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Jim
Sensenbrenner, The NSA Overreach Poses a Serious Threat to Our Economy
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Guardian UK , RSN, Nov. 201, 2013
Sensenbrenner writes: "The overreach by the National
Security Agency (NSA) does more than infringe on American civil liberties. It
poses a serious threat to our economic vitality."
READ MORE
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Dear Dick,
Rep. Jim
Sensenbrenner and Sen. Patrick Leahy just introduced the USA Freedom Act,
which would end the NSA’s bulk collection of our phone records and require
more oversight and transparency of the agency’s domestic surveillance
programs.1
Even Sensenbrenner —
one of the Patriot Act’s authors — thinks the NSA has gone too far. This bipartisan bill would prevent the NSA from
spying on all of us — limiting the agency to collecting
data on actual targets of criminal investigations. And it would mean the end
of the NSA’s “back-door” warrantless searches of Americans’ private
information.
The momentum has
shifted in our direction. Thousands of people attended Saturday’s Rally
Against Mass Surveillance,2 foreign heads of
state have expressed outrage over NSA spying — and your emails, phone calls,
social-media shares and chats by the watercooler have changed the
conversation about government surveillance.
The NSA’s programs —
coupled with decades of attacks on the privacy rights of immigrants,
communities of color and Muslim Americans — mean that we’re all living in a culture of surveillance.
Local and federal
agencies track our phone calls and mine our Internet use. They use race and
religion to target entire communities and track millions of innocent people.
And they won’t stop until people from across the country and across the
political spectrum unite in opposition.
The USA Freedom Act
will go a long way toward restoring our Fourth Amendment rights to connect
and communicate in private. At a moment when journalists are under attack
like never before and the open Internet is in peril, we need to make sure
Congress comes out in support of this bill.
Making change on
this front will take years — but passing this bill is the first step.
Thanks for all that
you do,
Josh, Matt, Candace
and the rest of the Free Press Action Fund team
P.S. The Free Press
Action Fund fights every day to protect your privacy. We don’t take money
from business, government or political parties and rely on the generosity of
people like you to fuel our work.Please
donate $15 (or more!) today. Thank
you!
The Free Press
Action Fund is a nonpartisan organization building a nationwide movement
for media that serve the public interest. The Free Press Action Fund does
not support or oppose any candidate for public office. Learn more at www.freepress.net.
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Snowden Files: Google and Yahoo Furious Over
NSA Intercept Report
Dominic
Rushe, Spencer Ackerman and James Ball, Guardian UK
Rushe, Ackerman, and
Ball report: "Google and Yahoo, two of the world's biggest tech
companies, reacted angrily to a report on Wednesday that the
National Security Agency has secretly intercepted the main communication
links that carry their users' data around the world."
READ MORE
Secretary of State Kerry: Reinstate Edward Snowden’s
passport!
Thank you for asking the Secretary of State to reinstate
Edward Snowden's passport.
Please support this campaign by donating here.
Please take a few moments to post on Facebook and Tweet it out, and email
your friends with the form below.
(Illustration by
Rachel K Dooley)
FEATURES » OCTOBER 17, 2013
Return
to Nixonland
How the NSA slipped its leash under Bush and Obama.
Each time we give up a bit of information about ourselves to
the Government, we give up some of our freedom. For the more the Government
or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us.
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confirm what privacy advocates have been saying for years: The
government has secretly turned its most powerful weapons of foreign
intelligence surveillance inward on millions of Americans.
How can an ordinary citizen cut through the brush—with the
avalanche of complicated, classified materials released, the flurry of
political finger-pointing, and the various denials and narrowly crafted dodges?
Welcome to a guided tour of the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal. We’ll
explore how we got here and what Nixon’s got to do with it.
Who? Me?
The NSA has rebuffed demands by some in Congress for an estimate of
the number of Americans whose information has been gathered, stored and
searched, but the math is simple. Unless you are a child, a Luddite or a hermit
who has never dialed a phone or used the Internet, records of your phone calls
and online interactions have been captured by the NSA.
This includes your number and everyone you dial or text, plus how
of- ten and how long you talk, as well as your location—although the NSA has
claimed it doesn’t actually use the location data. In other words, the NSA has
the fact of all your calls with your friends, family, lover(s), bank(s) and
doctors’ offices for whatever ails you, along with calls to psychic hotlines or
phone sex workers, if that’s your thing. The number of innocent Americans
affected: at least 260 million.
That’s not all. For nearly a decade, the NSA was gathering records
about Americans’ “Internet transactions,” including “metadata” such as the “to,
from, cc and bcc lines of a standard email,” when your email was sent and
opened, your IP address and location, and an array of data about you as you
search the Internet, and interact with friends and strangers through social
media. That program is no longer authorized by a secret court in Washington, D.C.,
but whether it continues is unknown. Also unknown: whether the NSA’s gathering
of Americans’ credit card transactions is continuing or was secretly stopped.
Even that’s not all. Though the NSA has emphasized that it does
not obtain the “contents” of your calls or emails through this program,
the government has decided that the contents of all international phone calls
and emails “to or from” Americans and others abroad are fair game for
acquisition by the NSA without a warrant. At least 40 million American citizens
travel internationally each year, and America is home to 40 million
immigrants, who call or email their loved ones overseas about their most
intimate worries and desires.
And there’s more. Newly declassified
documents prove that
countless purely “domestic” conversations between innocent Americans here in
the United States
have also been acquired and searched by the NSA.
Additionally, the affidavits in lawsuits filed in 2006 by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation present evidence that shortly after 9/11 the NSA
installed “NARUS” devices at AT&T’s main transmission station in San
Francisco and at other telecommunications hubs across the country. Those
devices are designed to make a duplicate of the communications stream (content
and data) as it passes through the system at the speed of light.
Accordingly, such devices can give the NSA access to all American
domestic and international phone calls and Internet activity that travel
through AT&T, which provides the backbone of the communications system that
other phone and Internet service providers rely on. So, as a technological
matter, if law were no barrier, the evidence indicates that the NSA could
technically acquire, store and analyze almost every word spoken or written on
American phones and computers.
Snowden’s revelations include Power Point presentations
referencing an array of tools—with code names like “PRISM”—the NSA has used to
target the social media activities, Internet searches and emails of specific
people. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. And that’s a problem in a
democracy in which the government is supposed to govern by consent of the
people.
The risk of ‘total tyranny’
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) said after his investigation of the NSA
in 1975, following leaks about President Richard M. Nixon’s use of the NSA to
spy on his enemies, opponents of the war in Vietnam and others:
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took
charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence com-
munity has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and
there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine
together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done,
is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this
technology. … We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess
this technology oper- ate within the law and under proper supervision so that
we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no
return.
Those were the late Senator Church’s fears before almost every
American had a “smart phone” and before most of us heard of the Internet—which
in the 1970s was merely a computer network within the Pentagon and a few
Silicon Valley companies—let alone traversed it daily.
Indeed, before Google was a word, let alone an empire; before
almost all of our telephone conversations, emails and transactions of daily
life were transmuted into a searchable digital world; and before a handful of
murderers crashed into the World
Trade Center
and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, we needed greater protections for our
privacy and liberty.
Now that need is even more urgent.
Along with the seismic transformation in the way we communicate,
the legal controls on the NSA’s powers have been systematically loosened, if
not obliterated, by the White House, Congress and the courts at the urging of
leaders of the military intelligence community.
The NSA says it has “internal controls” but once information about
Americans is stored by the NSA—including in a gargantuan 1-million-square-foot
data storehouse being finalized in Bluffdale,
Utah—it can be accessed by
numerous civilians at home and abroad. The agency claims there have been only 12 incidents of NSA staffers using its “Signals
Intelligence” (SIGINT) improperly. Most of them spied on lovers, such as
girlfriends suspected of infidelity. However, almost all of these were
discovered only through polygraph tests of workers renewing security
clearances. How many more times have lovers or enemies been “targeted” by
government employees, the military and intelligence contractors with access to
the trove of SIGINT data?
More importantly, how can we ever trust that the NSA’s new powers
won’t be misused by those in power? We already know that during the Occupy Wall Street
protests, federal
“counterterrorism” dollars were
used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland
Security and local law enforcement to monitor Americans guilty only of speaking
against Wall Street’s destruction of our economy and its corruption of our
democracy. And the government got away with it.
So the question isn’t whether the information that the NSA has
been allowed to gather on Americans will be misused. The question is, when? And
by whom? Perhaps our next president? Religious- Reactionary Rick (Santorum)?
Tea Party Ted (Cruz)? Take-Two Rick (Perry)? You may laugh, but remember that
prior to the 1980 presidential election,
Trees-Cause-More-Pollution-Than-Automobiles Ronald (Reagan) was a joke.
Who in the NSA’s quasi-military hierarchy has the power to
question a demand to provide information in its databases about specific
Americans when made under the authority of the commander in chief, no matter
who the president is or which power-hungry advisors aid the White House in 2016
or 2020 or beyond?
It’s a state of affairs that would make Nixon smirk. It’s also why
foreign citizens who’ve lived under authoritarian regimes, in Germany and
elsewhere, have expressed some of the greatest horror at the revelations over
the NSA’s ubiquitous monitoring.
The past isn’t even past
To understand what happened to the rule of law since 9/11, it’s
important to understand the path of the law before the World Trade
Center towers fell.
It begins with the Fourth Amendment, which makes no distinction
between “intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” The Constitution speaks
instead to the rights of Americans regardless of the agent that would violate
them:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by
Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and
the persons or things to be seized.
Those words were born of the vanquishing of an authoritarian
tyrant whose officers used “general warrants” to search colonists at will to
protect the crown and its interests.
Surprisingly, it was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled
that the government needed a warrant to listen to Americans’ phone calls. The
following year, in 1968, Congress passed a crime bill to provide rules for
obtaining warrants for wiretaps but—at the secret urging of the NSA—the
legislature exempted surveillance in the name of national security.
In November of that year, Nixon was elected president.
In 1969, just six months after taking office, Nixon directed the
NSA to search its files for information on specific Americans whom he and J.
Edgar Hoover had placed on a watch list.
At that time, the existence of the NSA, formally established in
1952, was so secret that almost no one in Congress knew about it, and its
funding was concealed in the Pentagon’s classified “black budget.” For decades,
the NSA and its predecessors had acted as the government’s signal corps,
listening for radio communications from enemy ships, tapping into the cables of
diplomats of the Soviet Union and decrypting
ciphers sent by spies. Unbeknownst to Congress, the NSA and its predecessor,
the Armed Forces Security Agency, had also been spying on Americans for
decades, making duplicates of all of the international telegrams sent to or
from Americans by “wire” or cable since 1945, as well as gathering radio
transmissions from across the globe through earth-bound satellite receivers and
satellites. By the early 1970s, the NSA’s analysts were reading over 150,000
telegrams to or from Americans a month under that program, called “Operation
SHAMROCK.”
With this vast and secret intelligence-gathering apparatus at his
disposal, Nixon later expanded his watch list, directing the NSA to search for
anything “subversive” or related to drug-dealing. In the meantime, in 1972, a
case involving Nixon spying on Americans under the guise of national security,
with no link to a foreign government, made its way to the Supreme Court. In
that case, known as the Keith case, the Court unanimously declared:
The Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if
domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion
of the Executive Branch. … The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the
executive officers of Government as neutral and disinter- ested magistrates.
In August 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal involving the
illegal surveillance activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President
(CREEP), Nixon resigned in disgrace.
Yet the extent of electronic surveillance under the administration
wasn’t revealed until December 1974, when the New York Times published a front-page story by
Seymour Hersh under the headline “Huge C.I.A. Op- eration Reported in U.S.
Against Anti-War Forces.” The article exposed part of Nixon’s spying under a
program code-named “Operation MINARET,” which made use of the cables the NSA
searched via SHAMROCK and by capturing radio transmissions.
Congress was shocked. During the investigation led by Sen. Church
in 1975, Congress discovered that the NSA had access to communications
involving millions of Americans and that there were about 1,200 Americans on
watch lists, mostly people opposing the Vietnam War.
But the names of some Americans on the watch list were kept sealed
until they were released this September. The newly declassified documents
reveal that the NSA’s spying targeted prominent Americans even before Nixon
took office. According to the National Security Archive, the NSA “eaves-
dropped on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, as well
as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and Washington Postcolumnist [and humorist] Art Buchwald”— and
Sen. Church himself.
In response to Sen. Church’s investigation, Congress passed the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, over the objections of a
few hard-liners in the Ford administration, including Laurence Silberman. It
was intended to ensure that the NSA was focusing on foreigners and not on
Americans, and “to curb the practice by which the Executive Branch may conduct
warrantless electronic surveillance on its own unilateral determination that
national security justifies it.”
FISA barred the NSA from inten- tionally acquiring radio signals
of the domestic communications of Ameri- cans without a warrant. It also barred
the NSA from acquiring wire communications here that were to or from Americans,
whether intentional or not. And it barred the NSA from intentionally targeting
radio communications to or from a known U.S. person in the country. It also
created rules for ob- taining warrants to target Americans, requiring probable
cause that a person was knowingly aiding an agent of a for- eign power or
someone planning “ter- rorism” or sabotage, as well as short-term rules for
emergency or war.
Congress also created a special court, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC), to hear these warrant requests. At the same time,
Congress established permanent Senate and House Intelligence Committees to
conduct oversight of the NSA, CIA and more.
Project MINARET and Operation SHAMROCK were said to be terminated
when FISA passed, and the public believed such activities were barred. By
almost all accounts, the NSA was directing its powerful surveillance tools
outside of the United States,
discarding Americans’ communications that were not relevant to its operations,
and tuning its radio channels to foreign navies and diplomats. Meanwhile, a
Soviet reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the Cold War thawed, the
Berlin Wall fell, and the need for enormous military and intelligence budgets
was being questioned.
Then came 9/11.
Checks and balances?
This much is clear: In the weeks following 9/11 a handful of men
in the Executive Branch literally rewrote our rights as citizens. While
Americans were sold war to secure “freedom” against al Qaeda, our freedoms at
home were deliberately undone in the name of protecting us.
That revision of our rights occurred on two fronts. One was a
public debate over the Patriot Act, which obscured the second: even more
dramatic changes being orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office
behind the scenes.
As the Pentagon prepared for war in Afghanistan and Congress
passed an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the George W. Bush
administration sent Congress a wish list of changes to the law that were later
titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” otherwise known as
the “USA Patriot Act,” or Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act changed some parts of FISA, but nowhere did it
authorize the NSA to acquire all of Americans’ phone or internet records. Nor
did it change FISA’s rules to allow Operation SHAMROCK-style monitoring of the
content of Americans’ international communications.
While Congress was considering the Patriot Act, the White House
had already secretly changed the rules for NSA surveillance on these shores.
Arch-autocrat David Addington (Vice President Cheney’s right-hand man)
hand-picked one Justice Department official—the newly hired John Yoo—to write a
legal memo justifying the NSA surveillance programs that Edward Snowden would
expose 12 years later. Yoo wrote a secret memo asserting that the president is
not bound by FISA’s legal rules for warrants because he has plenary powers as
commander in chief.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was busy pushing the Patriot
Act, did not even know Yoo had written that memo about what became known as the
“President’s Surveillance Program” when he cosigned the president’s first
authorization document on Oct. 5, 2001 and the NSA began asking
telecommunications companies for access to their switches.
It was two years after the launch of the new NSA surveillance
before the White House told even one judge on the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC) about the programs. That judge, the chief judge, was
not asked to approve the surveillance and was not allowed to tell the other
FISC judges about it.
In 2004, the Justice Department hunkered down to create a new
legal memo rationalizing the program as implicitly authorized by the
Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan. Later that year, the
FISC was asked to approve an order authorizing this surveillance for the first
time, and it did.
While this battle was brewing and the presidential election was in
full swing, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times were onto a
story about the NSA’s domestic surveillance, but the White House claimed the
story would hurt national security and risk American lives, and so publisher
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. held it until more than a year after the election.
On Dec. 16, 2005, the Risen-Lichtblau story broke: “Bush Lets U.S.
Spy on Callers Without Courts.” The
Bush administration responded by declassifying the least controversial
component of the program and rebranding it as the “Terrorist Surveillance
Program,” or TSP. As Bush famously quipped in trying to distract from the
revelations: “If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why.”
In the midst of the uproar over the NSA spying, the Patriot Act
was reauthorized in March 2006.
But in May of that year, more leaks came, with USA
Today publishing a
story that said the
NSA was “amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans—most of
whom aren’t suspected of any crime.”
By the time these extraordinary surveillance programs had been
operational for six years, nearly 3,000 unelected executive branch employees
(and an unknown number in the private sector) knew of the programs, but only 60
out of the 535 members of Congress.
Nevertheless, in 2007, aided by lobbying from telecommunications
companies like AT&T—which feared it would be held criminally or civilly
liable for violating the Wiretap Act and FISA— Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell began a full-court press to get FISA changed to
give retroactive immunity to the companies and Congress’s blessing to the
programs. After a court struck down a portion of the program, McConnell
demanded Congress temporarily authorize it through the Protect America Act,
which was re- placed a few months later in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.
Then-Sen. Obama, despite expressing earlier concerns about the
NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance, supported those bills as he began to
seek the White House. As president, he has embraced those (and other)
controversial uses of power that were initiated by the Bush administration.
Although he immediately sought to shut down Guantánamo, only to be thwarted by
Congress, on the issue of NSA spying he has largely continued the programs and
defended them. There has been little “change” or “hope” when it comes to
protecting Americans’ privacy from the NSA’s surveillance powers. It’s been mostly
business as usual under for the NSA, FBI and DHS.
Moreover, in light of the full weight of the Snowden revelations,
when one looks at the statutory constraintson the NSA now, the limits in FISA
that ostensibly protect Americans’ rights look slippery.
For example, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act repeats the
traditional rule that the NSA cannot acquire communications that “intentionally
target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.”
Given the revelations, though, does this mean the statute allows targeting of
Americans in pools of information after international communications are
seized?
Similarly, the NSA “may not intentionally acquire any
communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at
the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.” However, at the
time an email is transmitted and thus acquired, the NSA could argue that it
does not know where all the recipients are located, as a Bush rep
argued “hypothetically” to privacy advocates in 2007.
Thus the protections in the FISA statute that at first appear to
be shields against spying on Americans, appear upon closer inspection to
operate as swords.
Where’s the Fourth Amendment?
Three rulings issued by FISA judges hand-picked by the Chief
Justice have narrowly construed people’s Fourth Amendment rights when it comes
to two core issues: the rules for content and data acquired by the NSA.
The Bush administration set the stage for its evasion of the
Fourth Amendment in 2002, when it asked for a ruling from the FISA Court of
Review (FISCR), which oversees FISC, in a case involving a Patriot Act
provision changing the purpose of FISA surveil- lance. Judge Silberman (who
testified against FISA in 1978) and two other judges heard government
arguments— arguments originally concocted by Yoo. Silberman acted like an
advocate from the bench, arguing that the Constitution does not require a
warrant before the government can acquire the content of Americans’
communications.
The FISCR ruling opined that the constitutional test for searches
in intel- ligence cases was “reasonableness,” not a warrant, and “the key to
the reason- ableness of any search is the exterior threat.” In 2008, an unnamed
“Internet Service Provider” (ISP) challenged “directives” issued after FISA
Amendments Act as unconstitutional, but the FISCR ruled that the Constitution
did not require a warrant based on probable cause to demand content of
communications. In balancing whether a search order was “reasonable” under the
Fourth Amendment, the court ruled that national security is of the “highest
order of magnitude.”
In the most recent decision issued by the FISC, a lower court
judge ruled that the NSA could acquire Americans’ call records en masse because
Americans have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in their phone or
Internet data— a claim based on a Supreme Court decision from 1979 that most
Americans have never heard of.
In that obscure case, Smith v.
Maryland, a robbery suspect named Michael Lee Smith sued
the state after police obtained his call records from his phone company without
a search warrant. The Supreme Court, dominated by four new Nixon appointees, ruled
that Smith had no constitutional expectation of privacy in information about
himself conveyed to a third party, such as the phone company. (Justices
Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart and William J. Brennan, Jr. dissented, noting
that using a telephone does not carry with it an assumption that this
information will be released to others, let alone the government.)
The FISC embraced this precedent despite dramatic changes in
technology since the original decision. In the old days, the numbers you dialed
could be obtained by law enforcement through a court order, without accessing
the content of the conversation. But in the digital age, if the government has
access to the calls as they transit the phone company in fiber optic cables,
the government can duplicate the content as it seizes data.
Despite these differences, the FISC ruled that Americans’
electronic call records can be vacuumed up by the NSA.
Additionally, the court servilely stated that the NSA’s computers
work best when they have records of all of your calls—so all the call records
they must have.
The FISC also claimed that the surveillance was consistent with
the statutory rules for access to third party records, as modified by the
Patriot Act, which allow courts to order businesses to turn over records
“relevant to an authorized investigation.” The court’s order deemed all
Americans’ phone re- cords to be relevant to a general investigation to prevent
terrorism because any record might be a link to a potential terrorist.
If everything is relevant or potentially relevant, then relevance
means nothing.
Now what?
The good news is that Americans are rejecting these rationales and
are doing so in a way that transcends traditional political party divides. A
growing number of Americans dissent from these policies. Most Americans know
they have should have a right to privacy in their communication and Internet
records. A growing number of Americans believe that the content of their
emails, phone calls and Internet searches should not be given to the NSA if
they have done nothing wrong.
No government agency should be allowed to access the backbone of America’s communications infrastructure inside
or outside the United States.
Two of the most recent directors of national intelligence, James
Clapper (USAF-ret.) and Mike McConnell (USN-ret.) have led efforts to turn the
NSA inward on Americans and have misled Americans about the scope of these
powers in the name of keeping us safe. Both cashed out their military service
with the private-sector consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton (Edward
Snowden’s former employer) and then moved to top government “civilian.”
Concerns about trusting the NSA are only underscored when the
government has been deceptive in its communications with the American people
and with congressional and judicial overseers. In March, Sen. Ron Wyden
(D-Ore.) asked Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on
millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied stoutly, “No,
sir.”
This denial was exposed as a demonstrable lie four months later,
when the Snowden materials surfaced.
The NSA should only be allowed to access the contents of
Americans’ calls or emails based on an individualized warrant predicated on
probable cause of wrongdoing. As for international calls and emails to or from
an American, they should be subject to the requirement of an individual warrant
on one end before they can be searched.
No American’s name should be queried in the NSA database of calls,
emails and Internet searches without an individualized warrant.
Americans’ phone and Internet data should not be acquired at all,
unless it is directly connected (in one or two hops) to a specific person who
is a legitimate target of a terrorism or espionage investigation.
We also need better protections for information we have already
“shared” with a company—including the data that trails you as a result of
digital communications—to protect our inherent right to privacy against both
the private sector and government.
As Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.)—a staunch advocate of civil liberties
despite his Southern segregationist roots—said in 1974 after investigating
government spying on Americans, “Each time we give up a bit of information
about ourselves to the Government, we give up some of our freedom. For the more
the Government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over
us. When the Government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before
official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges. The
Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.”
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Lisa Graves is the Executive Director of the Center for Media
and Democracy and
formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of
Justice and as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union on national security issues. She has
been called to testify before Congress as an expert witness on national
security and civil liberties issues.
26 October 13 PM
GCHQ and European Spy Agencies Worked Together on Mass
Surveillance. Julian Borger,
Guardian UK 02
November 13 Reader Supported News
Borger reports: "The German, French, Spanish and Swedish
intelligence services have all developed methods of mass surveillance of
internet and phone traffic over the past five years in close partnership with Britain's GCHQ
eavesdropping agency."
READ MORE
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: If you live in the Boston area, Ann Jones and Andrew
Bacevich will appear together at 7 p.m.tonight to discuss their new
books, They
Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story andBreach
of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. Sponsored by Back Pages Books at the First Parish in Waltham (50 Church Street),
it’s a conversation not to miss. Click
here for more information or to
reserve a seat.
As many of you know, I recently went out to Santa Fe for an event
organized by the Lannan Foundation. There, I introduced a talk by, and
then had an on-stage conversation with, Jeremy
Scahill, author of Dirty
Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, which we recently
featured at this site. I’ve called
him our “first blowback reporter.” He’s also that rare creature, a
superb extemporaneous speaker. It occurred to me that TD readers might enjoy
seeing the evening and getting a little glimpse into Scahill’s world. Click here for my
introduction and his talk. Click here for my
onstage interview with him in which, among other things, he discusses his new
media project with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Tom]
Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence
In a World Without Privacy, There Are No Exemptions for
Our Spies
By Tom
Engelhardt
Given how similar they sound and how
easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having
total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough.
It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit,
America’s
spymasters had made just that mistake.
If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in May
and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however,
it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the
global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to
each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world
in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less
powerful you turn out to be.
Let’s begin by positing this:
There’s never been anything quite like it. The slow-tease pulling back
of the National Security Agency curtain to reveal the skeletal surveillance
structure embedded in our planet (what cheekbones!) has been an epochal event. It’s
minimally the political spectacle of 2013, and maybe 2014, too. It’s made a
mockery of the 24/7 news cycle and the urge of the media to leave the last
big deal for the next big deal as quickly as possible.
It’s visibly changed attitudes around
the world toward the U.S.
-- strikingly for the worse, even if this hasn’t fully sunk in here
yet. Domestically, the inability to put the issue to sleep or tuck it
away somewhere or even outlast it has left the
Obama administration, Congress, and the intelligence community increasingly
at one another’s throats. And
somewhere in a system made for leaks, there
are young techies inside a surveillance machine so viscerally appalling, so
like the worst sci-fi scenarios they read while growing up, that -- no matter
the penalties -- one of them, two of them, many of them are likely to become
the next Edward Snowden(s).
So where to start, almost half a year
into an unfolding crisis of surveillance that shows no signs of ending?
If you think of this as a scorecard, then the place to begin is, of course,
with the line-up, which means starting with omniscience. After all, that’s
the NSA’s genuine success story -- and what kid doesn’t enjoy hearing about
the (not so) little engine that could?
TIME TO END THE
SPYING GAME
|
#9 DELETE SOME OF THE FRONT STUFF AND ADD PRESIDENT O’S ADDRESSES
Contents of #3
Oct. 25, 2011
Arkansas Police Cell
Phone Surveillance
Patriot
Act, Cyber Surveillance
Books
Fuchs on Internet
Landau on Wiretapping
McCoy on Empire
Fuchs,
et al., Internet and Surveillance
Mass
Surveillance and False Positives
Databases
on Everybody Legislation
IPhone
Records
New
Photo Tech
Lt.
Dan Choi
Contents of #4 Jan. 31, 2012
Obama’s
State of the Union Speech
Spying
Boon to Corporations vs. Privacy
ACLU:
FBI Mapping US
Space
Surveillance
NSA
Warrantless Surveillance
Muslims
Demand End of Surveillance
Contents of #5 June 9, 2013
Warrantless
Spying: Contact Pryor and Boozman
Lockshin, Credo Action
Friday, BORDC
Massive
National Security Agency Spying
Massive
Surveillance State
NSA
Lying, Has Our Emails
Bromwich,
Secret Surveillance of All Communications in US
Cybersecurity
Act vs. Privacy
Baldwin, Protection from NSA
Take
Action to Defund the Massive NSA Spy Center
in Utah
Kuzmarov,
Modernizing Repression
McCoy,
Policing the Empire
Huggins,
Political Policing Latin America
Contents #6
July 22, 2013
Ellsberg,
Join ACLU Action
Petition
to President Obama
Jimmy
Carter, US Democracy
SNOWDEN
Greenwald,
Edward Snowden
Majority
Would Prosecute Snowden, Pew
Research Center
William
Blum on Snowden, NSA History, CIA, Whistleblower
Philip Agee (Anti-Empire Report
#118)
Greenwald,
Lack of FISA Oversight
Sign
Petitions on Snowden, NSA, FISA
The Nation, Snowden vs. Surveillance Net
and End of Privacy
Lindorff,
Not China But US is the Great Hacker
Snyder,
“Maincore”: US Martial Law Detainee List
Harris,
The Rise of the America’s Surveillance
State
Surveillance
Cameras
Greenwald,
Future Surveillance
Solomon,
Effective Resistance
New York Times Reports on
Surveillance. For example, Lichtblau (NYT), Data-Gathering Law Widened. ADG (7-6-13) 1A.
END
SURVEILLANCE CIVIL LIBERTIES NSA NEWSLETTER #9
Oct. 18, 2013
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