The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders

[Ichingcarpenter]

The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.


Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.

But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

The article goes on to describe how exactly the privacy of these innocents was violated. The NSA collected "medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque. Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam ..."

Have you ever emailed a photograph of your child in the bathtub, or yourself flexing for the camera or modeling lingerie? If so, it could be your photo in the Washington Post newsroom right now, where it may or may not be secure going forward. In one case, a woman whose private communications were collected by the NSA found herself contacted by a reporter who'd read her correspondence.


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-devastating-leak-for-edward-snowdens-critics/373991/?single_page=true

[pnwmom]

1. Right. So instead of going to Bernie Sanders or another trusted Senator about this,

and working to make sure this information was deleted or secured, Snowden did us all the favor of passing it on to Wikileaks and from there to the world.

Thanks for nothing, Snowden.

[Aerows]

2. Did you *NOT* just read the story that I did?

Because if you can have that opinion after reading that article, I'm speechless.

[pnwmom]

3. Why couldn't he have gone to Bernie Sanders instead of dumping these files with Wikileaks?

Of course the information should NOT have been collected, but he protected no one by dumping it all with Wikileaks.

[JDPriestly]

19. What could any senator have done if Snowden had gone to them?

Prior to Snowden, NSA leakers informed members of Congress about wrongful conduct at the NSA and were threatened, required to face terrible persecution and horrible losses. That route was not open to Snowden.

June 7, 2014

NSA whistleblower Russel Tice was a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping.

Tice told PBS and other media that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers, including Supreme Court Justices, highly-ranked generals, Colin Powell and other State Department personnel, and many other top officials:

. . . .

These programs typically have, at the least, a requirement of 100 year or until death, ’till the person first being “read in” [i.e. sworn to secrecy as part of access to the higher classification program] can talk about them. [As an interesting sidenote, the Washington Times reported in 2006 that – when Tice offered to testify to Congress about this illegal spying – he was informed by the NSA that the Senate and House intelligence committees were not cleared to hear such information.]

. . . .

When the stuff came out in the New York Times [the first big spying story, which broke in 2005] – and I was a source of information for the New York Times – that’s when President Bush made up that nonsense about the “terrorist surveillance program.” By the way, that never existed. That was made up.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/original-nsa-whistleblower-snowden-never-access-juicy-documents.html

I hope you will read more. It is really important that we Americans learn just how compromised our privacy may be. It is much, much worse than we ever thought, and it has been that way for a long time.

On the heels of the first Edward Snowden NSA disclosures in 2013, Tice was asked during an interview on All In with Chris Hayes, "What was your experience in trying to blow the whistle from inside the NSA? And does it make you understand why Snowden might have done what he did?" Tice replied,[17]

Oh, absolutely. I learned the hard way, you cannot trust any of the internal supposed mechanisms that are there for oversight. The chain of command, the IG [Inspector General]'s office, even at the DOD IG I found was basically trying to put a knife in my back.

The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to the intelligence community. They're exempt from it. And most people in the intelligence community, they don't realize that. So, you can't even go to the Office of Special Counsel because they're exempt from that, too, and the merit system protection board.
So even if you use the whistleblower - intelligence community Whistleblower Protection Act, the only thing that gives you is the right to go to Congress. It doesn't - it doesn't have any teeth there to protect you against retribution from the agency that you're reporting abuse on.

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

Members of Congress do not have adequate clearance to be told about some of the programs of the NSA according to the reports on Tice.

Then, of course there is Kriakou who blew the whistle on the Bush administration torture:

Another good read on this issue.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/whistle-blower_john_kiriakou_to_robert_scheer_ive_lost_20150529

Basically, there is no safe way for members of the NSA or in some instances the CIA to blow the whistle on egregiously wrongful behavior. And that is very sad for the American people. We will be blamed for not knowing.

I hope you read this report on the confirmation of the complicity of psychologists in the torture by the military and the CIA. I first heard of the report today although I heard of the complicity some time ago. This report confirms rumor. It's pretty damning.

Going to Congress is not as good an idea as it might sound. Kriakou ended up with a prison sentence.

[msanthrope]

52. Under the Whistleblowers Protection Act....both the Senator and Snowden

would have been indemnified. Instead, he just gave the info to Russia, China, and Wikileaks.

FYI...Kiriakou defended waterboarding......he wasn't a whistleblower, just a malcontent.

[JDPriestly]

66. The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to intelligence employees.

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33918.pdf

See CRS-3 on that document or do a search for the word "intelligence." I posted the precise paragraph elsewhere on this thread.

t is hard to copy.

[msanthrope]

67. Yes.....it does.....you have the wrong law......

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/18/19024443-analysis-why-edward-snowden-isnt-a-whistle-blower-legally-speaking?lite

Had Mr Snowden bothered to consult with an actual lawyer and not just Glenn Greenwald he could have found out what protections he would have had under the intelligence communities whistleblowers Protection Act of 1998.

[JDPriestly]

122. Here is the ACLU's answer to your comment.

But the fact that the leaks served the public interest by exposing government illegality and abuse doesn't mean Snowden is protected by the law, because the intelligence community has always been exempted from the Whistleblower Protection Act. This fact refutes the other common misperception: that there are effective internal avenues for reporting illegal activities within the intelligence community.

Congress passed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act in 1998, but it is no more than a trap. It establishes a procedure for internal reporting within the agencies and through the Inspector General to the congressional intelligence committees, but it provides no remedy for reprisals that occur as a result. Reporting internally through the ICWPA only identifies the whistleblowers, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation. The examples of former NSA official Thomas Drake, former House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark and former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa show too well.

This lack of protection means that when intelligence community employees and contractors – who take an oath to defend the Constitution – see government illegality they must turn the other way, or risk their careers and possibly even their freedom. The people we trust to protect our nation from foreign enemies deserve legal protection when they blow the whistle on wrongdoing within government.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/edward-snowden-whistleblower

[BeanMusical]

125. But of course the ACLU is wrong and that poster is always right so you lose. Or something.

SMH at some of the posts in this thread.

[JDPriestly]

139. What does SMH mean?

[BeanMusical]

141. Oh sorry, using too many acronyms. It means Shaking My Head.

[JDPriestly]

143. Thanks. New to me.

[msanthrope]

177. The ACLU also wrote an amicus supporting Citizen's United....and here, they agree with me

That Snowden would have fallen under the Protection Act...... they merely dispute the effectiveness of the Act and how much it shields potential whistleblowers.. what is unfortunate is that comrade Eddie .....before he decided to go parlay his knowledge to the Chinese and the Russians..... didn't consult an actual attorney in DC.

[shaayecanaan]

198. I love it how you think that calling him "Comrade Eddie" is somehow

going to score a point with anyone here.

I also love it when people are shown to be completely arse-about incorrect but continue to argue the point regardless.

[markpkessinger]

191. Nothing illustrates how empty the so-called "Whistleblower Protection" laws really are more than . .

. . . the case of Thomas Drake. Irrespective of those laws, the government has the resources to ruin a person if they wish to do so,. simply by forcing him or her to expend money he or she doesn't have in order to defend against a malicious prosecution by the government (whose resources are effectively unlimited). Whistleblower Protection laws don't pay attorneys' fees. Even if a person is permitted under the law to sue for attorneys' fees after the fact, most lawyers will still require those fees to be paid on an ongoing basie. Drake eventually reached a settlement whereby he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, but not before wiping out his life's savings in the process.

[markpkessinger]

199. Legal opinion is split on the matter . . .

. . so Snowden could conceivably have received two conflicting opinions from two different lawyers. The only "legal" avenue for disclosure was to a member of Congress, who could ONLY bring that information to the attention of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who would have (and would have even after the Snowden disclosures, but for the public outcry) allowed it to die a quiet death. It was set up as a kind of catch-22 that made it effectively impossible to bring illegal conduct by the CIA or NSA to the public's attention. And if they are engaging in illegal conduct, the public has an absolute right to know that.

[msanthrope]

201. Legal opinion is split on the matter, but here's the thing.....

There's no scenario under which an attorney is going to turn around and tell the client.....hey take off and run to China then to Russia. my point is that Snowden actions are not of a whistleblower or if someone who is willing to stand and fight you don't go running off to Vladimir Putin if you're going to go ahead and fight for truth justice and democracy.

[markpkessinger]

209. I don't accept that being a whistleblower means becoming a legal martyr . . .

. . . to a U.S. government determined to make an example out of someone.

[msanthrope]

210. Actually that's exactly what it means.......too bad Comrade Eddie didn't have her courage:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_Greenhouse

she had the courage to testify in front of Congress. he had the courage to run to China have his 30th birthday party in the Russian embassy and then run to Vladimir Putin. guess who I think actually has the courage of their convictions.

[markpkessinger]

211. No . . .

No, whistleblowing is merely exposing wrongdoing. It may entail being vindictively and maliciously prosecuted, but there is certainly no reason to suggest that such prosecution is the sine qua non of whistleblowing. There is no particular reason one should subject himself/herself to a malicious, vindictive prosecution by the same government whose wrongdoing one exposed. To suggest that it is is positively . . . . Nixonian. Indeed, there is nothing particularly virtuous in subjecting oneself to further wrongdoing merely for having exposed wrongdoing.

The lengths people go to in order to defend their early, hasty vilification of Snowden continue to amaze me.

[cui bono]

109. As if the Whistleblowers Protection Act protects.

Many stories have been posted here, several documentaries have been made, many articles have been written that all show that if you become a whistleblower through the proper channels your life will be destroyed. Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined.

Now what was that you were saying?

[bvar22]

110. Can you document Snowden giving information...

...to ANY government, as you state directly in your post.

In post #52, msanthrope stated that Snowden just gave the info to Russia, China.."

"
"he just gave the info to Russia, China"

Now THOSE are serious charges, and deserve some support (links) if you are going to post them on DU.

AFAIK, Snowden released files ONLY to credible journalists, and this information was received by the editorial boards of the NewsPapers to decide whether to print it or not.


Thank gawd for the Whistle Blowers.
They are the protectors of our Democracy.

[BeanMusical]

120. "he just gave the info to Russia, China"

Well, that was a WTF moment. Can I claim that Hillary secretly passed sensitive information to Wall Street firms from the White house in the 90s since I don't need to prove a thing?

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. I thought it was parody at first

NSA defenders are upset..... then goes on to blame the leaker and Sanders for the information the WP was given by the leaker.

[pnwmom]

12. Where did you come up with the idea that anyone is blaming Sanders?

I blame the NSA for collecting the information AND I blame Snowden, an employee with security clearance, for dumping the information with Wikileaks instead of going to someone like Sanders for help.

[Shamash]

25. How exactly -could- Sanders have done anything?

Does he have some secret power to say "No, you cannot arrest that man!"? You have said twice he should have gone to Sanders for help. Tell us all what help Sanders could have given. Frame your answer knowing that the NSA abuses, while revealed, have still not been curtailed through the mighty power of Sanders (or Warren or anyone else).

[randome]

33. Um, Congress creates legislation. They conduct investigations.

Plenty of opportunity to get the truth out there in front of the public. Except the real reason Snowden did not take that route is that it wouldn't have been heroic enough.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

[Shamash]

35. Um, right.

(finally stops laughing at the absurdity of your subject line)

So, in the past two years we have gotten exactly where with the investigation and legislation? Make your case that:

• You and I would know more about the abuses, if he had released the information to a member of Congress
• The results of investigation would be more thorough than they are now, if he had released the information to a member of Congress
• We would have better legislation to stop these abuses, if he had released the information to a member of Congress
• He would be more likely to be a free man right now, if he had released the information to a member of Congress

Because if you cannot make that case, you cannot argue his course of action was the wrong one for any reason more compelling than "because!". For your reply, keep in mind that the Democratic majority (at the time) Senate Intelligence Committee (the place such information would be discussed) did its absolute best to keep NSA activities of this type secret. And that is the Democratic committee that is supposed to have oversight of such activities.

[randome]

36. You do not steal national security docs, flee the country and hand over info to foreign nationals.

Not unless there is an emergency situation. There was no emergency. In fact, Snowden's first disclosure was about PRISM, which he and Greenwald misunderstood to be some sort of vacuum cleaner of the Internet.

That's what they led off with. That was their 'emergency'.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

[Shamash]

40. Send me some mail if you decide to answer my question, otherwise we're done

You are free to continue being a nationalist and defender of an illegal surveillance state, you'll just be doing it without me. You still however, have lots of friends in this regard. Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, Antonin Scalia and John Boehner have all made it clear they're on your side, so talk all you want.

[randome]

41. Where have we gotten during the past two years?

Not far. The changes at the NSA have been mostly cosmetic. So Snowden's 'revelations' did very little. Which means going to Congress about the NSA 'watching our thoughts form as we type' or implying (never alleging, mind you, only implying) that the NSA is scooping up all our communications would have resulted in pretty much the same thing.

Except Snowden would not have endangered intelligence operations and given information -through second-hand means- to foreign nationals.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[rhett o rick]

78. Do you think we the people would be better off had there not have been a Snowden?

Do you believe in whistle-blowing?

Do you believe in civil disobedience?

[JDPriestly]

92. Are you happy about the fact that we live in a police state?

Because that is what we have when the NSA can collect our most intimate correspondence.

When they can, as Russel Tice says they did, collect the information on lawyers and law firms, lots of lawyers and law firms.

That's stuff just as low as what was going on in the Soviet Union, in the DDR (STASI) and in NAZI Germany. The only difference is that our government has better technology and can snoop and pry more efficiently. Only difference. And that is shameful.

[randome]

160. Deliriously happy.

Of course the NSA could collect all your personal info. If I was a master hacker, so could I. Is there any evidence the NSA is doing this? No.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[BeanMusical]

166. "Deliriously happy."

I'm afraid that you are more than delirious my poor fellow. Here, take 2 straight Jackets and call the Doctor back in a month or two.

[sabrina 1]

107. I guess this means you were on board with the Bush/Cheney admin when this mass spying on US

Citizens was first exposed by another Whistle Blower?? I'm asking because you surely can't have changed your mind simply because we are now under a different administration so I'm assuming you were attacking THAT Whistle Blower, as were Bush supporters, as a traitor???

When the people's Constitutional Rights are violated by those in power, there is no more serious Emergency so I'm puzzled by your dismissal of such an egregious crime, when every Democrat to my knowledge considered it an imminent threat to this the very foundation of this Country and STILL DO btw, not so long ago.

It is more than emergency now, it has passed that stage, it is a Crime that has yet to be prosecuted and so long as the criminals are free to continue this threat against our Constitution, this country is in dire danger.s

Let's hope that before very long, we will start seeing these long over due prosecutions before it is too late to save this democracy.

[randome]

126. Foreign nationals do not enjoy our Constitutional privileges.

And as I've pointed out again and again, you cannot get a suspect's communications without also getting communications you are not interested in. It is a physical impossibility in the Digital Age.

Bush/Cheney were doing whatever the hell they wanted without warrants. It was Obama who put in additional safeguards regarding warrants.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[JonLP24]

155. Additional safeguards against secrets

like using the Espionage Act (originally signed by Wilson liberally used by Hoover to go after the lefty political protestors -- mostly socialists for things like protesting WWI) which was an Ashcroft precedent like the "state secrets privilege". They agency or deep state do whatever they hell they want and the less the President knows is better (I imagine he doesn't want to know but will certainly go after those who reveal secrets with as much effort as they possibly can). I imagine those safeguards didn't change anything or so what if they did, what happened? Redaction. Obama signed an executive order with a laughable America has long had "a zero tolerance" approach to human trafficking a decade after the abuses were well known by anyone who has seen a military base in Southwest Asia post-2003 but it didn't stop the abuses. In fact added a question the contractors asked did you pay a recruiting fee which they all did and if they say yes are fired on the spot so they say no to work back the $4,000 or so they paid to a bait-and-switch recruiter. They use Saudi or Kuwaiti contractors so legally they distanced themselves from responsibility and accountability.


Edward Snowden and the National Security Industrial Complex



Pushing for Expanded Surveillance

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. Congress in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on June 24, 2004.

<snip>

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s (become) impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

<snip>

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (... and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times this weekend.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Indeed Woolsey had argued in favor of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

<snip>

A Flood of New Contracts

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company's $5.86 billion in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial program defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organization, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to $5.6 billion to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

How does Booz Allen wins these contracts? Well, in addition to its connections with the DNI, the company boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for "top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence" - one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division and Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning.

In the 1970s, RCA and Western Union both took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

<snip>

In February 2012, the U.S. Air Force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor's contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas.

"Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm," wrote the U.S. Air Force legal counsel. "These events caused the Air Force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program."

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the Air Force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm's ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. "Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue," wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that noting that Del Eulberg, vice-president of the Booz Allen's San Antonio office had served as chief engineer in the Air Force.

"It couldn't hurt having (former Air Force people). Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years."

That very month, Booz Allen was hired to build a $10 million "Enhanced Secured Network" (ESN) for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. An audit of the project released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office this past February showed that it was full of holes.

The ESN “left software and systems put in place misconfigured—even failing to take advantage of all the features of the malware protection the commission had selected, leaving its workstations still vulnerable to attack,” wrote Sean Gallagher, a computer reporter at ArsTechnica.

Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) "employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate." The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges.

Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen's share of the $15 million settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3 million.

Incidentally, both the NASA and the Air Force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.

Investigate Booz Allen, Not Edward Snowden

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15846

Don't be incredibly naive in believing they are doing only stuff that is necessary and "51% confidence of "foreighness" was all the NSA required which suggests deliberate ways to do what they want and get away with it. In any case

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

<snip>

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no evidence its systems had been breached).

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0

If you would like to defend the program as is or defend the reality of it but there is little effort to check themselves and want to do more with less risk. Basically do anything without the consequences.

[randome]

161. I'm not going to take the time to address every point.

(I have to leave to take my daughter to work soon.)

But Greenwald was simply wrong about PRISM. PRISM is a secure FTP server that is used to transmit data to the NSA. It is not a virtual vacuum cleaner, as some have claimed nor is it a real-time 'eye' on Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, etc.

And all these capabilities the NSA supposedly has? So what? Is there any evidence they are systematically abusing these capabilities or not using them for legitimate targets? These are the type of questions that so-called 'journalists' never pose. Because they don't want you to think about that. They simply want you to tune in to their next exciting story.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[JonLP24]

163. The point I was addressing these safeguards or whatever things to keep them in check had any power

all that was showing highly unlikely and 51% confidence in foreighness shows the whole mentality as well as rules designed to let them do what they want.

You have other leakers he answers those questions

During interviews on Democracy Now! in April and May 2012[14] with elaboration in July 2012 at 2600's hacker conference HOPE[4] and at DEF CON a couple weeks later,[15] Binney repeated estimates that the NSA (particularly its Stellar Wind project[16]) had intercepted 20 trillion communications "transactions" of Americans such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data (but not including financial data). This includes most of the emails of US citizens. Binney disclosed in an affidavit for Jewel v. NSA[17] that the agency was "purposefully violating the Constitution".[6] Binney also notes that he found out after retiring that the NSA was pursuing collect-it-all vs. targeted surveillance even before the 9/11 attacks.

Binney was invited as a witness by the NSA commission of the German Bundestag. On July 3, 2014 the Spiegel wrote, he said that the NSA wanted to have information about everything. In Binney's view this is a totalitarian approach, which had previously been seen only in dictatorships.[18] Binney stated the goal was also to control people. Meanwhile, he said it is possible in principle to survey the whole population, abroad and in the US, which in his view contradicts the United States Constitution. In October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the NSA began with its mass surveillance, he said. Therefore, he left the secret service shortly afterwards, after more than 30 years of employment. Binney mentioned that there were about 6000 analysts in the surveillance at NSA already during his tenure. According to him, everything changed after 9/11. The NSA used the attacks as a justification to start indiscriminate data collection. "This was a mistake. But they still do it", he said. The secret service was saving the data as long as possible: "They do not discard anything. If they have anything they keep it." Since then, the NSA has been saving collected data indefinitely. Binney said he deplored the NSA's development of the past few years, to collect data not only on groups who are suspicious for criminal or terrorist activities. "We have moved away from the collection of these data to the collection of data of the 7 billion people on our planet." Binney said he argued even then, to only pull relevant data from the cables. Access to the data was granted to departments of the government or the IRS.[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29

The one thing you want to address which wasn't or maybe it was something you addressed that I didn't but this is what it can do

PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration.[11][12] The program is operated under the supervision of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).[13] Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities.[14] The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between NSA's Special Source Operations division (SSO) and PRISM partners in the millions of dollars.[15]

Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports", and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702 authority."[16][17] The leaked information came to light one day after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls.[18][19]

-----

As far as targets, I found a list of targets and I can already say these aren't legitimate targets or not legitimate in my view as I don't view operating under the goal of commercial exploitation of natural resources to be legitimate particularly the means aren't legitimate and all you have to do is look at the CorpWatch link to understand that.

---

Known Targets include[45]

Venezuela
Military procurement
Oil
Mexico
Narcotics
Energy
Internal Security
Political Affairs
Colombia
Trafficking
FARC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#Responses_and_involvement_of_other_countries

What were they go do? Stop a Venezuela terrorism bombing? No probably whatever they can use for it, kill a person based on metadata? Blackmail? Something they can use to ridicule with a little dose of psychological manipulation? Trusting them to not do it again is something you wouldn't do because you couldn't reasonable expect them to not do it again. Either way those targets aren't legitimate because their goals involve illegitimate actions.

[ronnie624]

195. Lol.

"Constitutional privileges"

[JDPriestly]

91. Like with Kriakou? Look it up. Congress is powerless to protect its witnesses.

[randome]

132. Kriakou did us all a world of good. He also lied to get his book published.

Enjoyed the talk show circuit of celebrity-hood and would not stop talking about classified matters. It's as if the entire gig went to his head.

So to say that he was punished solely for revealing waterboarding is disingenuous. And anyways, 30 months in prison versus Snowden's lifetime of exile and forever giving up the country he claims to love?

Relatively speaking, and with Kriakou's running-off-at-the-mouth, I'd say 30 months was a small price to pay.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[JDPriestly]

138. The Founding Fathers warned us against foreign entanglements for a reason.

There is a Robert Scheer interview by RealNews posted on this website in which Scheer discusses the fact that our foreign entanglements are bringing us down. I agree with him. We should be taking the motes out of our own eyes before trying to take them out of the eyes of other countries and their populations.

[JonLP24]

156. This is on US the CIA mostly

the CIA was allowed to do much of what they were doing was without Congressional oversight by law because its a secret but even before them was more of a greed to commercially exploit resources where-ever they may exist. I agree with Washington with the non-inteference aspect

Once again making reference to proper behavior based upon religious doctrine and morality, Washington advocates a policy of good faith and justice towards all nations, and urges the American people to avoid long-term friendly relations or rivalries with any nation. He argues these attachments and animosity toward nations will only cloud the government's judgment in its foreign policy. Washington argues that longstanding poor relations will only lead to unnecessary wars due to a tendency to blow minor offenses out of proportion when committed by nations viewed as enemies of the United States. He continues this argument by claiming that alliances are likely to draw the United States into wars which have no justification and no benefit to the country beyond simply defending the favored nation. Washington continues his warning on alliances by claiming that they often lead to poor relations with nations who feel that they are not being treated as well as America's allies, and threaten to influence the American government into making decisions based upon the will of their allies instead of the will of the American people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address#Alliances_with_Foreign_Nations

This was before the petroleum export era but suddenly their interests become beneficial to our interests and everyone against our interests "populists" became the enemy. The US doesn't have to be doing all this it is doing and especially being dishonest about not saying I disagree here which I do agree but wanted to add US or Intelligence did a lot more in bringing us and people over the world down than anyone can say that - recently anyway.

[JDPriestly]

157. Thanks. Eisenhower became enamoured with intelligence because the ENIGMA and

breaking the codes of the Germans, Japanese and Italians was the key to our success in WWII. He already began the practice of reading international cables in the hands of International Telegraph and Telephone Co. Per the book Ike's Spies.

[markpkessinger]

188. And don't forget Truman's 1963 Washington Post Op-Ed

Truman, whose administration was responsible for creating the agency, saw the problems coming even then:

[font size=4]The Washington Post
December 22, 1963 - page A11

Harry Truman Writes:[/font]
[font size=6]Limit CIA Role To Intelligence[/font]

[font size=3]By Harry S Truman[/font]
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

[JDPriestly]

190. Yes. Thanks for your post.

[randome]

159. America is not the answer to everything. But we have done more good than harm, IMO.

Frankly, what men (no 'Founding Mothers', of course.) of an 18th century slaveholding empire believed is, at best, a corollary to today.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[markpkessinger]

196. "More good than harm. . ."

Oh, do tell. I'm all ears.

[A Simple Game]

121. You know what could have been a better route? He could have gone to

the then Secretary of State, now who would that have been?

Oh I know, Hillary Clinton. There, now she is associated with Snowden just like you associated Sanders with him.

You must be 10 feet tall for that stretch, shame on you.

[tavalon]

32. Um, Snowden has given us a chance to be aware

It's a big request and a difficult task for many of us. This man may be vilified for "sexing it up" for people to stupid to understand the premise that the NSA is spying on you and me, not terrorists. In fact, the NSA is a terrorist organization now, terrorizing Ma and Pa over their not so spicy emails about life. He's got a really big spotlight on the bad guys and yet you want to complain about Snowden?

Yeah, it sucks that some people are getting their education on the front lines while others can just snicker and be grateful (hopeful?) that it wasn't their correspondence revealed (yet?). But people don't generally care unless it's interesting and horrifying and yet, something they can imagine happening to themselves.

Edward Snowden was rightfully shocked at how blase Americans were when he dropped the bombshell at first. "NSA spying on us, well yeah, we kind of thought so, so, oh well, whatever, what's for dinner?". This is just another try on his part to get the thick headed Americans to get it and if it takes a personal gut shot for many, well, so be it. He is the town Crier and we need to listen. Now.

So, it would really be great if you would turn your ire not at the whistleblower but at the criminals in the NSA who did this to us. Pin the blame on the right donkey please. Right there on the big, pugnacious Ass of the NSA.

[davidn3600]

38. Sunlight is the best disinfectant

Sure a bit of this stuff might have been deleted, but the NSA would carry on. Nothing was going to stop this government spy program. The powers that be have made the decision that they want to know everything about everyone regardless of privacy or the 4th amendment. The government doesn't care. The only way to make the government accountable was to make the information known to everyone.

If Snowden went to Congress...nothing would be done. Feinstein kept defending the program. Obama kept expanding it. The FISA court was rubber-stamping every government request. Nothing was going to get changed unless it was brought out into the open.

[randome]

39. If Snowden went to Congress, there would have been just as much sunlight as now.

Except most Democratic congress people are smart enough to not get bent out of shape about the NSA 'watching our thoughts form as we type' or would not have misinterpreted PRISM as some sort of cosmic vacuum cleaner.

The article is about ten thousand TARGETED individuals. What is so wrong about collecting the communications of ten thousand foreign nationals suspected of being terrorists or other threats?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

[questionseverything]

42. no it is not

from the article////

The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

NOT TARGETED....JUST SWEPT UP

[randome]

46. If you obtain a target's email, you will always get information that does not belong to him/her.

It is impossible -not difficult, but impossible- to only obtain a target's side of a conversation. As impossible as it is to hear only one side of a conversation during a wiretap.

Again, 10,000 is supposed to make us fearful that the NSA is monitoring the entire world's populace? It is ridiculous on the face of it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[bvar22]

175. I'll stand with Snowden, Greenwald, ....and THIS guy:

[randome]

204. A total non-sequitur. Nothing that Snowden stole shows that the NSA is spying on us.

They are forbidden by law from spying on us and there is nothing in all of Snowden's 'revelations' that point to them using their capabilities on anything but foreign targets.

There will be some non-targeted communications mixed in with targeted communications but that's unavoidable in the Digital Age.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[bvar22]

208. Did you bother to read the OP?

Last edited Mon Jul 13, 2015, 05:27 PM - Edit history (1)

....and you call MY post a non-sequitur?

#1..Go read the OP & Link.

#2..Go look up the word "non-sequitur."

#3.. delete you post before too many people read it.
(Just trying to save you more embarrassment.)

Here is what Krugman has to say about the crisis in Greece.
While he doesn't specifically say the word "Extortion", he describes it well.

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.
--- Paul Krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/killing-the-european-project/?_r=1

in best Jersey mob accent:
Nice country ya got there.
Be a shame if it burnt down tonight.

Your post is just another failed attempt to deny reality and discredit the Pulitzer Prize Winning service that Snowden, Greenwald, and their publishers have provided to the American Public and the World.

*Rampant Government Secrecy and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Persecution of Whistle Blowers and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Government surveillance of the citizenry and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Secret Laws and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Secret Courts and Democracy can not-co-exist.

*Our Democracy depends on an informed electorate.

You either believe in Democracy,
or you don't.
It IS that simple.

[Mojorabbit]

57. +1000 nt

[hughee99]

63. No, at BEST this would have been handled behind closed doors and the public would have still been

largely unaware of what was being done by the NSA.

[randome]

89. Sanders would have hid this behind closed doors? Warren? Udall?

I know Rand Paul would not have but he's not the sort of person I'd want in charge of street cleaning, never mind national security matters.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[hughee99]

100. Even those people aren't going to hold PUBLIC

Hearings on a supposed national security issue that people aren't already aware of.

[A Simple Game]

123. They can't even go public about details of the TPP and you think they could

legally hold public hearings about the NSA? You need another think.

[markpkessinger]

197. He would have had to do so . . .

. . . or else he, himself, would potentially face prosecution for disclosing classified information. Senators are not immune from such prosecutions, you know. Just ask Senator Ron Wyden, who, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew that director of national intelligence James Clapper was brazenly lying to the Committee when he said that no data was being collected on Americans. (He even repeated his question, only with a tone that suggested Brennan should answer more truthfully, only to receive the same outrageous lie a second time. But he couldn't pursue it any further at the time without risking running afoul of law governing disclosure of classified information. Now, if Wyden, as a member of the committee charged with oversight of the CIA, had that concern, how the hell could Bernie Sanders, who isn't even a member of that committee, have raised that issue?

You're really being obtuse here, randome.

[randome]

203. It was months after his escape that Snowden claimed he had tried to go through channels.

That strongly suggests he was making that up when he realized the world didn't take him as seriously as he wanted.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[sabrina 1]

48. He did exactly the right thing. Btw, you are aware, are you not, that several other Whistle Blowers

before him did just as you think Snowden should have done??? Have you ever heard of Binney, or Drake eg? They did everything exactly according to the rules for Whistle Blowers. Do you know what happened to them?

Snowden and all Whistle Blowers from now on, witnessing what happens to Whistle Blowers AND those they confide in, are going to make sure that the information gets to the people who are entitled to it and if that means seeking political asylum elsewhere, that is what they will have to do.

This is not unusual. WE have given political asylum to whistle blowers from other countries. Do you think THEY should have taken your advice and done what Drake did here only to find themselves facing ten years of utter personal destruction and charges of treason?

I applaud Snowden for getting this information to US. That is OUR right to know what our government is doing to our Constitutional rights.

[cantbeserious]

76. ^^^ THIS ^^^

eom

[BeanMusical]

105. +1000

[840high]

114. +10

[retrowire]

152. this post wins

well put.

[Octafish]

162. That is the point.

We the People are in charge, on paper ... Called the Constitution.

[LittleBlue]

70. I'm glad he didn't go to a senator and released it publicly instead

A senator can't necessarily release that info to the public.

It went down the best way for the American people.

[rhett o rick]

84. Had he done as you suggest, it's my opinion that he'd be in solitary confinement, most

likely indefinitely. I believe it's unrealistic to believe that the literally uncontrolled NSA/CIA Dark Security State would be interested in following channels when someone exposes their misdeeds. Do you think we'd be better off today if their never had been a Snowden?

[JDPriestly]

97. I checked the weather report on my Yahoo account this morning.

Instead of Herndon, VA., I got Los Angeles, CA which is where I live and where my computer is. That is for me a sign of progress of some sort. People on DU tried to tell me that my weather report was always Herndon, VA. as a default because of something about my computer having its connection there. That may have been true, but why would computer in Los Angeles be routed through Herndon, Va. to the extent that its weather was reflected as the weather in Herndon, Va.

Booz, Hamilton is the largest employer in Herndon, Va. I only know that because I looked up Herndon when my weather report repeatedly told me the weather there when I opened Yahoo and because when I first signed up for Facebook a few months ago, Facebook e-mailed me to tell me that my account had been opened from Herndon, Va. Very odd. Very odd.

And yes. I lived overseas for some years and have friends in foreign countries. So, maybe I am suspect for some odd reason. But I was very pleased to see that my weather report page opened to my city this morning. Very pleased.

[rhett o rick]

108. Those that choose to close their eyes to the un-Constitutional spying are

ignoring the numbers of bad things that can happen. The Security State insists that they are only collecting the data and not looking at it. One would have to be stupid to believe that they don't look at some of it. Even if they didn't, one huge danger is that their system could be hacked or even Snowdened. Where that info goes after that is anyone's guess. Also, there would be big dollars in selling that info to corporations that want to sell us stuff. And of course, what if a Cheney had control of the data? It could be used for political purposes. In fact, it looks to me like NSA/CIA data has already been used for political purposes.

[BeanMusical]

124. J. Edgar Hoover had an incredible amount of very detailed files on an impressive number of people.

It is now known that this scumbag blackmailed many people.

[rhett o rick]

148. Blackmail is a very useful tool and there is no reason to believe that the current, uncontrolled

NSA/CIA Security State are not using that tool.

[BeanMusical]

165. Absolutely, and on a much bigger scale than old Edgar did, I'm afraid.

[JDPriestly]

142. OK. Time for conspiracy theories.

I will simply name two names. John Edwards and Anthony Wiener. There are others. Those just come to mind. I understand that John Edwards was discovered because phone calls showed up on his I think it was Verizon records. And Wiener -- supposedly discovered due to his error. And then there is S;pitzer.

All of this may be my imagination, just worthless spinning of theories. But once the government starts collecting information on people, hacking phones and computers and electronic communications, IT BECOMES THE SUSPECTS whenever someone's sins are outed due to the exposure of information gleaned or transmitted via electronic devices.

The GOVERNMENT becomes the suspect every time there is a leak.

When I first heard about Snowden, one of my thoughts was that maybe he was leaking FOR the government or FOR some clique or group in the government in order to embarrass Obama or to pretend to be something he turned out not to be.

Liars and cheats -- even if our own government -- are the first people you suspect when something bad happens. Sin is its own punishment. And this wiretapping and surveillance is in the philosophical sense a sin. It is the equivalent of a sin against freedom and democracy. Close to criminal if not criminal in some cases.

[rhett o rick]

147. I've tried to make the point with some of our conservative friends (?) that this power can be used

for political purposes. Gov Spitzer was putting a lot of pressure on the Bush admin and I believe the NSA/CIA spying is what tipped off the police about him. The conservatives are quick to jump up and say that he was a naughty boy and deserved punishment. But there are thousands of naughty boys out there. They are ignoring the point that the NSA/CIA can pick and choose who they go after. In this case it looks like they went after a person that was a huge pain in the admin side.

[JDPriestly]

153. My suspicion precisely.

The surveillance on the one hand and the police brutality on the other are two sides of the same coin: abuse of authority or otherwise known as abuse of power.

And, inevitably, if not already, the knowledge learned from the surveillance will be used for political purposes. Think of the Occupy movement. All kinds of surveillance techniques were used against the Occupy movement activists I suspect.

I know this sounds paranoid, but I know what happened in the NAZI era and during the Communist era in Eastern Europe. I knew a guy whose job it was to censor the news in one of the Eastern European countries. He was among the first to leave well before 1988.

When a government is so insecure that it has to snoop on law abiding citizens in order to feel that it is more secure, that government has a problem. I don't care where it is located in the world. It has a problem, whether it is in Chile or Colombia or Russia or Poland or the US. It is not truly representing the people it is supposed to serve. It is estranged from them. That's the reality.

And of course personal, embarrassing information about political symbols, political figures on the side that is making the ruling party feel insecure will be used. Meanwhile, the party in charge, the people in charge, live secret lives that the people know nothing about. That is the typical dictatorship even if it claims not to be one.

[rhett o rick]

168. Yes I agree. nm

[840high]

112. WTH?

[JDPriestly]

5. The Constitution requires probable cause for a search and seizure.

What's the difference between stealing (seizing) personal photos from the internet and boarding a ship or entering a private home. The incursion is on the private space of the individual, on the privacy of the individual without probable cause.

What is the NSA defending if not the Constitution?

[msanthrope]

15. Um, no.

Truly. No.

[JDPriestly]

20. What are you saying no to? With what in my post do you disagree?

Or are you agreeing with me?

[msanthrope]

50. The Constitution does not require probable cause for a search in all

circumstances.

There's 200 years plus of jurisprudence that enumerates that.

[JDPriestly]

88. Jurisprudence that is not based on a reading of the text of the Constitution.

Nor on the history of the Fourth Amendment which should be read in the context of the First, Second and THIRD Amendments to be understood. Also in the context of the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.

The lax interpretations of the Bill of Rights will come back to haunt the Supreme Court when its members realize that its their party schedules, their children's drug use and partying and other activities, and their own phone calls that are being registered, perhaps even recorded and kept forever in some secret archive somewhere only to be leaked at an inconvenient moment.

We all need privacy.

The outrage at the recent theft by hacking of the records of government employees shows how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot.

Our law has become far to lenient about restraining government snooping and record-keeping on our lives.

I think we have forgotten the history of the NAZI and Communist regimes in Europe. I have not. Maybe others have.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. It's own budget. nt

[Enthusiast]

29. This is the great missed point. "What is the NSA defending if not the Constitution?"

What a country!

[sabrina 1]

49. They violated the 4th Amendment rights of every US Citizen and until someone is held accountable for

that Whistle Blowers will continue to expose the crimes being committed against the US Constitution. And anyone who even tries to defend this isn't worth bothering with imho. Just prosecute the criminals.

And note that this was all started with the Bush gang of war criminals. AND Clapper is an old Bush loyalist and CEO of Booz Allen. Why on earth is that crook and war profiteer still in the position he is in after lying to Congress especially?

And why would any Democrat defend these criminals who lied us into war and violated the Constitution in order to make money from it all?

[JDPriestly]

90. Actually the snooping started long ago.

They started reading international cables long ago, maybe under Eisenhower. I think I read about that in a book called Ike's Spies.

It has mushroomed. And now they pick on Americans.

I wish they would spend the money they spend on that program for something that would really help Americans. How about a program that would provide good, free housing for homeless people.

[Caretha]

127. I don't know

maybe they aren't Democrats? Maybe they are uneducated? Maybe someone pays them to try to mislead people and troll?

You tell me

[sabrina 1]

128. What's interesting is, that when the mass spying using the telecoms by the Bush regime was exposed

you could not find a Democrat who was no outraged. So where are all these 'excusers' coming from? Good questions, probably a combination of all of those options.

[rhett o rick]

87. Easy answer. The NSA/CIA Dark Security State work to protect the Oligarchs.

Even if the NSA/CIA were honestly trying to keep the 99% safe, the easiest way to do that is via a complete, strong authoritarian government. It's very hard to keep people safe when democracy is involved. We need controls on these organizations. Our politicians have failed to control them via oversight. Of course 9/11 gave Dark State carte blanche to spy on anyone.

Those here that object to Snowden do so because they prefer to live in a tight security state and not know the details. They are willing to give up their freedoms and liberty for the "promise" of security.

[OnyxCollie]

144. Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' Constitution.

National Security Agency/Central Security Service
Transition 2001, p. 32 (December 2000)

The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born an earlier electronic surveillance environment.

Make no mistake. NSA can and will perform its missions consistently with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today's and tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the "protected" communications of Americans, as well as the targeted communications of adversaries. (quotations in original)

&spfreload=10

[JDPriestly]

146. Gobbldygook. Meaningless chatter and justification.

There is a reason for getting a subpoena for each search and seizure identifying the persons, places and things to be searched or seized and based on probable cause. I will skip the historical reasons. They have to do with the British practice of the general warrant and John Hancock's zeal in signing the Declaration of Independence in huge letters to demonstrate to the world his defiance and anger at the intrusions on his life and liberty that those general warrants meant.

But the more practical reason for the specific and well grounded subpoena is that there is a record of specific searches and specific seizures of personal information by the government that can be, itself, subpoenaed and questioned if need be by someone unfairly and perhaps, but not necessarily illegally the subject of a search and seizure.

Used to be that communications were by hard copy letters, mail, and when they were taken people knew that they had been seized and searched. Today, with electronic media, searches and seizures can be surreptitious. The victim of the invasion of privacy does not know what hit him/her. I think that some of the government employees learned what that feels like when their information was somehow searched and seized by unauthorized parties, hackers from, we are being told to believe, China.

One story from people who secretly peek at, steal, do whatever they want to with other people's personal communications is as good as another.

It's sick, sick, sick.

I had a great-aunt who worked for the telephone company as "central" in a small town. That was back in the 1940s and 1950s. She knew every secret of every person in town. And now the NSA knows them all.

Just as an aside, I have been thinking that the NSA spying could be very bad for hotels that rent by the hour. I wonder if anyone has noticed any closings for lack of business in the D.C. area where the information gleaned from their phone records and electronic reservation lists would be most titillating for the folks at the NSA.

[Dwayne Hicks]

6. I do not support Snowden

The way he just handed classified documents to wikileaks is IMO treason. Yes I think the NSA overstepped and yes I think they should help accountable. But that does not excuse the potential harm Snowden has done to us, lives he may have put at risk. I wish to see Snowden arrested and tried.

[Katashi_itto]

10. Authoritarian types never like Snowden.

[tblue]

13. Touché. Persecute the citizen to protect the state.

Isn't that fascism?

[Enthusiast]

31. It's characteristic of any authoritarian government.

[nolabels]

212. It's part and parcel of ANY nation state

Nation states were once used to the betterment of the inhabitants but increasingly they are just the go-between's of individuals and the capitalistic system they mostly serve.

[Enthusiast]

30. +1!

[treestar]

55. So "authoritarian" means

respecting the rule of law. It's so authoritarian to ask people to go by the law - people ought to do what they think best. So if that's the case, why complain about those who disobeyed the laws of war? They were only doing what they thought best.

Eddie had the Whistleblower Protection Act - yet he chose to not take advantage of that. Oh but it was the "authoritarians" who passed that act and signed it into law. How ironic when authoritarians would not want that kind of regulation of authorities.

[Katashi_itto]

60. Ah an anti Snowden type. Other Various Fascist Regimes have the rule of law too.

The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to many intelligence workers.
Also explain this?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6962969

[treestar]

94. No fascists regimes do not have a rule of law

Again, people get to do what they want, so why not those who disobeyed the laws of war? If they thought they were doing what was best, as Eddie did? Each person gets to decide for themselves what laws are fair. Eddie apparently found the WPA too inconvenient. He preferred running off to Russia.

[Katashi_itto]

102. "Fascist regimes do not have the rule of law...."well at least we know you have no idea what your

talking about in addition to being Authoritarian.

LAW AND JUSTICE IN THE THIRD REICH
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005467

[treestar]

103. what we mean by the rule of law is

the leaders have to obey the law too. It applies to everyone. In fascist regimes, the dictator does what he wants - he's above the law.

We are not authoritarians when the NSA has been legislated to exist, and statutes say what it is supposed to do and there are even whistleblower provisions for when things go wrong.

[Katashi_itto]

104. Right...tell me what happened with the Bush Criminal Empire again?

They are all behind bars aren't they? Oh wait...

Or we could start with the Banksters...

Or the clear violations of the 4th Amendment by NSA...

Tell me about being above the law again?

[markpkessinger]

192. No one is above the law. Just ask General Petraeus . . .

. . . who languishes in federal prison for leaking classified information to his mistress!

Oh, wait . . .

[randome]

83. It's sort of a Hobby Lobby Corollary, treestar.

If you don't like a law, ignore it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[BillZBubb]

79. Exactly.

We see it here all the time.

[NorthCarolinaL]

14. Specifically what information was harmful?

[merrily]

16. What "potential" harm? Which lives did he put "at risk?"

[JDPriestly]

21. Supporters of the STASI in East Germany did not like whistleblowers either.

[treestar]

56. lol East Germany had a whistleblower protection act?

[JDPriestly]

61. The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to many intelligence employees.

Generally, current employees, former employees, or applicants for employment
to positions in the executive branch of government in both the competitive and the excepted service, as well as positions in the Senior Executive Service, are considered
covered employees.

However, those positions that are excepted from the competitive service because of their “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,”
and any positions exempted by the President based on a determination that it is necessary and warranted by conditions of good administration, are not protected by the whistleblower statute. Moreover, the statute does not apply to federal workers employed by the Postal Service or the Postal Rate Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency,

the National Security Agency, and any other CRS-3 executive entity that the President determines primarily conducts foreign intelligence
or counter-intelligence activities.

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33918.pdf

I omitted the footnote references.

So East German conditions do apply by law to employees of intelligence agencies in terms of the right to blow a whistle on government misconduct.

[John Poet]

24. I wish to see Snowden lauded and decorated.

Perhaps he can be put in charge of the N.S.A.

If anyone should be prosecuted, it's sundry members of that agency-- NOT Snowden.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

28. In charge of shutting it down? nt

[magical thyme]

26. whistleblowers are just so terrible, making it so hard for the "serious people"

to 'protect' the citizens.

[sabrina 1]

51. Snowden is a hero and did exactly the right thing. What do you think he should have done, what all

the others before him did? Drake, Binney eg? Follow the rules to the letter as they did, only to find himself destroyed and the information suppressed, as they did?

He knew, as we did, that the entire system was corrupted after witnessing what happened to every single Whistle Blower who followed the rules ended up being personally destroyed and charged with treason.

Sure, if we lived in a country that followed the law, that prosecuted War Criminals etc, he could have done it differently, but we don't, as these revelations prove, and the people have a right to know this.

When and if we ever become a country that respects the rule of law, then whistle blowers will be able to report to their government when they see wrong doing as egregious as this.

But then if were such a country, such wrong doing would not have occurred.

[BillZBubb]

80. +1000

[lordsummerisle]

113. ^^^^^^

[JDPriestly]

98. Dwayne, you are poorly informed.

Snowden did not hand anything to Wikileaks. He gave the documents to Laura Poitras, a documentary film maker, and to Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and journalist, and then to responsible news media like the New York Times and the Guardian.

We try to get the facts straight on DU.

If you think I am wrong, please provide a link, but this information about just how Edward Snowden made his revelations is in Greenwald's book, No Place to Hide. I recommend reading the book if you are interested in accurate information on Snowden's conduct.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to correct your misunderstanding on this. It is very important that Americans know the truth and not foolish rumors or half-truths.

[Hissyspit]

149. Wikileaks?

What are you talking about?

[Logical]

151. Some people don't see the big picture, like you! Nt

[markpkessinger]

193. "Treason" under U.S. law is not anybody's matter of opinion

Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason for all purposes under U.S. law, and defines it very narrowly, as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. . . .

Even if Snowden-haters could provide evidence that he gave information to the Russians or the Chinese (which, of course, they haven't and indeed they can't), it still wouldn't qualify, because neither of those countries is currently an enemy of the United States. They are geopolitical adversaries, to be sure, but unless a state of war obtains, they are not enemies.

You don't have to like what Snowden did, nor do you have to believe he was right in doing so. You do, however (at least if you are going to be intellectually honest), have to concede that what he did comes nowhere remotely close to 'treason' under the Constitution.

[bonniebgood]

7. all the hi tech NSA spying cant spy on white

and prevent the white supremacy american terrorist. go figure

[merrily]

18. Sure didn't prevent the Boston Marathon bombers, either, despite specific tips.

[randome]

34. Because the NSA is forbidden by law from monitoring American citizens.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

[think4yourself]

140. And also

"it's only metadata" that they are looking at.
I remember that was your mantra for a few months.

[bonniebgood]

8. i said it wrong but you get my point. nt

[vlakitti]

9. Great finn, Ichingcarpenter

Thanks for putting it out here.

[Kablooie]

11. What's all this Wikileaks nonsense?

Snowden did not release anything to Wikileaks.
He released everything to three journalists because he felt they would be the most trustworthy sources to manage the data in a responsible way.

Since he handed it to them he has had no contact or access to the data.

[reorg]

69. Pathetic attempts to distract from the issue

These people don't read articles or even OPs, they just start their usual bashing routines whenever Snowden OR Wikileaks is mentioned.

Not only do they ignore what you explained, the clear statements by Snowden as to why and to whom he provided the information and where it ended up, in this instance the Washington Post. They blatantly lie, claiming Snowden gave it to 'to foreign nationals', 'Russia and China'.

[merrily]

17. IMO, focusing on Snowden removes focus from the US Govt and the 4th Amendment, where it should be.

[randome]

22. Ten thousand TARGETED out of seven billion people? My 4th Amendment rights quiver with fear!

And then the article -it's a repeat of an old one, by the way- goes on about 'you' emailing a photograph, etc. when there is no evidence that this is being done en-masse.

But they really, really want you to be afraid because...BECAUSE!

Really, does the word 'targeted' not clue anyone in? Is there anything inherently wrong with collecting as much information about a terrorist as possible?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[druidity33]

44. doesn't the article say:

"But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."


That's my emphasis, but it's included in the OP's excerpts...

[randome]

47. Yeah, I misread that part.

But 10,000 inadvertent communications out of the communications of more than 7 billion people? That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, equate to the NSA monitoring the entire populace.

You cannot collect a target's email without also getting email that has nothing to do with the target or the investigation. It is impossible to differentiate between the two types of communications without first reading and assessing the communications, which, depending on the size of one's email account, could likely take months of study.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[treestar]

58. plus, heartbreaks and religious conversions

and everything else listed there is not embarrassing or going to be used against people unless they are well known. And there is no evidence NSA agents used it against them. Why would they bother to do that anyway - their job security involves finding terrorists, not randomly embarrassing average people.

[JDPriestly]

99. God forbid that any of the people should become well known.

I lived in Germany and Austria too long and met too many people from Eastern Europe during the Soviet dominance of that area to accept this kind of snooping with utterly no reaction of dismay.

I consider those who think this isn't important because it isn't their e-mails or their calls that are being monitored or recorded or registered or analyzed (yours probably are being analyzed if you are on DU or other electronic media) to be blissfully uninformed about history that occurred in my lifetime.

It's very sad. Frogs in boiling water is what so many people are. Just sitting there feeling complacent because after all they are good and so why should they worry?

[reorg]

62. You misread pretty much everything

In fact, I find it hard to believe that you actually read the article at all.

First, it's about 10,000 ACCOUNT HOLDERS and 160,000 stored communications, not '10,000 inadvertent communications'.

The 160,000 intercepted conversations originated from a total of more than 11,400 unique accounts.

Eleven percent of the accounts were NSA targets. The remaining 89 percent of the accounts were bystanders, or non-targets.

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/communication-breakdown/1153/

Second, this number represents only a SAMPLE provided by Snowden to the Washington Post.

If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html

Third, this number EXCLUDES communications where US identifiers such as IP adresses or email adresses have been masked ('minimized'), so the real number of 'inadvertently' intercepted and stored communications and individuals under surveillance must be far higher. The 'minimizing'/masking of identities only pertains to reports and summaries, in the actual intercepted and stored data, the identity is unmasked and visible for anybody who can access them in raw format.

Different types of data collected that can identify citizens, permanent residents or companies within the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain have been masked, or “minimized,” by the NSA.For example, a report may read, “I chatted with “MIN POSSIBLE U.S. PERSON” on the social Web site “MIN U.S. WEB SITE” about buying something from “MIN U.S. COMPANY.” The raw data is stored intact in NSA databases, but distribution of unminimized intercepts is limited by law.

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/communication-breakdown/1153/

Leading types of masked identifiers in the samples provided by Snowden to the Washington Post:

US IP address: 57,331
US-hosted URL: 12,214
US company: 9,455
US-hosted website: 9,452
etc.

All in all about ten times the number of 10,000 unmasked identities mentioned above, and that's only from the sample.

Extrapolated to the admitted number of about 90,000 individuals targetted under FISA, the communications of not just ten times, but more than 100 times that number of US citizens is actually, if 'inadvertently' being intercepted and stored. That's 10 million out of 320 million, not 10,000 out of 7 billion.

[Rex]

65. That ones never met a government agency they didn't like.

Snuck in here with zero posts on DU3 and went wild, now pretends to have been here since the beginning of DU. Really cute that one is. NOT.

[randome]

72. I've been here since 2001. Zero posts on DU3 is simply wrong.

No, I'm not cute, you are. There. Guess I showed you.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[Caretha]

131. What was your DU1 name?

I've been here since the beginning - I'll recognize it

[randome]

136. It was randome (pronounced RAN-dohm). Now it's randome (pronouned RAN-doh-may).

The Urban Dictionary has an unsavory definition for the first pronunciation so I changed it.

Funny how so much effort is being expended to 'catch' me in some sort of ruse. I have nothing to hide.

But I'm flattered by the attention.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[randome]

74. So what is 160,000 communications out of the hundreds of billions of yearly communications?

Next to nothing.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[reorg]

77. It's the sample analyzed by the WP

If you still don't get it, or any other detail clearly described in the WP article, feel free to ask me.

[randome]

81. Then there is no evidence that there is more. Or that this sample was obtained illegally.

Got it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[reorg]

93. Yes, there is evidence, and yes, it was obtained illegally

since 90 percent of the individuals identified in this sample were 'unintentionally' under surveillance, but their records had not been destroyed.

Since only the surveillance of about 1100 individuals in the sample was 'legal' (the FISA court kind of legal), the publicly admitted number of about 90,000 individuals 'legally' under surveillance means that there must be a vast amount of additional intercepts of which we can assume about 90 percent are like those in the sample not destroyed and thus also illegal.

[randome]

135. So if a woman in the U.S. sends a photo of a toddler in a bathtub to a foreign suspect...

...you're saying the NSA should never have captured that image? It's an impossibility to exclude it in the Digital Age.

Sure, once it was examined and determined to not have any immediate consequences, it could have been discarded but that image was obtained lawfully in the first place in connection with a legitimate suspect so why not keep it in case it turns out to be relevant?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[reorg]

176. no, this is about surveillance under FISA

Last edited Mon Jul 13, 2015, 03:38 AM - Edit history (1)

so it would be more like:

If a suspect inside the US joins one of those chat rooms where they jack off on camera, every participant in this chat room whatever their nationality would be included in the list of individuals under surveillance and recordings of their dick movies, among other things, would be stored forever.

If you had read the article, you would know that it mentions one example where 23 chat room participants came under surveillance when a 'suspect' joined. It also explains (what I already knew from watching the Sopranos) that it is illegal to continue surveillance when the 'suspect's' communications are irrelevant with regard to the warrant/suspicion.

[randome]

179. So how would anyone monitor only one individual in a chat room?

It can't be done. How would anyone know if the communications are irrelevant unless they were, well, monitored? And if a suspect under surveillance is a foreign national, our laws do not apply to him/her.

That's just the way things are.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[reorg]

200. that's exactly the problem

it can't be done efficiently without violating the rights of millions of Americans.

Breaking the law in foreign countries is not what the article is about, but your lack of concern is noted.

[Rex]

64. Funny you ignore the fact that they did something illegal and pass off 10k people as nothing.

Kidding, more like SOP for you...don't you ever get tired of defending the NSA?

[randome]

73. What is illegal about collecting foreign communications?

Ten thousand, eleven thousand, whatever the total is, it is nothing compared to the billions of communications that circle the globe every single day.

This article means nothing without context and that's what the author hopes you fail to entertain: context.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

[Aerows]

75. If that is the best defense that you have

Here are some straws. Grasp at them.

You are a pretty smart person, randome. Surely you don't think these excuses will work, do you?

No, you don't, but for some reason you try.

Why? Why torpedo your credibility to support a flimsy ass "Oh shit, our hand is in the cookie jar, but we weren't really going to steal the cookies - we were just making sure they were all there" defense.

[randome]

86. It's the NSA's job to analyze foreign communications.

So if these communications are as a result of their foreign monitoring, it is not illegal for the NSA to have them.

Snowden may not have liked this (although it was never part of his original release so he apparently never gave it much thought) but it is is not illegal. That's just a fact.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[markpkessinger]

194. Using classification as a means of hiding conduct that is illegal . . .

. . . like warrantless mass surveillance, is itself a violation of federal law.

[randome]

202. That was never Snowden's concern until deep into his exile.

And there is nothing illegal about the NSA monitoring foreign communications. In fact, that's their job. If other communications sometimes get caught up in the monitoring, that's just how the Digital Age works today.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[Caretha]

130. Define mass

No really...give me a number to work with here. I love definitions & numbers....

Really lets hear your take on "mass" & "number definitions". Don't be so damn coy.

[randome]

137. So long as the NSA does not spy on American citizens, they are following the law.

As for a definition of 'mass surveillance', I guess that's something I'll know when I see it. But less than a thousandth of one percent is something I am very comfortable with saying is not 'mass surveillance'.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[Caretha]

180. You contradict yourself

You said ...."So long as the NSA does not spy on American citizens, they are following the law". so your definition means if they spied on any American...that means, 1 - One - Uno American...they are breaking the law.

Don't get to comfortable yet. They broke "your" standard, but you don't really give a shit, now do you?

[randome]

185. By 'spy', I mean deliberately target an American citizen.

If they inadvertently gather communications belonging to an American while investigating a suspect, that is an entirely different matter.

I don't know why you can't see that. It's like I said, in the Digital Age it is impossible to only gather communications originating from a suspect just as it is impossible to only hear one side of a conversation with a wiretap.

The fact that the NSA only has 160,000 communications out of tens of billions yearly definitely points to inadvertent collection, not a willful disregard of the law.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[LanternWaste]

207. No doubt many people predicate their rights on playing the Vegas odds.

No doubt many people predicate their rights on playing the Vegas odds. Because...

[John Poet]

23. The NSA is an agency full of CRIMINALS.

They should be summarily abolished.
If there are national security consequences to that,
I really don't give a damn.


Snowden is a hero for outing them.

[GoneFishin]

37. The blackmail component of the NSA spying is also summarily dismissed, yet look at the obvious

headline popping up all over the place when it is alleged that the Chinese have ill-gotten information :

" ... Chinese government and aimed at uncovering sensitive, personal information that could have been used to blackmail or bribe government ... ".

The authoritarians are wrong, wrong, wrong on this issue. And they have been from the start.

[JDPriestly]

101. This is such an important point. If its OK for the NSA to snoop on foreign and domestic

communications, bank and health data, intimate correspondence and photos, why in the world would anyone object to some other country getting their data?

When the shoe squeezes your own foot, you scream from pain.

The snooping is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Warrants are not hard to get. Real warrants that are specific as to the place and things to be searched and based on probably cause. They aren't hard to get if the reason for getting them is persuasive and legitimate. The programs that Snowden revealed go too far and are not legitimate.

I was utterly shocked when I saw the first order for the Verizon documents. Way too broad. Way too broad. Far too overreaching. Only possible because it was done in a secret court -- and right there, a secret court in the US? Why do we need that? Sounds like something you might find in a dictatorship, not in a democracy.

[GoneFishin]

181. All true. We are now the 1960s Russia which we were told was inferior to America, land of the free,

because of the crappy way their government spied on their citizens and watched their every move.

[marmar]

43. And tragicomically, as evidenced by some of the responses, they'll find a way to defend it......

...... even when presented with all kinds of evidence. Cognitive dissonance writ large.

[Babel_17]

45. I thought they were pro's, and all that power wouldn't get misused?

Thankfully this is an easy situation to get back under control.

[treestar]

54. If true, no one care about that stuff

It isn't made public. No one is embarrassed by it. It's useless and too much for anyone to use to make anything of.

No as usual there is nothing devastating in fact here Eddie is the one who'd be making people worry about something that is not coming back to bite them.

And really really private things people don't put on the internet. Who would? You'd call or talk to someone in person.

And what is an NSA defender? Do you suggest there should be no national security agency and no spying?

[Mojorabbit]

59. The article says a woman was contacted by a reporter. nt

[randome]

85. And did this woman have some sort of connection -direct or otherwise- to a foreign suspect?

Funny how these kind of very basic questions are never posed.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[Caretha]

182. Guess you forgot

I.N.N.O.C.E.N.T U.N.T.I.L P.R.O.V.E.D. G.U.I.L.I.T.Y.

Never mind that shit! As George Bush the Chimp said...the Constitution is just a fuckin' piece of paper.

Birds of a feather flock together randome. Guess we know how and with whom you like to fly.

[randome]

184. No one has accused her of anything so innocence or guilt is irrelevant.

It's the exact same thing as if a warrant handed over business records to an investigator. If those records contain non-relevant communications, should they be immediately destroyed or stored away somewhere in case they become relevant?

Unable to predict the future, it seems like the sensible thing to do is keep all the records.

It's too bad the NSA did such a lousy job of keeping them secure but then they learned of a lot of holes in their setup because of Snowden. I mean, stealing documents from a Sharepoint site? The NSA deserves a facepalm for that.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[treestar]

96. I suppose the reporter found it because Eddie dumped it out there

and the reporter wanted us all to be outraged about it, so the reporter did not keep it private.

[whatchamacallit]

68. They don't possess the scruples to be devastated by the truth n/t

[bobthedrummer]

71. In Snowden's Wake: New Book Examines Needed Intelligence Reforms (Spencer Brignac 7-7-15 Project On

Government Oversight)
http://www.pogo.org/blog/2015/07/snowdens-wake-new-book.html

We, the people never got those "needed intelligence reforms" that were called for after Watergate by both the House and Senate. Edward Snowden is not a traitor, since an informed citizen is a requirement for democracy. We, the people can do something about the privatized national security criminals-it starts with our military, of which Edward Snowden was once part of.

K&R

[BillZBubb]

82. Like climate change deniers, no facts will influence the NSA groupies.

[Doctor_J]

95. And a significant overlap with the BOG and hillarians

The party is leaving me, after forty years. How sad

[840high]

115. 45 years here. It is sad.

[BeanMusical]

106. Great analogy!

[timdog44]

111. So how has all this affected you.

Flexed for your own camera or taken pictures of yourself modeling lingerie?

Why would you do that unless you wished it to be seen. Are you an idiot? Then post it on the most public place in history - the Internet. Are you an idiot?

You don't care about your country. You worry about yourself. Do you think other countries don't know more than you think they do? Are you an idiot?

Privacy of innocents. Put your pictures on Facebook or Twitter, or where ever. Are you an idiot?

The N S A are delivering pictures to perverts. The N S A are providing information that has been known for years by other countries.

So how has all this affected you? By the way, you look good in a dress. I say to the N S A like in Game of Thrones. You know nothing Jon Snow(den).

[Maedhros]

129. No words. At least, none that wouldn't get me an alert and time off.

All I can say is: you. You and everyone who agrees with you are my political opponents. Such persons are enemies of freedom.

/bye.

[timdog44]

170. You misunderstand. Period

[navarth]

134. For fucks sake man

disagree all you want but show some fucking class will you.

'By the way you look good in a dress'

What the bleeding fuck.

[timdog44]

171. show some fucking class will you

About as classy as you can get

[Hissyspit]

150. Crap apologism. Nt

[timdog44]

172. You misunderstand.

I apologize only for me and certainly not for my post.

[cstanleytech]

116. "The Latest Snowden Leak"

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-devastating-leak-for-edward-snowdens-critics/373991/?single_page=true

How can it be latest if its from an archive from 2014?

[randome]

117. I mentioned it was an old story in my first post but no one wanted to address that.

For a brief time, a lot of online media orgs had a field day publishing Snowden stories. Now that Snowden's gone silent, they want to get their fix by recycling old stories.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[cstanleytech]

119. Oh I kinda doubt is is actual silent, he is probably singing like a canary for the Russians because

lets face it he needs a safe haven and Russia is about the only country probably willing to risk it providing he earn his keep, China wouldnt because it could have put their trade at risk with the US and they did probably not want such a disruption though it honestly wouldnt surprise me if we learned say 50 or 60 years from now that he actually did sell some info to them before he went to Russia.

[BeanMusical]

145. "he is probably singing like a canary for the Russians"

Serious accusation. Back it up. Link? Anything? Just biased stupid speculation, then?

[cstanleytech]

154. Word of the day is ............"probably".

Or do you really believe that the Russians are granting him a safe haven out of the goodness of their hearts? I mean come on lets be realistic here, he needs them to keep his ass from going to jail and it only makes sense for him to provide them with some information.

[Number23]

118. Posted JUL 7, 2014. Happy one year birthday to this article!

Not that I get the feeling this will mean a bleeding thing to those A'kicking and A'recing.

[elias49]

164. Is this the LBN forum?

No.

[BeanMusical]

167. So fucking what?

Oh, you haz a sad!

[Number23]

178. Thank you for proving my point better than I ever could

The "latest and worstest Snowden leak yet" and it's only a year old!!! If this was such bad news for anybody, don't you think that AFTER AN ENTIRE YEAR, the bad news would have been born out by now???

I knew that the folks hopping up and down like this was actually news wouldn't care that this was a year old article. Please feel free to return to your This is HUGE!11! party. Your "haz a sad" comment was a nice touch to really demonstrate the quality of folks we're talking about here. Thanks for that.

[BeanMusical]

186. See post 164, this is a discussion site, people have been discussing.

Oh, and try to stop making a fool of yourself. I understand that it will not be easy but just try,
little grasshopper.

[Number23]

187. Not one thing you've said refutes anything I've said. In fact, not one thing you've said even

makes the tiniest, most minuscule bit of sense.

So if rofling smilies and "you haz a sad" is your pithy "contribution" to this conversation, then I can understand your wild efforts to "project" that I am the one making a fool out of myself when it's pretty fucking obvious that honor is all yours.

[BeanMusical]

205. I can see that you are angry.

Why is that?

[V0ltairesGh0st]

133. I'd vote for this guy.

"In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends."

-Ed Snowden-

[Aerows]

158. From what I have gathered from the folks

in this thread that want to see Edward Snowden tarred and feathered - it isn't about him. It isn't about anything other than their careers and pensions that they so desperately want to hold on to.

Your privacy is collateral damage to these folks.

Throwing whistle blowers in jail is direct damage and warranted in their minds.

Understand who and what you are confronting, because they know exactly how far they will go. If that doesn't scare the shit out of you, nothing will.

[timdog44]

169. From what I see an what you see

go back to #111.
- Flexed for your own camera or taken pictures of yourself modeling lingerie?

Why would you do that unless you wished it to be seen. Are you an idiot? Then post it on the most public place in history - the Internet. Are you an idiot?

You don't care about your country. You worry about yourself. Do you think other countries don't know more than you think they do? Are you an idiot?

Privacy of innocents. Put your pictures on Facebook or Twitter, or where ever. Are you an idiot?

The N S A are delivering pictures to perverts. The N S A are providing information that has been known for years by other countries.

So how has all this affected you? By the way, you look good in a dress. I say to the N S A like in Game of Thrones. You know nothing Jon Snow(den). -

The NSA is nothing. The people you seem to think information is being leaked to, already knows this information. "The Russians are bleeding him for his safety" as if he can pull all this stuff from his memory. China could be getting it?!!! Lets get real. If that have not already figured it out then they are not the techno guys all think they are. Then, if the NSA has not changed codes and all that to make things look different, or the same for any company or bank that has not changed things in the last, what? 10 years, then we are not the tech guys we think we are. The NSA is and should be a shell oranization handing out bogus stuff. Those who are worrying are those who put pictures out for all to see, or people wearing dresses in there private dreams, or flexed for your camera and sent them out to your girls, or boys. Are people idiots. I was not nice. Do you now get it. The NSA is a bit nothing and Snowden is not coming back because there are idiots who would execute him with or without a trial. Think about it.

[Liberal_in_LA]

173. holy crap

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

174. Will it interfere with their 2 minutes of love for Big Brother?

[navarth]

189. Ron Cobb.

One of the greats.

[BeanMusical]

206. "Greenwald's fuck-buddy"

Homophobic much?