NSA Collecting Phone Records of MILLIONS of Verizon Customers Daily

[Demosthenes]

^^^My bad, I misunderstood you when you said that "you didn't see an opinion anywhere" throughout the top post on this page. I get it that you disagree with it, and that's fine. I just think that many people are way too paranoid for nothing.

thats not really an opinion is it?

I mean your opinion is that we shouldnt have opinions and stay uninformed.  Its literally the exact opposite of what the site was founded for.

although at least thats more honest and direct than demosthenes, who thinks we should all just shut the fuck up and let things get done by unknown persons who make bold decisions and dont bother with stupid shit like 'consensus'.

You are sickeningly disingenuous. Perhaps if you all dropped the partisan crap, and stopped backing a horse based on the letter after their name, you would all see that you are being tricked into supporting bad things. I'm not calling for you to "shut the fuck up" at all, but rather, when you speak up, do it against abuses by our government and the leaders, regardless of their party, instead of attacking someone else who also got suckered into the same game by the guy with a different letter behind his name.

Its time the American people set aside the political rhetoric for a little while and kick this government in the ass instead.

[ChriswUfGator]

SO basically this conversation has devolved into a NotNow and Dare airing out their dirty laundry?

Normally I come to his rescue on these, but jesus I've never been more disappointed in someone I've voted for in my life. I was decidedly pleased with his social reforms, mildly unhappy that the healthcare bill got passed despite being stripped of the part that made the whole thing competitive (the public option), more than a bit peeved that he wanted to continue playing world-cop and bombing random countries, but then that all went out the window with this wiretap mess. I'm flabbergasted that the NSA/CIA/FBI can (and, apparently, do) listen to my, your, anyone's phone calls on a whim and without a warrant, apparently just because they can. This place is turning into a 1960s soviet union, and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather someone blow up a building and however many people die, than start down the path of this kind of invasive and government-controlled society, with the reason being that it means the terrorists indeed won. There, I said it.

This was exactly the type of thing I was hoping would fade away with the Bush administration. I guess I take solace in the fact that after the Bush debacle I'd have voted a straight democratic ticket even if it had included Hitler, or I can justify to myself that McCain or Romney probably would have done the same thing, but then that's really the point here, isn't it. This guy was supposed to be different.

[peestandingup]

SO basically this conversation has devolved into a NotNow and Dare airing out their dirty laundry?

Looks like it, and a handful of others. I came back to see if the partisan circle jerk was still going on. It is. This thing is much bigger than that, but some people can't turn it off it would seem.

Carry on, fellows.

[Kaiser Soze]

Some pretty damn long posts in this thread

[NotNow]

Allright, allright.  I'll shut up!   

[KenFSU]

The 29-year old NSA systems administrator who blew the whistle on PRISM has deliberately outed himself to warn Americans about what is going on. INCREDIBLY brave man, who is in for the smear campaign of a lifetime.

[KenFSU]

While people engage in short-sighted partisan arguments about who was right and who was wrong, an apparatus continues to take hold that can only end in complete control over the American populace, whether now or fifty years from now. This is so much bigger than Bush vs. Obama.

Snowden on why he leaked this information and fled for his life:

Q: "Why should people care about surveillance?"

A: "Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. The storage capability of the systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion by somebody - even by a wrong call. Then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspision from an innocent life and paint anyone into context of a wrongdoer."

http://www.youtube.com/v/5yB3n9fu-rM

Q: Why did you decide to become a whistleblower?

A: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."

Q: But isn't there a need for surveillance to try to reduce the chances of terrorist attacks such as Boston?

A: "We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism. Boston was a criminal act. It was not about surveillance but good, old-fashioned police work. The police are very good at what they do."

Q: Do you see yourself as another Bradley Manning?

A: "Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good."

Q: Do you think what you have done is a crime?

A: "We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence."

Q: What do you think is going to happen to you?

A: "Nothing good."

Q: Why Hong Kong?

A: "I think it is really tragic that an American has to move to a place that has a reputation for less freedom. Still, Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People's Republic of China. It has a strong tradition of free speech."

Q: What do the leaked documents reveal?

A: "That the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians."


Snowden is a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA
Q: What about the Obama administration's protests about hacking by China?

A: "We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries."

Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?

A: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."

Q: Does your family know you are planning this?

A: "No. My family does not know what is happening … My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with …

I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night."

Q: When did you decide to leak the documents?

A: "You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.

"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

Q: What is your reaction to Obama denouncing the leaks on Friday while welcoming a debate on the balance between security and openness?

A: "My immediate reaction was he was having difficulty in defending it himself. He was trying to defend the unjustifiable and he knew it."

Q: What about the response in general to the disclosures?

A: "I have been surprised and pleased to see the public has reacted so strongly in defence of these rights that are being suppressed in the name of security. It is not like Occupy Wall Street but there is a grassroots movement to take to the streets on July 4 in defence of the Fourth Amendment called Restore The Fourth Amendment and it grew out of Reddit. The response over the internet has been huge and supportive."

Q: Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital's Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be "disappeared". How do you feel about that?


A: "Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process â€" they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

Q: Do you have a plan in place?

A: "The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me … My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom. I have no idea what my future is going to be.

"They could put out an Interpol note. But I don't think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the US. I think it will be clearly shown to be political in nature."

Q: Do you think you are probably going to end up in prison?

A: "I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will."

Q: How to you feel now, almost a week after the first leak?

A: "I think the sense of outrage that has been expressed is justified. It has given me hope that, no matter what happens to me, the outcome will be positive for America. I do not expect to see home again, though that is what I want."

[KenFSU]

I think Snowden is a true patriot, btw.

But I do wonder if you are a subscriber to the whole trilateral commission conspiracy or something similar to it?

These 'partisan' arguments, unfortunately are the slow water through which the gears of our society are operated.  It is a democracy after all, and people have to come to their own conclusions for their own reasons.

And as the years pass, i am actually coming to appreciate this basic wisdom.  I dislike these Change on a Dime, Shock Doctrine kind of policy making that has characterized the recent decade.  It will come to no good end.

Let people make their case, let it be argued out, let the debates, both large and small be had and let the slow common sense of the People drive change whenever possible.  I have to believe that people are on the whole, Good.  And that they will eventually do the right thing.

I certainly hope that you share that basic optimism with me.

I subscribe to history.

In this case, two famous quotes have held true time and time again:

1) Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
2) Absolute power eventually corrupts absolutely.

When the balance of powers shifts so dramatically that our elected officials can access, without warrant, anything we say or do, history says that this is going to end very, very badly for many of us or our children. There are some very scary warning signs in place. In the last two months alone, we've seen the government abuse these powers to go after journalists and political organizations, and this week we have the telecom dragnet and PRISM stories leak. The reason I don't believe this is a partisan issue is because both sides of the political spectrum have allowed this to not only go on, but increase in scope. And I have no faith that the next Republican or Democratic mainstream Presidential candidate is going to do anything other than accelerate the surveillance.

While I largely agree that the population overall are good people who will eventually do the right thing, I also believe that we're rapidly approaching a point of no return, if we haven't already gotten there. I hope we get the opportunity to turn this thing around. I genuinely hope people fight back against this gross abuse of power, but sadly, I have little confidence that the population has the attention span to continue to see this thing through once the 5-hour news cycle flushes it down the toilet and moves on to something else :/

[ben says]

SO basically this conversation has devolved into a NotNow and Dare airing out their dirty laundry?

Normally I come to his rescue on these, but jesus I've never been more disappointed in someone I've voted for in my life. I was decidedly pleased with his social reforms, mildly unhappy that the healthcare bill got passed despite being stripped of the part that made the whole thing competitive (the public option), more than a bit peeved that he wanted to continue playing world-cop and bombing random countries, but then that all went out the window with this wiretap mess. I'm flabbergasted that the NSA/CIA/FBI can (and, apparently, do) listen to my, your, anyone's phone calls on a whim and without a warrant, apparently just because they can. This place is turning into a 1960s soviet union, and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather someone blow up a building and however many people die, than start down the path of this kind of invasive and government-controlled society, with the reason being that it means the terrorists indeed won. There, I said it.

This was exactly the type of thing I was hoping would fade away with the Bush administration. I guess I take solace in the fact that after the Bush debacle I'd have voted a straight democratic ticket even if it had included Hitler, or I can justify to myself that McCain or Romney probably would have done the same thing, but then that's really the point here, isn't it. This guy was supposed to be different.

Couldn't agree more

[BridgeTroll]

Good article... explaining the process... and the safeguards... and where the rules could be strengthened...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/the_nsa_s_phone_call_database_a_defense_of_mass_surveillance.single.html

What’s wrong with the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program? The answer, according to civil libertarians, is its scope. Edward Snowden, the ex-NSA contractor who exposed the program, calls it “omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance.” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the story, accuses the U.S. government of  “collecting the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing … monitoring them, keeping dossiers on them.” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., says the feds are “trolling through billions of phone records.”

It sounds as though NSA goblins have been studying everyone’s phone calls. But that isn’t how the program works. It’s a two-stage process. The first stageâ€"collectionâ€"is massive and indiscriminate. The second stageâ€"examination of particular recordsâ€"is restricted. We can argue over whether this two-tiered policy is too intrusive. But either way, our debate about it has focused on the wrong stage. The problem isn’t the data collection. It’s how the data are used.

The first document published by the Guardian, an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, instructs Verizon to “produce” to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records” related to phone calls within, to, or from the United States. Although the order pertains only to the date, length, and phone numbers involved in each callâ€"not to what was saidâ€"it’s still a colossal demand. But what happens to the data once the NSA gets it? James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, gives this account:

“The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time. … By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. … The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. … Only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed because the vast majority of the data is not responsive to any terrorism-related query.”

In other words, the rules that most of us would apply at the collection stageâ€"reasonable suspicion, specific facts, court approvalâ€"are applied instead at the query stage. Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA, CIA, and national intelligence office under President Bush (no, he didn’t hold all three of those jobs at once), describes how the program operates. “The government acquires records … from the telecom providers, but then doesn't go into that database without an arguable reason connected to terrorism to ask that database a question,” Hayden explained on Fox News Sunday. For instance, “You roll up something in Waziristan. You get a cell phone. It's the first time you've ever had that cell phone number. You know it's related to terrorism because of the pocket litter you've gotten in that operation. Here's how it works: You simply ask that database, ‘Hey, any of you phone numbers in there ever talked to this phone number in Waziristan?’ ”

Note the indefinite past tense. The analyst asks whether any of the numbers in the database has ever talked to the number in Waziristan. That’s why the database is colossal: Its aspiration is to capture and preserve records of every call so that no potential lead is missed. Big Brother isn’t watching you. But he does want your records in the database so that if any number you called later surfaces in a plot, he can look back through history, spot the connection, and check you out.

The magnitude of this projectâ€"a permanent, comprehensive library of which phones called which other phones, when, and for how longâ€"means that no record is deleted. Chris Wallace asked Hayden, “What do you do with all the records, the billions of records that you have on all of us law-abiding citizens?” Hayden replied: “Nothing. … You get the cell phone with that [Waziristan] number six months from now. You want to know the history of that number. … So you do retain the information so that you can ask questions of it in the future.”

In some ways, this process resembles traditional law-enforcement analysis of phone calls to and from a suspect. But there’s a big difference. On Face the Nation, Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, observed:

“When I was a counterterrorism federal prosecutor, we could take the number and run them through the phone companies, through a national security letter or subpoena. Now what has happened is they have literally taken all these phone records and maintained them, taken them out of the private sector and maintained them in the public sector within the NSA. … It's the warehousing of all the phone records from all the major carriers within the federal government …”

Why would the NSA do this? Why not wait till we snag that phone in Waziristan and then order Verizon to turn over records of the calls going in and out? On This Week, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, offered this explanation:

“After 9/11, we realized there was a big hole in our ability to fully identify all of the players in that terrorist plot. And [part] of it was by the fact that these business records, the phone billing information, is destroyed by these companies. They can'tâ€"expense-wise, it's really difficult for them to hold them. So this is what happened: The [FISA] court said, 'Put all of that information in a box, and hold that information. And when you want to access that information, you have to use this very specific court-ordered approval process.'”

That’s the concept: Collect the companies’ records so they’re never lost. Later, when we have a suspicious phone number, we can scan the universe of records to find every number connected to that number. Your records are never purged from the database, because being in the database doesn’t mean you’re under suspicion. It’s simply the default.

The catch is that your records are now in the government’s hands. Civil libertarians are right to worry about that. The reason this is still a free country, 237 years later, isn’t that our public servants are such wonderful people. The reason is that we constantly improvise systems to block or catch them when they try to abuse power.

Clapper, President Obama, and the heads of the Congressional Intelligence Committees swear that the NSA has safeguards to prevent abuse of the phone data. They point to congressional oversight and judicial veto power through the FISC. I’m sympathetic to that defense. But they can’t just assert that these safeguards exist. They have to tell us more about them. Why should we trust a secret court that rarely turns down the government’s demands? Why should we rely on senators who don’t even attend briefings on surveillance programs?

If we don’t get satisfactory answers to these questions, we don’t have to reject the NSA’s database. We just have to build in sensible, visible restrictions. One strategy is to divide the informationâ€"which numbers you’ve called, on which dates, and through which cell towersâ€"so that no individual analyst can know everything about your calls. That’s how we protect your privacy in naked airport scanning: The officer who sees your body can’t see your face or your name. The NSA query system could be set up so that numbers don’t even appear on the analyst’s screen unless they’re triggered, through a connection in the database, by the manual input of a number from a court-approved list. The FISC could be monitored by a public advocate or inspector general whose reports go immediately to the intelligence committees and are later declassified so the public can evaluate the oversight.

For all we know, the NSA is already doing some of these things. What’s absurd is that we don’t know, because the government won’t tell us. That’s bad for civil liberties and for security. It breeds suspicion and overreaction. If we can’t trust the government to manage surveillance data through publicly understood procedures that inhibit abuse, we won’t let it have the data to begin with.

[marksjax]

Well, keep believing their narrative if you want to. But the barn door is open now. I am guessing that this is just a taste of what they are really doing.

And I know the political landscape on this Forum leans left for the most part. I would hope you would not let your political loyalties cloud your vision on this NSA spying on us revelation. This is both parties, both Bush and Obama, it is how our Gov't operates.
If you accept that both parties are in on this maybe it will allow you to show some anger and not keep quiet because it happened on your guy's watch.

Point is: It doesn't matter who is in charge, this is not acceptable and should not be tolerated.

If you think it is acceptable then we will respectfully have to disagree.

[BridgeTroll]

Well, keep believing their narrative if you want to. But the barn door is open now. I am guessing that this is just a taste of what they are really doing.

And I know the political landscape on this Forum leans left for the most part. I would hope you would not let your political loyalties cloud your vision on this NSA spying on us revelation. This is both parties, both Bush and Obama, it is how our Gov't operates.
If you accept that both parties are in on this maybe it will allow you to show some anger and not keep quiet because it happened on your guy's watch.

Point is: It doesn't matter who is in charge, this is not acceptable and should not be tolerated.

If you think it is acceptable then we will respectfully have to disagree.

This issue is certainly making for "strange political bedfellows"... as we seem to have people from either side of the spectrun both for and against.  I am trying to keep an open mind and looking at this pragmatically rather than emotionally.

As I have said before... your "metadata" is collected and stored every day by banks, internet browsers, credit companies, grocery stores, book sellers, music sellers, etc... under less secure and more accessible means than NSA's program.  This is unlikely to stop as this information is constantly used, crunched, recrunched, and used again.

What we need are acceptable safeguards to this information.  We can certainly agree that these safeguards need to be reviewed and monitored.  It is a question of trust I guess... and the government has given us plenty of reason lately to distrust it...

[marksjax]

So maybe the lack of outrage by regular citizens is less about their politics and more about complacency.
"Why bother forming a protest march when you can vent on the internet" (I'm guilty of that right now!).
We have gotten lazy and haven't been paying attention and this type of stuff is the result.
They (the Gov't) just make these decisions knowing that no one is going to really stand up to them.
If you do then you are a traitor or criminal.
It is really sickening.

From our friends at Wikipedia I offer you this:

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system in which the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life whenever necessary.[1]

[BridgeTroll]

So maybe the lack of outrage by regular citizens is less about their politics and more about complacency.
"Why bother forming a protest march when you can vent on the internet" (I'm guilty of that right now!).
We have gotten lazy and haven't been paying attention and this type of stuff is the result.
They (the Gov't) just make these decisions knowing that no one is going to really stand up to them.
If you do then you are a traitor or criminal.
It is really sickening.

From our friends at Wikipedia I offer you this:

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system in which the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life whenever necessary.[1]

I guess I do not understand who "we" are angry at.  Is it the President who has said on more than one occasion that your calls are not being listened to? (more than one person here is claiming the President has lied) Is it Congress who say the same thing?  Is it the rotating panel of Federal judges who approve warrants based on probable cause?

Do you (we) not trust any of the above?  To me... it seems the distrust is because of a lack of understanding of the process.  This is certainly understandable as the guts of the program have been classified due to the sources and methods involved.

I wish to have a discussion of this topic without the acrimony and name calling that often times accompany these topics.  I certainly respect your opinions Mark...

[BridgeTroll]

I wish to have a discussion of this topic without the acrimony and name calling that often times accompany these topics.  I certainly respect your opinions Mark...