“We don’t have a domestic spying program” Just incredible . . .

[bigtree]

Last edited Fri Aug 9, 2013, 10:17 PM - Edit history (1)

___________________

The New York Times ‏@nytimes 28m
N.S.A. is searching through vast amounts of Americans' e-mail & text communications crossing the border http://nyti.ms/16CkkuR


bigtree rant

Almost every government denial of snooping on Americans since 'Snowden' has been met with an even more damaging revelation contradicting them.

The Obama administration is practically begging civil libertarians and other concerned Americans to dig even further into their intelligence activities with a determination for reform. I think it's more of a naivete than arrogance.

All along, the president has operated as if the spooks left over from the last administration - enemies of the constitution who ushered in the present security regime - could be moderated by his apparent concern for civil liberties and privacy rights that he stressed while campaigning for office.

What's occurred, however, by allowing the former Bush cronies to keep their control over policy and operations, Pres. Obama has allowed most of the more objectionable practices and provisions to flourish behind the facade of his own 'reasonableness,' which proponents have always asserted protected Americans from abuses of privacy or constitutional rights.

In defending his own practice, Pres. Obama is obscuring the injustices inherent in both the law and the way the laws are manipulated by agents and operators to overcome almost every obstacle that FISA offers.

By insisting that we can tweak our way to reform; that we can trust that the government will be reasonable and follow good practice in its wide scope of information-gathering, actually does little more than codify the Bush-era premise that government can do whatever it deems necessary.

There will be no leadership to true intelligence reform from the Obama administration, because it's spent almost all of that capital of the president's earlier convictions about civil liberties and privacy rights defending their own unethical and anti-constitutional practices.

[Historic NY]

1. We do its called SOCIAL MEDIA...

and you thought it was fun to share. Of course the government has to filter out the bowel movement stuff along with Aunties bunions, but you get the drift.

Every click you make, is a click they can take! Carry on.

[bigtree]

3. I'm sure there's been a line on me long before the clicking became mainstream

. . . it's a pretty weak argument to point to all of the other intrusiveness inherent in this medium; and in others; to (I assume) explain away the impact and consequence of government's domestic snooping. After all, we've been told by the same that they're recognizing these rights and concerns of ours.

[sabrina 1]

22. This comment is so sad because it demonstrates how successful the 'grooming' of citizens

over time has been to accept things that they should never accept. To create apathy, a sense of 'oh well, this is how it is, so what'.

This is one of the worst effects of the years of indoctrination, using the most successful tool of all, government created fear of one enemy or another, because this country always seems to have enemies no matter how many lives are lost or money spent, to 'fight' them.

When you read the history of totalitarian states and the people who lived in them, how they were able to control the populations, it is this kind of blase dismissal of the loss of basic rights and the acceptance that the government is all powerful so why worry, just carry on, that strikes you the most. Iow, people learn to just 'live with it'. We looked at those states and felt superior to them, it could not happen here.

Well, it has, and when you read the excuses right here on DU every day, such as this one, they sound so familiar.

However, we are not yet at the point where this is the prevailing attitude, because there are still millions of Americans who are appropriately outraged at the out of control behavior of their government.

Anger and outrage leads to action. THAT is the antidote to apathy.

[bemildred]

2. Yep, they are screwed, did it to themselves too. nt

[LondonReign2]

4. They'll insist this still isn't proof

Then reinsert their heads in the sand/their rectums

[ProSense]

5. This article is about

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

<...>

The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.”

<...>

The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government...The disclosure sheds additional light on statements intelligence officials have made recently, reassuring the public that they do not “target” Americans for surveillance without warrants.

...the process of gathering information on foreign targets.

As the article states, this is a revelation from June, and the ACLU covered it. Bringing it to light again serves the purpose of focusing on what needs to be done to address the way the information is gathered.

[bigtree]

7. it's clear enough to me, ProSense, how this program is being described

. . . you make those points very clearly in your post.

After taking all of that in, I'm still left with many years of watching our government (made up of many, many motivations and individuals) operate in a most nefarious and duplicitous manner with regard to our individual rights to privacy, and with regard to our constitutional rights to due process of law.

Quite simply, I don't trust that this present government is any less determined or any less engaged than it has been in the past in routinely subverting and manipulating the protections Edward Kennedy's original FISA Act intended to provide (their denials, notwithstanding).

[ProSense]

10. Congress is

"Quite simply, I don't trust that this present government is any less determined or any less engaged than it has been in the past in routinely subverting and manipulating the protections Edward Kennedy's original FISA Act intended to provide (their denials, notwithstanding). "

...going to have to address the concerns, including the information-gathering process. Americans need to be shielded from the NSA foreign surveillance program.

The FISA act and its intent were clear, but you also have to consider that we're no longer in the telephone-only era. New technologies present a challenge.

One could debate whether or not the FISA amendments and the Patriot Act need to be repealed. That still leaves a need to reform the secret FISA court, and there is at least one proposal to do so (http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023425884).

[bigtree]

12. very good points; especially 'Congress' and their responsibility to lead

. . . and the 'challenges' new technology present to investigators. Transparency issues, as well.

Remember, though, this is a very entrenched and powerful bloc of intelligence agencies (at least 18 or so major ones) which will not relinquish whatever assumed authority they have willingly. Power doesn't concede . . . that's where forcing the government to defend its practices openly and directly challenging their assertions plays its role in agitating change.

[KoKo]

6. "Big Tree"...this is an important Rant from you....

Much appreciated and well stated by you of the concerns we should have.

[OnyxCollie]

8. It's a surprising rant.

Domestic surveillance has taken the luster off of the Obama administration.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933 - 1945

[leftstreet]

9. Where is Bigtree, and what have you done with him?

Good article, excellent rant

worth repeating:

By insisting that we can tweak our way to reform; that we can trust that the government will be reasonable and follow good practice in its wide scope of information-gathering, actually does little more than codify the Bush-era premise that government can do whatever it deems necessary.

There will be no leadership to true intelligence reform from the Obama administration, because it's spent almost all of that capital of the president's earlier convictions about civil liberties and privacy rights defending their own unethical and anti-constitutional practices.

[BlueCheese]

11. Thanks for the post. Bookmarking.

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. The Stazi didn't call it spying

The Stasi said they were not spying they were just doing surveillance.on a national scale for the protection of the people's state.



Spying vs Surveillance are synonyms

for basically the same action



http://thesaurus.com/browse/surveillance

http://thesaurus.babylon.com/spying

[Common Sense Party]

14. So every time I send an e-mail or a FaceBook message to a friend in Argentina,

because that communication is crossing the border, the NSA is going to collect it and possible read it?

Do I have this correct?

[Catherina]

15. This is where the weasel parsing comes in

Last edited Thu Aug 8, 2013, 03:17 PM - Edit history (1)

They're definitely going to collect it, but they're not going to *read* it. Machines do the reading (except they don't call it that) and strip keywords out of your email, tag them and file them in a big database connected with your other metadata. They don't have enough humans to do the reading and besides machines are more efficient. In 3 years, if your friend comes under surveillance for say, organizing a GMO protest in Argentina, then you get pulled up as a relationship, and they look at your file. At any time they can pull the raw content of your communications for further analysis and call in their linguist analysts to give you both a close look. If you're protesting GMO's in the states, you're doubly, triply screwed.

Now if you're a big cog in the GMO movement in the US, that's when they'll look at your browsing history, your financial transactions, your other relationships and other communications and use any information they can get to stop you for jaywalking and take it from there.

Technically they're not reading it, computer programs are collecting it all and sifting through your communications with your friend. The same thing goes for listening. Technically no one is listening to your calls. Computers are.

[bigtree]

17. rec read this ^^^

[Catherina]

23. 1 more thing. NSA can search your emails for talking *about* a target, not just talking *to*

Thanks Bigtree! One more thing

Trevor Timm ‏@trevortimm 3h

Key to this NYT story: NSA can search your emails for talking *about* a target, not just talking *to* a target http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all …

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

...

Timothy Edgar, a former intelligence official in the Bush and Obama administrations, said that the rule concerning collection “about” a person targeted for surveillance rather than directed at that person had provoked significant internal discussion.

“There is an ambiguity in the law about what it means to ‘target’ someone,” Mr. Edgar, now a visiting professor at Brown, said. “You can never intentionally target someone inside the United States. Those are the words we were looking at. We were most concerned about making sure the procedures only target communications that have one party outside the United States.”

The rule they ended up writing, which was secretly approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, says that the N.S.A. must ensure that one of the participants in any conversation that is acquired when it is searching for conversations about a targeted foreigner must be outside the United States, so that the surveillance is technically directed at the foreign end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

[bigtree]

26. rules?! They don't need no steeekin' rules!

thanks, Catherina

[KoKo]

19. Recommend.

[alc]

16. that's the start

Every time you send an email to someone in the US they are going to collect it (but not analyze it). Because tomorrow you may send one to Argentina that gets flagged and then they want to look at everything else you've sent, both in and outside the US. And, since I'm now replying to you, they would then want to look at everything I've sent. And they've said they can go one step further and look at everything sent by everyone I've communicated with (3 steps in the US - you, me, my contacts)

If you've contacted a congressman, and they can make up a reason that your contact in Argentina "may be associated with" terrorism, then they can look into your congressman's contacts. When consider everything they want to consider "terrorism" it gets even uglier. A few years ago they tried to label "unauthorized access to a computer system" as terrorism. And wouldn't state that "following a google link to a page that someone didn't authorize you to see" would not be considered "unauthorized access". A court would certainly (I hope) throw it out, but their rules on who is/isn't a terrorist would justify them doing further analysis on you if your contact in Argentina had accessed a computer without authorization (i.e. if they set up a honeypot that "accidentally" got indexed by google and they followed google's link).


It may sound ridiculous and may never happen. But they have the technology and much of the process rules in place to perform pretty detailed analysis of politicians' lives.

[bigtree]

18. rec, continue reading alc's summary ^^^

thanks, alc

[KoKo]

20. Recommend.

[Catherina]

24. +1000. Thank you n/t

[Th1onein]

28. They're going to store it and read it.

And, they are going to collect and store and read your emails and all of your communications from now on, because you have communicated with a foreigner.

But, really? They're collecting, storing and reading EVERYTHING from EVERYONE.

[KoKo]

21. It was disappointing that he used the word "Spying"..

"We are not Spying." Either he is told by NSA and other Intelligence Services that "We are not Spying on Americans" and he believes it...because it's too technical for him to understand what some might indeed consider to be "spying" in their private communications.

Or, he is using a lawyerly cover to say: "We are not spying on Americans" ...which can later be interpreted that he had no awareness that Private Contractors and NSA employees, (who may be very low level but have personal access to read your communications and use/sell the information for their own purposes), and therefore the President would not be implicated in because he only believed what he had been told by those involved in the matter. Sort of like Reagan and Iran Contra.

Not sure which it is and maybe there's a third reason...but, I wish he hadn't gone on Leno and mentioned it at all, because it didn't inspire confidence in him or reassure any of us who are keeping up with the revelations as they keep coming and are very concerned that he, himself, is concerned and willing to push to do anything to correct it.

[Mojorabbit]

25. Great post! nt

[Zorra]

27. K&R nt

[bigtree]

29. today's presser

Greg Sargent ‏@ThePlumLineGS 29m

Obama should be asked about this at today's presser: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls …

[Safetykitten]

30. He thought he said "pieing", as we do not hit people with pies...of course.

[bigtree]

31. NYT

on Friday's presser:


President Obama, who seems to think the American people simply need some reassurance that their privacy rights are intact, proposed a series of measures on Friday that only tinker around the edges of the nation’s abusive surveillance programs.

He said he wants “greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints” on the mass collection of every American’s phone records by the National Security Agency. He didn’t specify what those constraints and oversight measures would be, only that he would work with Congress to develop them. But, in the meantime, the collection of records will continue as it has for years, gathering far more information than is necessary to fight terrorism . . .

Fundamentally, Mr. Obama does not seem to understand that the nation needs to hear more than soothing words about the government’s spying enterprise. He suggested that if ordinary people trusted the government not to abuse their privacy, they wouldn’t mind the vast collection of phone and e-mail data . . .

As long as the N.S.A. believes it has the right to collect records of every phone call — and the administration released a white paper Friday that explained, unconvincingly, why it is perfectly legal — then none of the promises to stay within the law will mean a thing.


. . . well said, NYT.