes, too.

A smaller number of protesters remain sitting on the lawn into early morning, October 16, even as police warn them to leave or face arrest for violating a city loitering ordinance. Several in the crowd shout that they are peacefully protesting as uniformed officers arrive en masse.

The confrontation with police is unnecessary.

Protest organizers had sought a permit to remain in the park through the night. Former state Senator Alfredo Gutierrez had put his political weight behind negotiating a deal between city officials and organizers.

There were reports that Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon would show up to support the rally, but neither he nor the permit materialize.

Instead, a menacing wall of officers wearing dark uniforms and gas masks and carrying protective shields close in on protesters. They grab those who refuse to stand up by their wrists, necks, and arms and drag them away.

City cops arrest 45 people, including Gutierrez, who served in the Arizona Senate for 12 years.

Phoenix Police Department officials who ordered officers to don riot gear and haul off those loitering in the park after hours claim they simply were maintaining law and order.

But their officers did more than make sporadic arrests to control various Occupy-related protests across the Valley, according to a report recently co-published by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy.

DBA Press describes itself as an online publication reporting on private- and public-sector corruption, while the CMD states that it's an investigative-reporting group that "exposes corporate spin and government propaganda."

Freelance reporter and DBA Press publisher Beau Hodai's in-depth report "Dissent or Terror" details how law enforcement officials used the resources of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, its Terrorism Liaison officers, and an intelligence analyst to track and report on the movements of individuals affiliated, or believed to be affiliated, with the Occupy Phoenix movement.

And, the author reports, this information — obtained using these taxpayer-funded resources — promptly was shared with those whom Occupy organized to protest. Police officials passed along details to downtown Phoenix bank executives and the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that joins corporate executives and lobbyists with lawmakers to produce conservative "model" laws. For instance, ALEC created the framework for Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the state's draconian anti-immigrant law.

The PPD devoted significant time and resources to the probe, despite its officials noting that there was paltry participation in the local Occupy movement compared to movements in other U.S. cities.

"It's part of a surveillance state that's crept up on us, but is larger than people realize," Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, tells New Times. "We've seen this kind of monitoring . . . of political-protest activity . . . for decades."

Boghosian says the difference is that the Internet and social media have made it easier for local and federal law enforcement "to gather information on, and track with more sophistication, the activities of politically active individuals in the United States."

A behind-the-scenes look at the government's probing of Valley Occupy activists and protesters was a prelude to what has been referred to in recent weeks as "Orwellian" government tactics on several fronts.

Most recently, national outrage was sparked by revelations in the Washington Post and in London's Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency and the FBI have collected personal data from nine major U.S. Internet firms — including Facebook, Google, and Apple — and from millions of records from major U.S. cell phone carriers.

The NSA debacle follows others, including the IRS' treatment of conservative Tea Party groups during the 2012 election. The Associated Press reported that about 75 groups were targeted inappropriately for additional reviews to ensure they weren't violating their tax-exempt statuses.

Another instance of government intrusion came on May 13, when the AP reported that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months' worth of "telephone records of reporters and editors" that listed "outgoing calls for work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, and Hartford [Connecticut], and for the main number of the AP in the U.S. House of Representatives press gallery."

The feds also gathered the phone records and tracked the movements of a Fox News reporter while he was developing leads on stories.

In Phoenix, Occupy organizers say they, too, were targets of undue government scrutiny doled out strategically and intentionally by police to hamper their ability to protest.

Cops call it intelligence gathering. Organizers call it spying and infiltration.

"It's like killing an ant with a shotgun," says Diane D'Angelo, an Occupy Phoenix member and spokeswoman. "It's absurd . . . to investigate protesters [who] care about people getting their homes foreclosed on. When you're treating people occupying Cesar Chavez Plaza with the same kind of rigorous attention as someone who's a member of al-Qaeda, that's pretty scary!"

To be sure, some Occupy-related events across the country, including in Oakland and in New York, saw episodes of violent clashes between cops and protesters. Most arrests, however, resulted in loitering or urban-camping charges.

Like police agencies across the country, the PPD devoted the resources of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center to track members of the Occupy movement. Such information centers also are known as "fusion centers" because they pull together various law enforcement agencies.

In Arizona, the center touts itself as monitoring "all hazards" and potential terror threats. It's comprised of 25 law enforcement agencies, also including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Tempe and Mesa police departments, and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

The details of journalist Hodai's report were gleaned from thousands of pages of public records he obtained from local, state, and federal agencies. They reveal that as organizers met to plan protests and advance the Occupy movement in metro Phoenix, city police officials sent an undercover officer to pose as a Mexican eager to support the cause.

The Phoenix cop attended public group meetings but also spent time with organizers in the park and on other occasions to gather details about protests and report them to superiors.

At the same time, an analyst with the PPD's Homeland Defense Bureau, part of the fusion center, monitored Occupy protesters' Facebook and Twitter accounts or used advanced technologies, such as facial recognition, to identify members of the movement.

The Occupy movement in Phoenix never burgeoned as it did in other American cities, but the PPD cautiously and vigorously tracked it as though it were a huge threat.

Although initial demonstrations attracted sizable crowds, subsequent rallies drew 50 or fewer protesters. On some days, attendance was so low that it prompted "mockery within the ranks" of the police department, Hodai reports.A Phoenix police detective working as a terrorism liaison officer for the Arizona Counter Terrorism Intelligence Center sent a law enforcement brief on trends his colleagues in other states had observed at Occupy events.

The police sergeant who received the detective's brief on December 28, 2011, commented sarcastically that the national report failed to "mention the four people we have demonstrating at Chavez Plaza."

Other police records show that daily monitoring of social-media accounts linked to members or sympathizers of the Occupy cause revealed "concern and frustration [among organizers] over the consistently low level of community involvement in the movement," according to city records obtained by Hodai.

Even so, his report notes, the PPD spent $245,200 "directly related to the policing of Occupy Phoenix during the first three days of the movement's existence."

The resources of the counter-terrorism center, well-funded by federal dollars, were spent to keep track of various Occupiers. Hodai noted that Phoenix received more than $1 million in grant money from the Department of Homeland Security in September 2010 to fund, in part, an intelligence analyst.

Brenda Dowhan, the civilian analyst hired by the PPD, and her counterpart in the Tempe Police Department commented in one e-mail exchange about how pleased they were that their "interference" helped foil a plot by activists to use a piece of vacant land in Tempe for urban gardening.

Dowhan wrote: "Every site I've been on, they know we're watching them."

But cops were doing more than "watching" — they were tracking.

Monitoring protesters isn't exactly what the feds had in mind as they poured as much as $1.4 billion since 2003 into creating and expanding 70 fusion centers across the United States.

In fact, a bipartisan probe in 2012 by a U.S. Senate subcommittee was critical of fusion centers for wasting money, getting used in ways that weren't strengthening counter-terrorism efforts, and stepping on Americans' freedoms.

The subcommittee investigation found the intelligence coming from the centers was "oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and . . . occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism."

The bottom line is that the October 2012 subcommittee findings severely question the value of the feds' investment in the fusion centers.

Democratic U.S. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of that Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which analyzes waste in government, said in the 2012 document that "fusion centers may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism, such as contributions to traditional criminal investigations, public safety, or disaster response and recovery efforts." Nevertheless, he recommended that Congress "clarify the purpose of fusion centers and link their funding to their performance."

Republican U.S. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a ranking member of the subcommittee who initiated the investigation of fusion centers, said: "Congress has a duty to the American people to ensure . . . it is getting value for the millions of taxpayer dollars invested in fusion centers."

Perhaps Phoenix terrorism liaison officers and analysts also were keeping tabs on actual terrorism threats, but they certainly were absorbed by Occupy Phoenix.

Silent Witness, a nonprofit organization that solicits crime tips, passed along to the PPD an anonymous online tip it received on November 18 about an "Occupy nut" from the Phoenix area.

The unnamed tipster wrote that the woman appeared to be involved with a violent organization.

"I'm aware no crime has technically been committed," the tipster continued, claiming the young woman had outstanding arrest warrants, was paranoid, and knew of specific plans for a violent revolt involving bombs. "[But] I've got an actual crime for you . . . illegal possession/use of marijuana. I've seen her smoking it on camera."

The individual, who had encountered the woman he called Amber only online, pledged to get police a photo of her smoking pot.

Police didn't wait for the photo of her smoking pot. They set out to identify the woman from an earlier photo provided by the tipster of her sitting in front of a computer.

"We have a Facebook photo and tried to do facial recognition, but she was wearing glasses," Dowhan wrote to police officials after sending the photo for analysis to another police agency within the counter-terrorism center.

It appears the photo was sent to a Facial Recognition Unit operated by the county Sheriff's Office, which can compare biometric data from photographs, such as those found on Facebook, to photos in a huge database — and not just pictures of people who have had brushes with the law.

Aside from 4.7 million mug shots from Arizona jails, 12,000 photos in the state's sex-offender database, and 2 million others listed in federal jails, the database includes about 18 million Arizona driver's license photos.

Hodai reports that there were "multiple instances" of police taking photos from Facebook and then using facial-recognition software to attempt to identify people believed to be Occupy members. He says it's important to note that the invasive technology was employed to investigate protesters as though police had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes.

Going to such extremes seems unwarranted. But Phoenix police spokesman Trent Crump tells New Times that the department would have been criticized as "negligent" had it not checked out a such alleged threats and somebody "actually carried out some kind of violent behavior."

When the PPD encounters "any behavior or statements" that allude to a possible threat, Crump says, it must follow up.

Documents show, however, that police tracked and dug into the backgrounds of individuals previously identified as members of Occupy Phoenix, even in the absence of any threat.

On December 14, 2011, at least five members of the PPD's executive staff, including Central City Precinct Commander Louis Tovar, received an e-mail regarding "Phoenix Occupiers" from a man identifying himself as David Mullin.

Mullin wrote: "Dear Sir or Madam, Please consider leaving the Occupy movement alone. They speak for me, and I suspect a large portion of American[s] who are upset with corporate greed and the ability to purchase politicians and their votes. We are going to take back America for its citizens, and it would probably be better for your careers not to get in the way."

He signed off with a simple "thanks."

Tovar noted to his colleagues that he had received similar e-mails from others and that he was merely giving investigators a heads-up.

It was enough for Assistant Phoenix Police Chief Tracy Montgomery to take Mullin's note as a possible threat, if only to her job security. Responding to members of the department's executive staff, Montgomery wrote: "Interesting e-mail threatening our careers. Anyone know the name?"

Montgomery's question prompted a subordinate commander to order that a lieutenant "check it out," and the e-mail ended up with Detective C.J. Wren of the city's Homeland Defense Bureau (part of the state counter-terrorism unit) and with analyst Brenda Dowhan.

The following day, Wren sent an e-mail to his lieutenant letting him know that "we figured out exactly where this guy got the names and e-mails to send that message." He identified the e-mailer as a former Glendale resident who lived in Las Vegas.

The e-mail addresses of the PPD commanders Mullin had messaged were posted on a website called Occupy the Signal, and viewers were asked to write to the city's top cops.

"Will work on it some more when I get back," wrote Wren, who had to head out for another assignment.

Hodai notes in his report that it's not a "violation of Arizona law for constituents to write their public servants with their concerns" and that "encouraging open communication is not an act of terrorism."

Records show that Dowhan and Wren "devoted the better part of two days [to] discovering the identity and whereabouts of the e-mail author," according to Hodai's report, which said: "The purpose or conclusion of this investigation into . . . Mullin . . . is not clear."

On another occasion, two Occupy members posted plans on Facebook to travel to Flagstaff for Christmas 2011, and terrorism analyst Dowhan dutifully reported it to a Flagstaff terrorism official.

"I have notified the [official] there that they are coming and that we have no reason to believe that their visit is anything but peaceful," she wrote to her supervisors.

Her monitoring continued, and when the two individuals changed their travel dates, she again contacted Flagstaff law enforcement to report their updated plans.

Why would law enforcement here or in Flagstaff be so interested in the comings and goings of apparently "peaceful" citizens who only have exercised a constitutional right?

Because, Crump says, their past activities made Flagstaff authorities want to know about their presence in preparation for "any response deemed necessary."

But, Hodai tells New Times, "There is no predicate [for] criminal activity," continuing that police monitored not only people arrested or cited during Occupy protests but those who were just issued warnings.

"How much of a threat could these people possibly be that you need to give their information to a terrorism liaison [officer] or analyst, when [your] beat cop didn't even feel it was important enough to arrest them for whatever infraction?" he says.

Crump counters that there was no overreach, that "safeguards" exist in government to limit abuse of power.

He further justifies the official invasions of privacy by stating, "The public expects a great deal from us."

Government tracking of activists hardly was unique to Phoenix, as events nationally have trumpeted over the past couple of months. And groups targeted have not been limited to those on the political left.

Right-wing Tea Party organizations have sued the IRS after their tax-exempt statuses, or applications for them, were singled out because of key words in their names — "tea party" and "patriot."

Although IRS officials apologized in May, and none of the tax-exempt statuses was revoked, the controversy is ongoing. Conservative think tank American Center for Law and Justice filed a federal lawsuit on May 29 against the IRS on behalf of several Tea Party organizations, including the Greater Phoenix Tea Party.

The complaint states that the agency violated groups' constitutional rights by subjecting them to "burdensome inquiries and scrutiny . . . based solely upon Plaintiffs' political viewpoints, or Defendants' assumption of Plaintiffs' viewpoints, based on their organizational names."

But anyone with a cell phone or Internet access could have been caught up in PRISM, a U.S. government intelligence program launched in 2008. The program was exposed after the Guardian published leaked information about the NSA's intel program, including a top-secret court order demanding that Verizon Business Network Services turn over details of phone calls made between April 25 and July 19, 2013.

Intelligence officials later confirmed that the program probably included all U.S. cell phone carriers.

Details are still emerging, with CNN reporting that government officials now insist that the program is directed at "foreign targets located outside the United States" and that data mined as part of the program gets reviewed by the Obama administration, Congress, and judges.

Other acts of government intrusion include the feds' collection of phone records from the AP as part of a probe into who leaked details of a CIA operation in Yemen that thwarted a plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airplane on the anniversary of the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Open Channel, an investigative NBC news blog, reported on May 20 that the Justice Department's secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of logs for five reporters' cell phones and three reporters' home phones, as well as for two fax lines.

David Schulz, chief lawyer for the AP, said the subpoenas also covered the records for 21 phone lines in five AP offices — including one for a dead phone line at an office in Washington shut down six years ago. The phone lines at four other offices — where 100 reporters worked — also were covered by the subpoenas, the blog reported.

The AP also is considering legal action against the Justice Department.

A Fox News reporter came under scrutiny by the Justice Department in 2011 as it investigated an unrelated 2009 leak of classified and sensitive information related to North Korea.

The details of federal agents' snooping into the activities of reporter James Rosen first were reported on May 19 by the Washington Post, exposing the depth of government surveillance.

Rosen had written in June 2009, two years before the investigation, about "U.S. intelligence officials [warning] President Barack Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the looming passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution — condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests — with another nuclear test."

The Post reported that federal agents used security-badge-access records to track the reporter's State Department visits, traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report, and obtained a search warrant for his personal e-mails.

Congressman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, criticized the Justice Department's tendency to zealously investigate leaks to the media.

During a June 2 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Rogers said the Justice Department went too far when it cast such a wide net for AP reporters' phone records.

He said he knows, as a former FBI agent, how "incredibly important" keeping classified information secret is to national security.

"However, I think that dragnet that they threw out over those AP reporters was more than an overreach [and] a little bit dangerous when you talk about First Amendment protections for a free press."

Excessive scrutiny of average residents' exercising their constitutional rights to gather and protest also is dangerous, civil libertarians insist.

"We are very concerned . . . about this use of police resources against folks where there was no indication of any criminal activity, no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity," says Dan Pachoda, legal director of the Arizona office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Clearly, it was a political decision . . . based on ideology that led [Phoenix police] to this increased focus on these groups. The police didn't like what they were saying."

Phoenix police and other law enforcement agencies shared details about pending protests with the very corporate entities that Occupy organizers planned to demonstrate against.

In his report, Beau Hodai documents how a Phoenix terrorism liaison officer, a police officer hired by the right-wing ALEC group, a terrorism analyst, an undercover police officer posing as an Occupy supporter, and others coordinated with ALEC officials before its convention in Scottsdale.

He notes that one meeting coincided with updating a "face sheet" with photos of 24 people. The sheet was titled "Persons of Interest to the ALEC Conference," and stated, beneath the title: "Committed Assault on Police Officers."

Attorney Heidi Boghosian, who wrote Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance, says such cozy relationships and data monitoring "create a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech."

It amounts to the criminalizing of free speech, she says.

PPD spokesman Trent Crump says the department shares information with any group, regardless of ideology, expecting a large gathering. The goal, he insists, is to maintain public safety at the event.

Aside from analysts and terrorism liaison officers mining social-media networks, PPD leaders decided to embed undercover cops within the ranks of Occupy organizers.

A clean-cut man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair who appeared to be in his 50s introduced himself to activists in early 2011 while they were gathered at Conspire, a now-closed coffee shop and vegan cafe, Hodai's report states.

Although certain activists believed all along that he was a cop, the man claimed to be a homeless Mexican with ties to anarchists in that country. Public records show that after getting chummy with those attending Occupy gatherings, the man, who indeed turned out to be a cop, would report back any information about the group's future plans to his supervisors.

Hodai and Occupy activists question what suspicion of criminal activity existed to prompt Phoenix police to "infiltrate" meetings where protests and demonstrations were being planned.

Crump told Hodai that police don't have to even "anticipate that there's going to be criminal activity" to gather intelligence. It's a routine exercise, he contended.

Hodai highlights in his report that dispatching undercover cops and mining social-media accounts weren't the only ways PPD officials obtained information about the Occupy movement here. They also asked private citizens to help out.

Cindy Dach, owner of MADE Art Boutique on Roosevelt Row and co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, got caught up in the controversy over the department's activities when she sent an e-mail to cops in 2011 informing them about an upcoming Occupy meeting.

Dach tells New Times that she did not intend to share information with police to hamper protesters' efforts.

"There were huge safety concerns," she says. "People forget that, at the time, sidewalks were not yet expanded, and police were working with a lot of residents and business owners to keep [First Fridays] a safe event."

First Friday is a monthly art walk through downtown Phoenix's Roosevelt Row, a revitalized urban area with restaurants, galleries, and boutiques.

Dach's e-mail to police let them know that activists planned to meet later on October 7. It wasn't until Hodai requested thousands of documents and e-mails from the PPD that Dach's message to cops came to light.

It drew mixed reaction from Occupy members, some calling for a boycott of her businesses.

Her public apology was posted on Facebook and OccupyPhx.org:

"I am truly sorry. It was never my intention to provide an intelligence-gathering tip to local police or [to] attempt to disrupt free speech." She added that, after reading Hodai's report, she "realized how naive I was in this situation."

Calling what transpired a sobering lesson, she said she didn't know her information would be "used instead to gather information about an Occupy meeting."

For D'Angelo, the PPD's information-gathering campaign against Occupy members "reinforces the notion that they were being treated like terrorists or criminals."

Although she had served on the city's Human Rights Committee, had been a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Transportation, and knew members of the state fusion center, her Facebook page and social-media accounts were monitored by police.

Detective Wren, Phoenix's terror liaison officer, told a colleague in an e-mail that he was gathering information from D'Angelo's social-media accounts, but he asked the officer not to mention anything to her about him "trolling" her Facebook page because he and D'Angelo were longtime friends.

"What amazes me is the tone-deafness of the Phoenix Police Department and city officials about why we were protesting," D'Angelo says. "They were assuming criminality and that Occupy was just a bunch of dirty hippies. That just wasn't the case."

One of the "dirty hippies," it turned out, was former Arizona Senator Gutierrez, also a past gubernatorial candidate, who was among those carried away by police in the early hours of October 16 for overstaying their welcome at a city park.

Boghosian says such action often "placates the public into thinking law enforcement is dealing with national-security threats." The reality, she says, is that the PPD was investigating "domestic activism" when it should have been "pursuing real criminal activity."

The local ACLU defended those arrested, and in nearly all cases, got the charges against them dismissed.

"At best, it's a bad use of police resources," ACLU lawyer Pachoda says, "because there was no indication that people were planning crimes, committing crimes, or meeting for any other purpose than [constitutionally protected] political protest."

Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance

Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance

Associated Press Tue Jul 16, 2013 11:10 AM

Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.

Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs earlier this year.

NSA public affairs deferred comment on the lawsuit to the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the lawsuit, the coalition demands that the federal government return and destroy any telephone communications information in its possession. It also wants a jury trial on the allegations contained in the suit.

The plaintiffs include the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the Council on American Islamic Relations Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and others.

The federal government has “indiscriminately obtained, and stored the telephone communications information of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Associational Tracking Program,” the lawsuit states.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in New York asking the government to stop the phone tracking program.

Other articles about Edward Snowden

These are articles I collected before I created this web page which has articles almost exclusively about Edward Snowden.

Edward Snowden was a Ron Paul supporter.

Leaker’s Employer Became Wealthy by Maintaining Government Secrets

NSA leaker may becharged

Security contractor was determined to shine a light

Tyrants pretend to protect our rights!!!!

Edward Snowden fired by security firm after NSA leaks

Edward Snowden fired by Booz Allen after admitting leak

Mukasey the Obnoxious

In it Robert Robb says that Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an obnoxious column in today’s Wall Street Journal. In it, he essentially says that those who are concerned about recently revealed government snooping programs are mentally ill.

Editorial: The NSA leaks and national security

NSA surveillance whistle-blower: Hero or villain?

According to this article in its 34 years of existence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved more than 30,000 government requests for surveillance authority while rejecting a grand total of 11.

Edward Snowden - NSA freedom fighter???

If you ask me Edward Snowden is a freedom fighter and patriot, not the criminal that our government masters are calling him.

Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks are backlash of too much secrecy

Sinema collects $1.6 million a year in bribes, no campaign contributions

Kyrsten Sinema job as a Congressman or Congresswoman gets paid a nice $174,000 a year. Something only most of the people she rules over can only dream about.

But if her current rate of campaign contributions, something the rest of us call bribes, continues she will be pulling in $1.6 million a year, almost 10 times the amount of her cushy $174,000 salary.

Last for those of you who don't keep up with the news, Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who tried to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet.

Source

Sinema a leader in campaign donations

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jul 16, 2013 10:50 PM

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., in her first year in Congress has vaulted to the top echelon of fundraisers nationwide, according to campaign-finance reports released this week.

Sinema, whose district includes parts of Phoenix and Tempe, raked in nearly $400,000 from April through June [for a year that would be $1.6 million], with major money coming from labor unions, Arizona State University employees and Democratic leadership groups. Her total surpassed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and roughly 90 percent of other House members, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Sinema ended the second quarter with $550,000 on hand.

The numbers show how important fundraising has become for incumbents like Sinema, especially those who represent competitive districts, said Bruce Merrill, a longtime political scientist and professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

Sinema’s fellow Democrats in hot seats for 2014 — Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of northern Arizona and Rep. Ron Barber of southern Arizona — raised significant amounts as well: about $300,000 each.

Kirkpatrick ended the quarter with $452,000 on hand, while Barber kept $330,000 in the bank.

“Whether it’s right or wrong, raising money is one of the principle components of American electoral politics,” Merrill said. “It’s kind of like a poker game: Do you have the ante to sit at the table and play?”

Sinema, Kirkpatrick and Barber, whose districts are closely split between Republican and Democratic voters, are likely to face tough re-election campaigns. Lining their war chests this early could deter potential challengers and prepare them for battle. The incumbents each spent more than $2 million in their 2012 campaigns.

Incumbents in safe Arizona districts raised smaller amounts:

Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican from Mesa, hauled in $165,000 and kept $243,000 on hand.

Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican from Fountain Hills, raised $163,000 and was left with $123,000.

Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Prescott, took in $79,000 and had $83,000 in the bank.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, and Rep. Ed Pastor, a Phoenix Democrat, each hauled in $65,000. Pastor had $1.3 million on hand compared with Grijalva’s $58,000.

The least successful fundraiser of Arizona’s delegation was Rep. Trent Franks, a Glendale Republican, who took in $25,000, even after putting out a plea for donations last month following furor over his comments regarding the incidence of pregnancy from rape.

The plea seems not to have made a ripple among pro-life activists. After his comments, only two donations came in from donors who were not corporations or from Washington political and legal firms. At the end of the quarter, he had less than $10,000 in the bank.

Only two candidates seeking to run for Congress next year spent the quarter fundraising seriously. Both are Republicans hoping to unseat Sinema in her brand-new Phoenix district.

Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot who lost last year’s Republican primary, raised $128,000 and had $206,000 on hand. Andrew Walter, a former ASU quarterback and first-time politician, pulled in $113,000 and was left with $122,000 in the bank.

Reports for Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake were not yet available.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8096.

PRISM a small part of more intrusive snooping effort

June 15, 2013

PRISM a small part of more intrusive snooping effort

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- In the months and early years after 9 /11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often, there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate or not.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" -- not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to PRISM, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of PRISM this month by The Washington Post and The Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

However, interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while PRISM has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber-optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, PRISM appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, PRISM takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. PRISM makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. Those interviews, however, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to PRISM's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That storyline has attracted the most attention so far.

The second -- and far murkier one -- is how PRISM fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

After 9/11, the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' begins

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

However, Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job -- and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 al-Qaida terrorist attack, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber-optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber-optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over PRISM, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified, but former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the United States someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

US-98XN, or PRISM, takes over warrantless-wiretapping effort

When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national-security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now, Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Although the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as PRISM.

Although many details are still unknown, it worked like this:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the PRISM documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of 2012. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named PRISM. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called PRISM, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil-libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court -- and lost -- in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.

"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under PRISM, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces that make it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the PRISM documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate PRISM's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slides made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from PRISM and from the fiber-optic cables.

PRISM, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With PRISM, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, PRISM helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. However, it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber-optic cables that actually captures the data, experts say.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is if the government can use the data from PRISM to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. However, if PRISM provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible that the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.

Whether the government has that power and whether it uses PRISM this way or not remains a closely guarded secret.

After decrying Bush for PRISM, President Obama keeps it going

A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama said recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several as yet unspecified terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how PRISM works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.

"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."

Experts deride bite marks as unreliable in court

Source

Experts deride bite marks as unreliable in court

2:39 p.m. EDT June 16, 2013

At least 24 men convicted or charged with murder or rape based on bite marks on the flesh of victims have been exonerated since 2000, many after spending more than a decade in prison. Now a judge's ruling later this month in New York could help end the practice for good.

A small, mostly ungoverned group of dentists carry out bite mark analysis and their findings are often key evidence in prosecutions, even though there is no scientific proof that teeth can be matched definitively to a bite into human skin.

DNA has outstripped the usefulness of bite mark analysis in many cases: The FBI doesn't use it and the American Dental Association does not recognize it.

"Bite mark evidence is the poster child of unreliable forensic science," said Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the New York-based Innocence Project, which helps wrongfully convicted inmates win freedom through DNA testing.

Supporters of the method, which involves comparing the teeth of possible suspects to bite mark patterns on victims, argue it has helped convict child murderers and other notorious criminals, including serial killer Ted Bundy. They say problems that have arisen are not about the method, but about the qualifications of those testifying, who can earn as much as $5,000 a case.

"The problem lies in the analyst or the bias," said Dr. Frank Wright, a forensic dentist in Cincinnati. "So if the analyst is … not properly trained or introduces bias into their exam, sure, it's going to be polluted, just like any other scientific investigation. It doesn't mean bite mark evidence is bad."

The Associated Press reviewed decades of court records, archives, news reports and filings by the Innocence Project in order to compile the most comprehensive count to date of those exonerated after being convicted or charged based on bite mark evidence. Two dozen forensic scientists and other experts were interviewed, including some who had never before spoken to a reporter about their work.

The AP analysis found that at least two dozen men had been exonerated since 2000, mostly as a result of DNA testing. Many had spent years in prison, including on death row, and one man was behind bars for more than 23 years. The count included at least six men arrested on bite mark evidence who were freed as they awaited trial.

Two court cases this month are helping to bring the debate over the issue to a head. One involves a 63-year-old California man who is serving a life term for killing his wife, even though the forensic dentist who testified against him has reversed his opinion.

In the second, a New York City judge overseeing a murder case is expected to decide whether bite mark analysis can be admitted as evidence, a ruling critics say could kick it out of courtrooms for good.

Some notable cases of faulty bite mark analysis include:

— Two men convicted of raping and killing two 3-year-old girls in separate Mississippi crimes in 1992 and 1995. Marks on their bodies were later determined to have come from crawfish and insects.

— A New Mexico man imprisoned in the 1989 rape and murder of his stepdaughter, who was found with a possible bite mark on her neck and sperm on her body. It was later determined that the stepfather had a medical condition that prevented him from producing sperm.

— Ray Krone, the so-called "Snaggletooth Killer," who was convicted in 1992 and again in 1996 after winning a new trial in the murder of a Phoenix bartender found naked and stabbed in the men's restroom of the bar where she worked. Krone spent 10 years in prison, three on death row.

Raymond Rawson, a Las Vegas forensic dentist, testified at both trials that bite marks on the bartender could only have come from Krone, evidence that proved critical in convicting him. At his second trial, three top forensic dentists testified for the defense that Krone couldn't have made the bite mark, but the jury didn't give their findings much weight and again found him guilty.

In 2002, DNA testing matched a different man, and Krone was released.

Rawson, like a handful of other forensic dentists implicated in faulty testimony connected to high-profile exonerations, remains on the American Board of Forensic Odontology, the only entity that certifies and oversees bite mark analysts. Now retired, he didn't return messages left at a number listed for him in Las Vegas.

Rawson has never publicly acknowledged making a mistake, nor has he apologized to Krone, who described sitting helplessly in court listening to the dentist identify him as the killer.

"You're dumbfounded," Krone said in a telephone interview from his home in Newport, Tenn. "There's one person that knows for sure and that was me. And he's so pompously, so arrogantly and so confidently stating that, beyond a shadow of doubt, he's positive it was my teeth. It was so ridiculous."

The history of bite mark analysis began in 1954 with a piece of cheese in small-town Texas. A dentist testified that a bite mark in the cheese, left behind in a grocery store that had been robbed, matched the teeth of a drunken man found with 13 stolen silver dollars. The man was convicted.

The first court case involving a bite mark on a person didn't come until two decades later, in 1974, also in Texas. Two dentists testified that a man's teeth matched a bite mark on a murder victim. Although the defense attorney fought the admissibility of the evidence, a court ruled that it should be allowed because it had been used in 1954.

Bite mark analysis hit the big time at Bundy's 1979 Florida trial. bitemarks2

Forensic odontologist Dr. Richard Souviron pointing to a blown-up photograph of accused murderer Theodore Bundy's teeth during Bundy's 1979 murder trial in Miami, Fla.(Photo: AP Photo)

On the night Bundy went on a killing spree that left two young women dead and three others seriously wounded, he savagely bit one of the murder victims, Lisa Levy. A Florida forensic dentist, Dr. Richard Souviron, testified at Bundy's murder trial that his unusual, mangled teeth were a match.

Bundy was found guilty and executed. The bite marks were considered the key piece of physical evidence against him.

That nationally televised case and dozens more in the 1980s and 1990s made bite mark evidence look like infallible, cutting-edge science, and courtrooms accepted it with little debate.

Then came DNA testing. Beginning in the early 2000s, new evidence set free men serving prison time or awaiting the death penalty largely because of bite mark testimony that later proved faulty.

At the core of critics' arguments is that science hasn't shown it's possible to match a bite mark to a single person's teeth or even that human skin can accurately record a bite mark.

Fabricant, of the Innocence Project, said what's most troubling about bite mark evidence is how powerful it can be for jurors.

"It's very inflammatory," he said. "What could be more grotesque than biting someone amid a murder or a rape hard enough to leave an injury? It's highly prejudicial, and its probative value is completely unknown."

Fabricant and other defense attorneys are fighting to get bite mark analysis thrown out of courtrooms, most recently focusing their efforts on the New York City case.

It involves the death of 33-year-old Kristine Yitref, whose beaten and strangled body was found wrapped in garbage bags under a bed in a hotel near Times Square in 2007. A forensic dentist concluded a mark on her body matched the teeth of Clarence Brian Dean, a 41-year-old fugitive sex offender from Alabama, who is awaiting trial on a murder charge.

Dean told police he killed Yitref in self-defense, saying she and another man attacked him in a robbery attempt after he agreed to pay her for sex; no other man was found.

Dean's defense attorneys have challenged the prosecution's effort to admit the bite mark evidence, and a judge is expected to issue a ruling as early as mid-June — a pivotal step critics hope could eventually help lead to a ban on such evidence.

A dayslong hearing last year over the scientific validity of bite marks went to the heart of the debate.

"The issue is not that bite mark analysis is invalid, but that bite mark examiners are not properly vetted," Dr. David Senn, of San Antonio, testified at the hearing.

Another case gaining attention is that of William Joseph Richards, convicted in 1997 of killing his wife, Pam, in San Bernardino, Calif., and sentenced to life in prison.

Pam Richards had been strangled and beaten with rocks, her skull crushed by a cinder block, and her body left lying in the dirt in front of their home, naked from the waist down.

Dr. Norman Sperber, a well-respected forensic dentist, testified that a crescent-shaped wound on her body corresponded with an extremely rare abnormality in William Richards' teeth.

But at a 2009 hearing seeking Richards' freedom, Sperber recanted his testimony, saying that it was scientifically inaccurate, that he no longer was sure the wound was a bite mark, and that even if it was, Richards could not have made it.

Shortly after that, a judge tossed out Richards' conviction and declared him innocent. The prosecution appealed and the case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in December that Richards had failed to prove his innocence, even though the bite mark evidence had been discredited. In a 4-3 decision, the court said forensic evidence, even if later recanted, can be deemed false only in very narrow circumstances and Richards did not meet that high bar.

Since April 27, Richards' attorneys have been on what they dubbed a two-month "innocence march" from San Diego to the state capital, Sacramento, to deliver a request for clemency to Gov. Jerry Brown and raise awareness about wrongful convictions. They are expected to arrive later this month.

The American Board of Forensic Odontology recently got a request from Richards' attorneys, who are affiliated with the Innocence Project, for a written opinion on the shoddy bite mark evidence used against him. The board declined.

Only about 100 forensic dentists are certified by the odontology board, and just a fraction are actively analyzing and comparing bite marks. Certification requires no proficiency tests. The board requires a dentist to have been the lead investigator and to have testified in one current bite mark case and to analyze six past cases on file — a system criticized by defense attorneys because it requires testimony before certification.

Testifying can earn a forensic dentist $1,500 to $5,000 per case, though most testify in only a few a year. The consequences for being wrong are almost nonexistent. Many lawsuits against forensic dentists employed by counties and medical examiner's offices have been thrown out because as government officials, they're largely immune from liability.

Only one member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology has ever been suspended, none has ever been decertified, and some dentists still on the board have been involved in some of the most high-profile and egregious exonerations on record.

Even Dr. Michael West, whose testimony is considered pivotal in the wrongful convictions or imprisonment of at least four men, was not thrown off the board. West was suspended and ended up stepping down.

Among his cases were the separate rapes and murders of the two 3-year-old girls in Mississippi, where West testified that two men later exonerated by DNA evidence were responsible for what he said were bite marks on their bodies. The marks later turned out to be from crawfish and insects, and a different man's DNA matched both cases.

“People love to have a black-and-white, and it's not black and white. I thought it was extremely accurate, but other cases have proven it's not.”

— Dr. Michael West

West now says DNA has made bite mark analysis almost obsolete.

"People love to have a black-and-white, and it's not black and white," said West, of Hattiesburg, Miss., where he has a dental practice but no longer works on bite mark cases. "I thought it was extremely accurate, but other cases have proven it's not."

Levon Brooks, convicted of killing one of the girls, spent 16 years in prison. The other, Kennedy Brewer, was behind bars for 13 years, many of them on death row.

West defended his testimony, saying he never testified that Brooks and Brewer were the killers, only that they bit the children, and that he's not responsible for juries who found them guilty.

Other dentists involved in exonerations have been allowed to remain on the board as long as they don't handle more bite mark cases, said Wright, the Cincinnati forensic dentist.

"The ABFO has had some internal issues as far as not really policing our own," he said.

Wright and other forensic dentists have been working to develop guidelines to help avert problems of the past while retaining bite mark analysis in the courtroom.

Their efforts include a flow chart to help forensic dentists determine whether bite mark analysis is even appropriate for a given case. Wright also is working on developing a proficiency test that would be required for recertification every five years.

An internal debate over the future of the practice was laid bare at a conference in Washington in February, when scores of dentists — many specializing in bite mark analysis — attended days of lectures and panel discussions. The field's harshest critics also were there, leading to heated discussions about the method's limitations and strengths.

Dr. Gregory Golden, a forensic dentist and president of the odontology board, acknowledged that flawed testimony has led to the "ruination of several innocent people's lives" but said the field was entering a "new era" of accountability.

Souviron, who testified against Bundy in 1979 and is one of the founding fathers of bite mark analysis in the U.S., argued there's a "real need for bite marks in our criminal justice system."

In an interview with the AP, Souviron compared the testimony of well-trained bite mark analysts to medical examiners testifying about a suspected cause of death.

"If someone's got an unusual set of teeth, like the Bundy case, from the standpoint of throwing it out of court, that's ridiculous," he said. "Every science that I know of has bad individuals. Our science isn't bad. It's the individuals who are the problem."

Many forensic dentists have helped the Innocence Project win exonerations in bite mark cases gone wrong by re-examining evidence and testifying for the wrongfully convicted.

But a once-cooperative relationship has turned adversarial ever since the Innocence Project began trying to get bite mark evidence thrown entirely out of courtrooms, while at the same time using it to help win exonerations.

"They turn a blind eye to the good side of bite mark analysis," Golden told the AP.

One example is a case Wright worked on in 1998. He analyzed the bite marks of the only three people who were in an Ohio home when 17-day-old Legacy Fawcett was found dead in her crib. Of the three, two sets of teeth could not have made the bite marks, Wright testified; only the teeth of the mother's boyfriend could have. The boyfriend was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served eight years in prison.

Without the bite mark, Wright said, the wrong person might have been convicted or the man responsible could have gone free, or both.

"Bite mark evidence can be too important not to be useful," Wright said. "You can't just throw it away."

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

NSA: The finder and keeper of countless US secrets

NSA: The finder and keeper of countless US secrets

Associated PressBy KIMBERLY DOZIER | Associated Press – Sun, Jun 9, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — An email, a telephone call or even the murmur of a conversation captured by the vibration of a window — they're all part of the data that can be swept up by the sophisticated machinery of the National Security Agency.

Its job is to use the world's most cutting edge supercomputers and arguably the largest database storage sites to crunch and sift through immense amounts of data. The information analyzed might be stolen from a foreign official's laptop by a CIA officer overseas, intercepted by a Navy spy plane flying off the Chinese coast, or, as Americans found out this past week, gathered from U.S. phone records.

Code-breakers at the Fort Meade, Md.-based NSA use software to search for keywords in the emails or patterns in the phone numbers that might link known terrorist targets with possible new suspects. They farm out that information to the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and to law enforcement, depending on who has the right to access which type of information, acting as gatekeeper, and they say, guardian of the nation's civil liberties as well as its security.

The super-secret agency is under the spotlight after last week's revelations of two surveillance programs. One involves the sweeping collection of hundreds of millions of phone records of U.S. customers. The second collects the audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas — and probably some Americans in the process — who use major Internet companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

NSA was founded in 1952. Only years later was the NSA publicly acknowledged, which explains its nickname, "No Such Agency."

According to its website, NSA is not allowed to spy on Americans. It is supposed to use its formidable technology to "gather information that America's adversaries wish to keep secret," and to "protect America's vital national security information and systems from theft or damage by others," as well as enabling "network warfare, a military operation," that includes offensive cyberoperations against U.S. adversaries.

The agency also includes the Central Security Service, the military arm of code-breakers who work jointly with the agency. The two services have their headquarters on a compound that's technically part of Fort Meade, though it's slightly set apart from the 5,000-acre Army base.

Visible from a main highway, the tightly guarded compound requires the highest of clearances to enter and is equipped with electronic means to ward off an attack by hackers.

Other NSA facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado and Hawaii duplicate much of the headquarters' brain and computer power in case a terrorist attack takes out the main location, though each one focuses on a different part of the globe.

A new million-square-foot storage facility in Salt Lake City will give the agency untold additional capacity to store the massive amounts of data it collects, as well as adding to its analytical capability.

"NSA is the elephant of the U.S. intelligence community, the biggest organization by far with the most capability and (literally) the most memory," said former senior CIA official Bruce Riedel, who now runs the Brookings Intelligence Project.

NSA's experts include mathematicians and cryptologists, a term that means everything from breaking codes to learning and translating multiple foreign languages. There also are computer hackers who engage in offensive attacks like the one the U.S. and Israel are widely believed to have been part of, planting the Stuxnet virus into Iranian nuclear hardware, damaging Iran's nuclear development program in 2010.

Then there are "siginters," the signals intelligence experts who go to war zones to help U.S. troops break through encrypted enemy communications or work with a CIA station chief abroad, helping tap into a foreign country's phone or computer lines.

"More times than we can count, we've made history, without history even knowing we were there," reads a quote on the NSA's Web page by the current director, Gen. Keith Alexander.

NSA workers are notoriously secretive. They're known for keeping their families in the dark about what they do, including their hunt for terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. NSA code-breakers were an essential part of the team that tracked down bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan in 2011.

Their mission tracking al-Qaida and related terrorist groups continues, with NSA analysts and operators sent out to every conflict zone and overseas U.S. post, in addition to surveillance and analysis conducted at headquarters outside Washington.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said in a statement Saturday that the NSA's programs do not target U.S. citizens. But last week's revelations show that the NSA is allowed to gather U.S. phone calls and emails and to sift through them for information leading to terrorist suspects, as long as a judge signs off. Lawmakers are questioning the scope of the information gathered, and how long and how much of it is kept.

"Does that data all have to be held by the government?" asked Sen. Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

King, a Maine independent, was briefed on the program this past week, but would not discuss how long the government holds on to the phone records. "I don't think there is evidence of abuse, but I think the program can be changed to be structured with less levels of intrusion on the privacy of Americans," he said.

While NSA has deferred any public comment to Clapper, it offered an internal article written by director of compliance John DeLong, who's is in charge of making sure NSA protects Americans' privacy.

DeLong writes that privacy protections are being written into the technology that sifts the information, "which allows us to augment — not wholly replace — human safeguards." The NSA also uses "technology to record and review our activities. ... Sometimes, where appropriate, we even embed legal and policy guidance directly into our IT architecture."

What that means is that the data sifting is mostly done not by humans, but by computers, following complicated algorithms telling them what to look for and who has a right to see it.

"Through software, you can search for key words and key phrases linking a communication to a particular group or individual that would fire it off to individual agencies that have interest in it," just like Amazon or Google scans millions of emails and purchases to track consumer preferences, explained Ronald Marks, a former CIA official and author of "Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World."

Detailed algorithms try to determine whether something is U.S. citizen-related or not. "It shows analysts, 'we've got a US citizen here, so we've got to be careful with it,'" he said.

Another way counterterrorist officials try to protect U.S. citizens is through centers where operators from the military, CIA, NSA, FBI, Treasury and others sit side by side. When one comes across information that his or her agency is not supposed to access, it's turned over to someone in the center who's authorized to see it.

But the process isn't perfect, and sometimes what should be private information reaches agencies not authorized to see it.

"When information gets sent to the CIA that shouldn't, it gets destroyed, and a note sent back to NSA saying, 'You shouldn't have sent that,'" Marks said. "Mistakes get made, but my own experience on the inside of it is, they tend to be really careful about it."

Analysts need that level of detail because they are no longer looking for large networks, but small cells or individuals that carry out "lone wolf" attacks, as the Boston Marathon bombing is thought to have been.

"If we are going to fight a war or low intensity conflict that has gone down to the level of individual attacks by cells one or two people, if you are looking for total risk management, this is the kind of thing you're going to have to do," Marks said.

___

Follow Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier

___

Online:

NSA: http://www.nsa.gov/

License plate cameras track millions of Americans

License plate cameras track millions of Americans

By Craig Timberg, Wednesday, July 17, 7:00 AM

The spread of cheap, powerful cameras capable of reading license plates has allowed police to build databases on the movements of millions of Americans over months or even years, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released Wednesday.

The license-plate readers, which police typically mount along major roadways or on the backs of cruisers, can identify vehicles almost instantly and compare them against “hot lists” of cars that have been stolen or involved in crimes. Do they have your photo?

In 26 states, police often can find out who you are based on your facial image, even if you've never been arrested for any crime.

Users of the enterprise cloud software giant will add the ability for sales teams to coach, motivate, and reward their fellow workers.

But the systems collect records on every license plate they encounter — whether or not they are on hot lists — meaning time and location data are gathered in databases that can be searched by police. Some departments purge information after a few weeks, some after a few months and some never, said the report, which warns that such data could be abused by authorities, and chill freedom of speech and association.

“Using them to develop vast troves of information on where Americans travel is not an appropriate use,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney at the ACLU and one of the authors of the report, “You are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements.”

The use of license-plate readers is common in the Washington area, where concerns about terrorism have fueled major investments in the equipment, with much of the money coming from federal grants. Agreements among departments and jurisdictions allow sharing of the location information, with data typically retained for at least a year.

Such details, say police and law enforcement experts, can help investigators reconstruct suspects’ movements before and after armed robberies, auto thefts and other crimes. Departments typically require that information be used only for law enforcement purposes and require audits designed to detect abuse.

“We’d like to be able to keep the data as long as possible, because it does provide a rich and enduring data set for investigations down the line,” said David J. Roberts, senior program manager for the Technology Center of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

But the ACLU argues that data collection by most police departments is unnecessarily broad. In an analysis of data collected in Maryland, the report found that license-plate readers recorded the locations of vehicle plates 85 million times in 2012.

Based on a partial-year analysis of that data, the ACLU found that about one in 500 plates registered hits. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it said, the alleged offenses were minor, involving lapsed registrations or failures to comply with the state’s emission-control program.

For each million plates read in Maryland, 47 were associated with serious crimes, such as a stolen vehicle or a wanted person, the report said. Statistics collected by the ACLU in several other jurisdictions around the country also found hit rates far below 1 percent of license plates read.

Maryland officials have defended their program, which collects data from departments across the state in a fusion center, which shares intelligence among federal, state and local agencies. In a recent three-month period, state officials said, license-plate readers contributed to 860 serious traffic citations and the apprehension of 180 people for crimes including stolen autos or license plates.

The center deletes the data one year after they are collected, in what officials said was a compromise between investigative needs and privacy rights.

“We don’t want to retain more information . . . than is necessary,” said Harvey Eisenberg, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversees Maryland’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council. “You strike the balance, because people are legitimately concerned.”

The license-plate readers are also widely used in Northern Virginia and the District, which has them mounted on many of the major roadways entering and exiting the city. A D.C. police spokeswoman did not immediately comment on the ACLU report.

Private companies also are using license-plate-reading technology to build databases, typically to help in repossessing cars.

License plate readers: A useful tool for police comes with privacy concerns

License plate readers: A useful tool for police comes with privacy concerns

By Allison Klein and Josh White, Published: November 19, 2011 E-mail the writers

An armed robber burst into a Northeast Washington market, scuffled with the cashier, and then shot him and the clerk’s father, who also owned the store. The killer sped off in a silver Pontiac, but a witness was able to write down the license plate number.

Police figured out the name of the suspect very quickly. But locating and arresting him took a little-known investigative tool: a vast system that tracks the comings and goings of anyone driving around the District.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.

Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

“It never stops,” said Capt. Kevin Reardon, who runs Arlington County’s plate reader program. “It just gobbles up tag information. One of the big questions is, what do we do with the information?”

Police departments are grappling with how long to store the information and how to balance privacy concerns against the value the data provide to investigators. The data are kept for three years in the District, two years in Alexandria, a year in Prince George’s County and a Maryland state database, and about a month in many other suburban areas.

“That’s quite a large database of innocent people’s comings and goings,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program. “The government has no business collecting that kind of information on people without a warrant.”

But police say the tag readers can give them a critical jump on a child abductor, information about when a vehicle left — or entered — a crime scene, and the ability to quickly identify a suspected terrorist’s vehicle as it speeds down the highway, perhaps to an intended target.

Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.

“It’s a perfect example of how they’d be useful,” said Lt. T.J. Rogers, who is responsible for the 26 tag readers maintained by the Fairfax County police. “We see a lot of potential in it.”

The plate readers are different from red-light or speed cameras, which issue traffic tickets and are tools for deterrence and enforcement. The readers are an investigative tool, capturing a picture of every license plate that passes by and instantly analyzing them against a database filled with cars wanted by police.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Police can also plug any license plate number into the database and, as long as it passed a camera, determine where that vehicle has been and when. Detectives also can enter a be-on-the-lookout into the database, and the moment that license plate passes a detector, they get an alert.

It’s that precision and the growing ubiquity of the technology that has libertarians worried. In Northern Virginia recently, a man reported his wife missing, prompting police to enter her plate number into the system.

They got a hit at an apartment complex, and when they got there, officers spotted her car and a note on her windshield that said, in essence, “Don’t tow, I’m visiting apartment 3C.” Officers knocked on the door of that apartment, and she came out of the bedroom. They advised her to call her husband.

A new tool in the arsenal

Even though they are relatively new, the tag readers, which cost about $20,000 each, are now as widely used as other high-tech tools police employ to prevent and solve crimes, including surveillance cameras, gunshot recognition sensors and mobile finger­print scanners.

License plate readers can capture numbers across four lanes of traffic on cars zooming up to 150 mph.

“The new technology makes our job a lot easier and the bad guys’ job a lot harder,” said D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

The technology first was used by the postal service to sort letters. Units consist of two cameras — one that snaps digital photographs and another that uses an optical infrared sensor to decipher the numbers and letters. The camera captures a color image of the vehicle while the sensor “reads” the license plate and transfers the data to a computer.

When stored over time, the collected data can be used instantaneously or can help with complex analysis, such as whether a car appears to have been followed by another car or if cars are traveling in a convoy.

Police also have begun using them as a tool to prevent crime. By positioning them in nightclub parking lots, for example, police can collect information about who is there. If members of rival gangs appear at a club, police can send patrol cars there to squelch any flare-ups before they turn violent. After a crime, police can gather a list of potential witnesses in seconds.

“It’s such a valuable tool, it’s hard not to jump on it and explore all the things it can do for law enforcement,” said Kevin Davis, assistant chief of police in Prince George’s County.

The readers have been used across the country for several years, but the program is far more sophisticated in the Washington region. The District has 73 readers; 38 of them sit stationary and the rest are attached to police cars. D.C. officials say every police car will have one some day.

The District’s license plate cameras gather more than a million data points a month, and officers make an average of an arrest a day directly from the plate readers, said Tom Wilkins, executive director of the D.C. police department’s intelligence fusion division, which oversees the plate reader program. Between June and September, police found 51 stolen cars using the technology.

Police do not publicly disclose the locations of the readers. And while D.C. law requires that the footage on crime surveillance cameras be deleted after 10 days unless there’s an investigative reason to keep it, there are no laws governing how or when Washington area police can use the tag reader technology. The only rule is that it be used for law enforcement purposes.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists. Click Here to View Full Graphic Story

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

“That’s typical with any emerging technology,” Wilkins said. “Even though it’s a tool we’ve had for five years, as it becomes more apparent and widely used and more relied upon, people will begin to scrutinize it.”

Legal concerns

Such scrutiny is happening now at the U.S. Supreme Court with a related technology: GPS surveillance. At issue is whether police can track an individual vehicle with an attached GPS device.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who has been closely watching the Supreme Court case, said the license plate technology probably would pass constitutional muster because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on public streets.

But, Kerr said, the technology’s silent expansion has allowed the government to know things it couldn’t possibly know before and that the use of such massive amounts of data needs safeguards.

“It’s big brother, and the question is, is it big brother we want, or big brother that we don’t want?” Kerr said. “This technology could be used for good and it could be used for bad. I think we need a conversation about whether and how this technology is used. Who gets the information and when? How long before the information is deleted? All those questions need scrutiny.”

Should someone access the database for something other than a criminal investigation, they could track people doing legal but private things. Having a comprehensive database could mean government access to information about who attended a political event, visited a medical clinic, or went to Alcoholics Anonymous or Planned Parenthood.

Maryland and Virginia police departments are expanding their tag reader programs and by the end of the year expect to have every major entry and exit point to the District covered.

“We’re putting fixed sites up in the capital area,” said Sgt. Julio Valcarcel, who runs the Maryland State Police’s program, which now has 19 mobile units and one fixed unit along a major highway, capturing roughly 27 million reads per year. “Several sites are going online over the winter.”

Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader’s computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it.

A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications.

There also has been scant legal precedent. In Takoma Park, police have two tag readers that they have been using for two years. Police Chief Ronald A. Ricucci said he was amazed at how quickly the units could find stolen cars. When his department first got them, he looked around at other departments to see what kind of rules and regulations they had.

“There wasn’t much,” Ricucci said. “A lot of people were using them and didn’t have policies on them yet.”

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

License plate reader cameras — separate from those used for surveillance and detection of red-light running and speeding — are set up by local law enforcement to track movements of individuals on watch lists.

Finding stolen cars faster

The technology first came to the Washington region in 2004 as a pilot program. During an early test, members of the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement Unit recovered eight cars, found 12 stolen license plates and made three arrests in a single shift. Prince George’s police bought several units to help combat the county’s crippling car theft and carjacking problem. It worked.

“We recover cars very quickly now. In previous times that was not the case,” said Prince George’s Capt. Edward Davey, who is in charge of the county’s program. “Before, they’d be dumped on the side of the road somewhere for a while.”

Now Prince George’s has 45 units and is likely to get more soon.

“The more we use them, the more we realize there’s a whole lot more on the investigative end of them,” Davey said. “We are starting to evolve. Investigators are starting to realize how to use them.”

Arlington police cars equipped with the readers regularly drive through the parking garage at the Pentagon City mall looking for stolen cars, checking hundreds of them in a matter of minutes as they cruise up and down the aisles. In Prince William County, where there are 12 mobile readers, the units have been used to locate missing people and recover stolen cars.

Unlike in the District, in most suburban jurisdictions, the units are only attached to police cars on patrol, and there aren’t enough of them to create a comprehensive net.

Virginia State Police have 42 units for the entire state, most of them focused on Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Tidewater area, and as of now have no fixed locations. There is also no central database, so each unit collects information on its own and compares it against a daily download of wanted vehicles from the FBI and the state.

But the state police are looking into fixed locations that could capture as many as 100 times more vehicles, 24 hours a day, with the potential to blanket the interstates.

“Now, we’re not getting everything — we’re fishing,” said Sgt. Robert Alessi, a 23-year veteran who runs the state police’s program. “Fixed cameras will help us use a net instead of one fishing pole with one line in the water waiting to get a nibble.”

Beyond the technology’s ability to track suspects and non-criminals alike, it has expanded beyond police work. Tax collectors in Arlington bought their own units and use the readers to help collect money owed to the county. Chesterfield County, in Virginia, uses a reader it purchased to collect millions of dollars in delinquent car taxes each year, comparing the cars on the road against the tax rolls.

Police across the region say that they are careful with the information and that they are entrusted with many pieces of sensitive information about citizens, including arrest records and Social Security numbers.

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not driving a stolen car, you’re not committing a crime,” Alessi said, “then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema is both for and against Obamacare???

And if you are for Obamacare, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema also seems to want you to think she is also for Obamacare. This is probably U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema true position.

Frequently the same bill will be voted on several times in the US House or US Senate and our double talking Congressmen and Senators will routinely vote against a bill on the first vote and then flip flop and vote for the same bill the second time around.

No our Congressmen and Senators are not confused idiots who don't know which way to vote. They do this very intentionally to mislead people so they can claim to be FOR the bill when they talk to people who are FOR the bill, and so they can claim to be AGAINST the bill when they talk to people who are AGAINST the bill.

That's probably why U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema voted against Obamacare which she almost certainly supports. So she can trick people who are against Obamacare into voting for her.

Source

Politics spurs some Ariz. Dems to join Republicans on health care

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Jul 20, 2013 7:47 PM

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema once toured Arizona on behalf of the White House, touting the benefits of health-care reform. Last week, the freshman Democrat voted with the GOP to delay the law’s requirement that individuals and businesses buy insurance by 2014.

Sinema said she still supports the law because it helps students and people with pre-existing conditions obtain coverage.

“However, the law isn’t perfect. ...,” Sinema said in a statement after the vote. “Arizona’s hard-working families and businesses need transparency and certainty about this health care law and its implementation. A one-year delay will ensure that Arizonans get that certainty.” [And she will trick a few people into thinking that she is against Obamacare and get their votes]

Sinema also had a political motivation for the vote. Her congressional district, which stretches from Phoenix to Mesa, is considered a toss-up seat, where enough conservative-leaning voters concerned by the health-care law could boot her out of office in the mid-term elections. [Which is why she would love to trick a number of people into thinking she is against Obamacare so she can get their votes.]

That’s what happened in 2010, when voters turned out in droves to unseat Democrats in an uproar over passage of the president’s health-care law. [And of course Kyrsten Sinema doesn't want to be booted out of office because she is a big time socialist that supports Obamacare]

The GOP is hoping to capitalize again on opposition to the overhaul in the midterm elections, just as more consumers begin to feel the effects of reform as requirements for most individuals to obtain insurance kick in.

“Folks like Sinema have reason to be concerned because they are still champions of a law that is not popular in their districts,” said Constantin Querard, a Valley Republican strategist. “When you see someone who’s as much of a vocal supporter of ‘Obamacare’ as Sinema is voting against it, you know it’s going to be an issue” in the 2014 campaigns. [And even though Kyrsten Sinema loves Obamacare, if you hate Obamacare Kyrsten Sinema probably wants to trick you into thinking she hates Obamacare to get your vote]

Arizona’s two other Democrats who represent swing districts, Reps. Ron Barber and Ann Kirkpatrick, voted for the delays as well. [Again probably for the same reason Kyrsten Sinema voted for it. To trick their opponents into thinking they are against Obamacare]

House Speaker John Boehner scheduled the votes, calling for fairness for individuals and to “delay and dismantle Obamacare,” after President Barack Obama announced fines would be postponed until 2015 for midsize businesses that fail to provide employee health insurance.

The House bills — long shots in the Senate and guaranteed to be vetoed by the president — affirmed the business delay and added that individuals should get a one-year reprieve. Just 35 House Democrats supported the business delay and 22 backed it for individuals.

Next year’s races are expected to ramp up around the time consumers notice major changes to health care because of the Affordable Care Act.

In the fall, states will open online marketplaces for uninsured individuals and businesses to buy private coverage. A few months later, Arizona is scheduled to expand Medicaid coverage to thousands of low-income families.

Democrats are hoping voters who are uninsured will give the party credit once they receive coverage. But Republicans predict voters will react negatively once fines and higher premiums kick in.

Highlighting the political fight that still rages around the 2-year-old law, Obama held an event last week with a few of the more than 8.5 million Americans he said will receive rebates this summer from their insurance companies because of the law’s provision requiring insurers to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on health care. The president also touted early indications that insurance costs will be lower in several states under the law.

“Health-care implementation could take center stage (in 2014) if there are massive problems. And if there are, it will likely haunt Democrats no matter what Republicans vote on,” said David Wasserman, an editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report based in Washington, D.C.

He said Democrats like Sinema are likely to continue to frame the issue as “keep the bill and fix it,” while Republicans will continue to advocate repealing the law.

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