PRISM

[BigV]

I flatly refuse to believe that the government is only intercepting communications of foreigners.

I know that should some American citizen (wacko extremist though he may be) located in the country, make mention of some threat to the president, that it would be acted upon, even though the aforementioned wacko extremist was previously unknown to the government.

Where is the fucking due process in this whole farce? Where is the check and balance of the three co-equal branches of government? Where is the transparency?

sickening!

[Griff]

Screw checks and balances, no branch should be actively subverting the Constitution and right now by my count we are at two and three is likely.

[Lamplighter]

Some Dwellars may remember this post....

Ron Wyden is still at it... hinting, but not disclosing.
This weekend new issues may be becoming public.

With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill:
For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.

Today another article clarifies more of what Wyden was all about...

Washington Post
Ellen Nakashima
9/8/13

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011
to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails,
permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases,
according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban
— at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches,
that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.<snip>

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications,
“we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview.
“We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching
of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer
expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate
or any specific authority from Congress.<snip>

The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released,
but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators,
Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole”
that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans.
They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules
from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
<snip>

[Griff]

Let's play the reallocation game! What would you do with $52.6 Billion a year that have demonstrably made us less free and likely less safe? Education, science research, space exploration, roads and bridges,...

[Lamplighter]

The beat goes on...monotonously and sadly

This article refers to NSA's collection and use of emails, social media, etc.,
to link people to others, who travels with whom, where they go.

Washington Post
Ellen Nakashima
9/28/13

NSA said to be studying some Americans’ social connections using e-mail, call data

The National Security Agency has been mining for several years
its massive collections of e-mail and phone call data to create extensive graphs
of some Americans’ social connections that can include associates, travel companions
and their locations, according to the New York Times.

The social graphing began in 2010 after the NSA lifted restrictions on the practice,
according to an internal January 2011 memorandum, the Times reported online Saturday.
It based its article on documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden and interviews with officials.

The graphing, or contact chaining, is conducted using details about phone calls and e-mails,
known as “metadata,” but does not involve the communications’ content,
according to the documents cited by the Times.

It is supposed to be done for foreign intelligence purposes only, the documents state,
but that category is extremely broad and may include everything from data
about terrorism and drug smuggling to foreign diplomats and economic talks.
<snip>
According to documents the Times cited, the NSA can augment the data
with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes,
Facebook profiles, airline passenger manifests and GPS location information.
<snip>

“This report confirms what whistleblowers have been saying for years:
The NSA has been monitoring virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives
— their communications, their associations, even their locations,”
said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.<snip>

William Binney, a former NSA technical director turned whistleblower, has
long warned of the NSA’s mining of data to create social graphs.
He alleged that it started in the second week of October 2001,
in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that it took place on a massive scale.
<snip>

[Lamplighter]

I read this article yesterday, and it blew me away.
This 3-page article goes on and on with a new release of what NSA has been doing.

It seems outlandish to spend so many resources on fear,
...yet they still MISSED the Boston Marathon bombing.

Shouldn't there be something like a signal-to-noise ratio or a risk/benefit analysis.


Washington Post
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani
10/14/13

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists
from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world,
many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials
and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before,
intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant
messaging services as they move across global data links.
Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on,
composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device
with information stored on remote servers.
<snip>
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch
collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook,
33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers,
according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.

Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document,
correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists
on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>

[glatt]

They can't prevent stuff, because there is too much data. They can only go back after the fact and use their info to round up the rest of the gang after an attack has occurred.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

It seems outlandish to spend so many resources on fear,
...yet they still MISSED the Boston Marathon bombing.

Boston Marathon is simply one example. Could easily be the outlier in the data.

But from most every leak is a pattern. Most all averted terrorist attacks were from similar sources that also saw and suspected 11 September. Information that resulted in a memo on the president's desk warning of such an attack. And it was ignored.

Most terrorism was averted by using conventional investigative techniques. Most every failure was due to people not following up on their information (ie underwear bomber). If all this high tech spying on Americans was so useful, then where are all the leaks reporting on those successes? Even bin Laden was located using more conventional techniques.

Conventional investigations: Diana Deans and three other officers - discovered the bomb for LAX. Therefore the word went out from President Clinton to look for other attacks. Using conventional investigation techniques, they probably averted the bombing of Time Square, of Toronto, of the Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, and the bombing of the USS The Sullivans. Because top management put out the word and took seriously information from conventional investigation sources.

These advanced investigation tools have proven useful AFTER other information targets a specific threat. IOW every one should require a bench warrant. Currently, even that legal requirement has been bypassed because, well, this is the problem. We still have not defined the definition of the word 'privacy'. And have too many lawmakers who are so wacko extremist that no time remains to address this now serious problem.