NSA Collected Thousands of US Internet Communications Over 3 Years w/ No Terror Connection

[Hissyspit]

Source: Associated Press

@AP: BREAKING: NSA collected thousands of US internet communications over 3 years with no terror connection

m.twitter.com/AP

@AP: MORE: Declassified court opinions to show how NSA collected up to 56,000 emails with no terror link: http://t.co/MU356v8HtW -KK

m.twitter.com/AP

NSA COLLECTED THOUSANDS OF US COMMUNICATIONS

By KIMBERLY DOZIER
— Aug. 21 3:07 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nations' top intelligence official is declassifying three secret U.S. court opinions showing how the National Security Agency scooped up as many as 56,000 emails annually over three years and other communications by Americans with no connection to terrorism, how it revealed the error to the court and changed how it gathered Internet communications.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper authorized the release Wednesday.

The opinions show that when the NSA reported to the court in 2011 that it was inadvertently collecting as many as 56,000 Internet communications by Americans with no collection to terrorism, the court ordered the NSA to find ways to limit what it collects and how long it keeps it.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/nsa-collected-thousands-us-communications

[gopiscrap]

1. Yup we are not a free society anymore!

[uhnope]

15. are you joking? this is about the NSA reporting its own mistakes, a few thousand out of trillions

so I hope you joking when you think this suddenly make the USA not a free country

[limpyhobbler]

23. They wouldn't have declassified without pressure due to Snowden leaks.

And the guy that leaked it is now a wanted "criminal".

So yeah that makes us a less than free people.

[Kelvin Mace]

17. This is what they have admitted to

after they were dragged kicking and screaming into to court and forced. Imagine what else is lurking in the dark that will take years of court hearings to unveil.

[Arctic Dave]

2. But we had safegaurds...

nothing to hide...

a few bad apples...

just metadata...

Obama...

[bowens43]

3. but it's Obama watching over us and keeping us all safe and snowden sucks

[atreides1]

4. But, but, but.....

...they didn't read any of them! (Which makes you wonder how they knew they had no terror connections?)

[dkf]

5. Sounds like this is a huge underestimation when juxtaposed with the WSJ piece on 75% collection.

[OnyxCollie]

6. The prosecutions will begin any day now...

[leveymg]

7. Here's the direct link - very short article.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/nsa-collected-thousands-us-communications

[Journeyman]

8. As early as 2004, I wrote "Power is more easily grabbed than it is relinquished.". . .

I first commented on this back in early 2004 and have repeated my concerns often through the years. Nothing's happened so far to ease my fear.

As I've written often over the past 9 years:

Whoever takes over as President after George W., my hope is they will want to dismantle the illegal structure BushCo's erected.

Power is more easily grabbed than relinquished.

As recipients of a political reality altered beyond anything the wildest thinkers could have imagined just a few short years ago, it will take a remarkable will for anyone to revoke it, let alone strive to revert it to what it was before. Certainly, I see I quick return to some aspects of "normality," but the allure of unbridled power will remain and, despite readily accomplished cosmetic improvements, power's seduction will be a Siren song of indeterminate appeal.

Yet another reason for us all -- Democrats and Republicans -- to choose wisely in the coming elections.

And here we are today, five years into a new Administration, and little's happened to ease my fear but plenty's transpired to enhance it.

[JDPriestly]

9. + 1000

And that erosion of the power of Congress and the people and the increase in the power of the executive is precisely what worries me most about this surveillance.

The executive branch can now capture, collect, sift through and read the correspondence, the e-mails including the private e-mails of members of Congress.

That is a total negation of the constitutional provision for three co-equal but separate branches of government.

That destroys the foundation of our Constitution. It has to stop.

[woo me with science]

24. "That is a total negation of the constitutional provision

for three co-equal but separate branches of government.

That destroys the foundation of our Constitution. It has to stop."

Thank you. This simple observation is OP-worthy.

[AngryOldDem]

20. I heard once: "There's always a good reason to give up your freedoms."

But once they're gone, they're gone.

Starting with the "Patriot" Act and through this scandal, the tree is starting to bear fruit. Has it been worth it? Do we feel more safe?

[DontTreadOnMe]

10. I get about 120 emails per day... thousands?

I get a couple thousand emails per month.

[pnwmom]

11. If it wasn't inadvertent, then why did they report it to the court

and then change their methods to avoid it in the future?

[villager]

12. Oh, that 4th Amendment stuff is just so "hair on fire!"

What are you -- an alarmist!?

[Paulie]

13. We need a Pro to make Sense of this!

We need the right think, right now!

[uhnope]

16. let me try: This is the system working.The NSA reported on itself in 2011 to the FISA court

that these few thousand out of trillions of emails were mistakenly collected, and reported to the court the procedures for avoiding these mistakes in the future. It says right in the first sentence of the article:

...showing how the National Security Agency scooped up as many as 56,000 emails annually over three years and other communications by Americans with no connection to terrorism, how it revealed the error to the court and changed how it gathered Internet communications.

OMGdictatorshippolicestateendoftheworld-type reactions not necessary

[Kelvin Mace]

18. Yes, because what I believe are self-reporting criminals

They are always the most honest sources.

We have a government that over the last 12 years has:

1) Lied us into an illegal war.

2) Committed torture and other war crimes

3) Murdered American citizens

4) Imprisoned innocent people and refuses to let them go.

5) Spied on innocent Americans extensively.

These lies and crimes now extend between two different administrations from both parties, and yet here we have people saying we should trust them and sneering at people who are justly upset.

[uhnope]

19. the gov't is not a monolith; we don't sneer but we do question irrational misplaced freakouts

[Kelvin Mace]

28. I am a very rational person

I am a rational person who said to my wife the morning of 9/11 that the country was now going to take a dark turn. We were going to find a scapegoat to war with, were going to start harassing, arresting, imprisoning and torturing Muslims. I told her we would eventually turn on our own people.

I repeated Frank Herbert's admonishment from "Dune" that "fear is the mind-killer", that fear was how politicians control people and get them to voluntarily surrender liberty.

I do not fear terrorists or terrorism. If we would like to stop being targeted by terrorists, we need to stay the hell out of other people's business and STOP picking winners and losers at the behest of the corporate oligarchs.

I told my wife that whatever lie was needed would be told to foment war.

I said the Patriot Act would be abused, criminally so and no one would go to jail.

I voted with considerable reluctance for Obama saying that his message of "hope and change" would quickly become business as usual once he got elected. I posted on this board that the acid test would be whether he went after Bush on war crimes and the various military contractors who aided and abetted illegal war.

He ditched the "liberal wing" of the party within 90 days of being sworn in, cutting deals with insurance companies to write the ACA, sweeping war crimes under the carpet and making it plain that he would rely on the same people who brought the planet to the brink of economic collapse to be his guide on economic policy.

I am not talking about "monolithic" government, I am talking about the handful of men who call all the shots. The "monolith" just moves the direction it is pushed, crushing all in its path.

So far, I am batting 1000, and yet I am accused of being "irrational" and freaking out.

[uhnope]

29. are you arguing you're rational or you're amazing wise prescient guy?

My point is that the NSA freakout is an extreme overreaction. It doesn't even fit very well into the narrative you just described, since unlike so much going wrong in our society, it does not have the impunity that the military does, the militarized police do, the military corporations do, the right wing does, that mega-corporations in general do. The attention to fixing the NSA surveillance is a good thing, but the screaming headlines and panic serves both as distraction and as fodder for the right wing.

[Kelvin Mace]

31. I manage to track multiple issues at a time

Last edited Fri Aug 23, 2013, 03:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Looking at the NSA has not drawn my attention away from:

1) Voter suppression in my home state and nationally
2) Fracking
3) Climate Change
4) The razor and baseball bat melee that is the GOP run up to 2014
5) The dozen or so weekly egregious police misconduct incidents
6) The current abuses of the Citizens United decision
7) The Catholic Church's continued attempts to hide endemic child sexual abuse

Etc.

ALL of these issues pose a myriad serious dangers to society, humanity and the biosphere.

I am arguing that by any rational analysis of the facts we are now a de facto police state. People SHOULD be getting VERY upset about this.

I am VERY amused by the right-wing gun nuts who regale me with tons of conspiracy theories about how the "gubmint" is coming to take their guns away in black helicopters any day now, and they NEED their guns to protect us from "tyranny".

The police state is here. Tyranny is in place, and yet everybody got to keep ALL their guns because they VOLUNTARILY surrendered all their other liberties without a fuss.

I find the accusations of "overreaction" to the "Obama/Bush Mutual Big Brother Society" pretty much on par with certain people's claim that I, and other like me, are "overreacting/freaking out" about climate change.

Facts are on our side. Folks just don't want to see the truth because they have so much invested in not seeing the truth.

I am old enough to remember when Glenn Greewald was a hero on this board. Back then Bush was in office and designing and implementing the American STASI. Today Obama has refined it and has it running at high speed, splattering the Bill of Rights all over the road. But because many people here voted for Obama, and got sucked into the fantasy that he was a fine and noble man lacking Bush's base hunger for power, they cannot, and will not, accept the reality of his abuse of power.

So, Glenn Greenwald and all who support him are (fill in your favorite denigration here).

[Nihil]

33. Two excellent posts there (#28 & #31)

Thanks for taking the time to spell it out in clear, factual, unemotional language.

[Paulie]

21. That report wa only on a couple of collection sites around Washington DC

They exclude the other unknown number of hoover sites around the rest of the country such as inside the telecom data centers.

The thing about audits is the scope. Rarely do auditors get carte blanche because auditors don't have an unlimited (black) budget. You can have auditors at a baseball game but if you scope the engagement to only look at peanut vendors what happens with beer they can't make an opinion on. But reporting that auditors found no problems at the park is accurate based on their scope.... And so it goes.

[Daniel537]

14. But it Keep me Free from dem' thar terraists!!!!@&%!$!*!((@!!&

[PSPS]

22. "The least untruthful answer."

[ConcernedCanuk]

25. NSA threads/news is almost getting boring

.
.
.

It's now akin to reporting that gangsters use guns.

I'm not trying to discourage threads/news about the NSA,

but I think by now the whole World knows the NSA is the new Gestapo.

CIA and FBI are well known for their shananigans,

but the NSA trumped them.

CC

[uhnope]

30. Gestapo? Godwin again? Last I heard the gestapo did not self-audit and admit their mistakes...

to Congress.

[blkmusclmachine]

26. .

.

[4bucksagallon]

27. OMG now they know I wished my sister happy birthday on skype and sent her some flowers

using the internet. I'm doomed I tell you doomed. Ohhhh, the inhumanity of it all. Where will it all end. If only Robme was elected President things would be so much different now. My paranoia spiel for the day.

[Kelvin Mace]

34. It is all terribly amusing until this happens

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2013/08/21/fbi-suspected-william-vollmann-was-the-unabomber/

Let me just give the salient points of the article:

“Reading one’s FBI file is rarely pleasant,” Vollmann writes. He discovered that someone — Vollmann gives him the codename “Ratfink” — turned him in to the authorities as a possible Unabomber suspect because of the content of his fiction. His file claims that “anti-growth and anti-progress themes persist throughout each VOLLMANN work.” In this case, his accuser was referring to “Fathers and Crows,” a novel “set mostly in Canada in the seventeenth century.” Even more conclusive, the FBI observed ominously that “UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing.”

Perhaps most alarming, he discovered in his heavily redacted file that he was considered a terrorist suspect even after the Unabomber had been apprehended in 1996. After the 9/11 attacks, he realizes, “I had graduated from being a Unabomber suspect to being an anthrax suspect.” Even today, his international mail often arrives opened. A private investigator explains to him: “Once you’re a suspect and you’re in the system, that ain’t goin’ away. . . . Anytime there’s a terrorist investigation, your name’s gonna come up.”

As someone who has seen a family member dead at the hands of the police, then watched the political/police power structure close ranks to protect official misconduct, I am rather lacking in a sense of humor on the issue.

[JoePhilly]

32. So 56,000 emails in a year ... there are over 200 billion emails in a day.

56,000 is still way too many ... but compared to the number of emails sent in a year (365*200 Billion) ... its seems like a small number.