NSA Collecting Phone Records of MILLIONS of Verizon Customers Daily

[Bridges]

Trying to politicise this is the worst thing you can do. Its distracting from the real issue.  The problem isnt who did this, its that this is completely legal.  You should be outraged, but you should focus that energy on pushing for the Patriot Act and FISC to be repealed. 

This isn't even news in terms ofdomestic spying.  There is so much more that goes under the radar cause we're so used to this shit by now.  If you think this is bad, realize programs and power like this grow every year.

Contact your congressmen and women.  Try to not politicize it with Dems/Reps.

[JeffreyS]

Good post^^^

[peestandingup]

It gets worse. http://www.businessinsider.com/prism-spying-program-nsa-fbi-mine-data-yahoo-facebook-google-2013-6

[JeffreyS]

Wait until we're all wearing Google glasses. Facial recognition software And video of everywhere available 24 seven for snooping.

[spuwho]

Collecting records just to find out that....

we are either talking about the Bachelorette

or talking about the NBA Finals.......

NSA will release a report that says "Phone records show that Americans are just as bored and mundane as we expected"

[coredumped]

Trying to politicise this is the worst thing you can do.
...
Contact your congressmen and women.  Try to not politicize it with Dems/Reps.

I disagree, I think it's important that people realize democrats are just as bad on human rights as republicans (worse with this president in my opinion).

It won't be until people realize the 2 parties are the same this stuff will continue.

[coredumped]

Anyone see the front page of the huffington post? (traditionally a liberal site)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Here's a screenshot:


Maybe people will wake up....

[JeffreyS]

I don't think they will I do not think most Americans have a problem with it. 

[KenFSU]

Ken, werent you one of the ones asking what people had to hide way back when this was first an issue?  Or was that someone else?

Quite the opposite, actually

From 2009:

I see nothing wrong with the cameras unless you plan on doing something illegal you shouldnt be worried.

With all due respect, I think there should be a special key on the keyboard that automatically outputs this catchphrase each time the issues of civil liberties and privacy are raised. People, such as myself, don’t deplore surveillance systems like this because they are street hooligans hell bent on “doing something wrong.”

Privacy is a person’s most sacred right. It’s not the ability to commit crime without consequence, but rather the freedom to be a human being. I work hard during the day, but I tense up when my boss is looking over my shoulder. I stress over what websites I visit at the office during my lunch break and censor my emails. I drive safely, but my blood pressure increases when a police officer is following me closely. Stress under scrutiny is one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. It’s why your pulse is rarely accurate at the doctor’s office. You might be fine with it, but I do not accept being reduced to a lab rat in a maze on streets that my tax dollars fund, and find “the roads are public” to be thin rationalization for it.

Call it a police state, call it a nanny state, call it whatever. These surveillance grids are going up all over the country, thanks in no small part to grants from the Department of Homeland Security. Sure, a few dozen cameras downtown might not seem like a big deal. A few dozen more at intersections. A few dozen more at public parks and communal areas around town. It’s a slippery slope though. Look no further than England. They started putting up a few cameras here and there a decade ago, and now there are cameras on the streets of London with built-in speakers for the police to yell at citizens for jaywalking or littering. Their schools have cameras in the bathrooms. And ironically enough, a law was just passed this week in England making it a criminal offense, carrying up to ten years in prison, to photograph or film police officers. That’s not what America needs.

There is an old saying that goes: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Quite frankly, I don’t trust the United States government. With Congressional approval ratings as low as 9% in the last year, it appears as if I am not alone. I don’t trust the Department of Homeland Security and NSA. With illegal prisons around the world, White House-authorized torture, rendition practices, and arbitrary abuse of every type of surveillance on the book, they can’t even seem to get themselves a conviction to back it all up. I have no reason to trust them either.

And God knows I don’t trust the City of Jacksonville. You want to trust the same people to monitor your behavior each and every day that can’t even fix a freakin fountain?

It in no way takes a “conspiracist” to come to the conclusion that Americans are being surveilled in record numbers. It’s black and white fact, backed up by the most trusted news organizations in America. Your phone calls are fair game. Your emails are fair game. Your IM’s, text messages, credit card records, financial transaction, bank statements, library logs, website visits, travel information. All being pumped directly to the NSA. Some it is delivered from the telecoms and financial institutions. Much of it is delivered from cooperative local agencies, who send your information to the NSA through regional Department of Homeland Security Fusion Centers. Ours is in Tallahassee.

The NSA is gathering and permanently databasing information, not on criminals or overseas threats, but on American Citizens just like me and you. Journalists are prime targets. As our those engaged in anti-war or civil liberties groups. Some people’s information is culled and archived simply because they happened to place a couple of phone calls in one day that lasted less that a minute (terrorists tend to make short calls, says the CIA).

To imply that this information is somehow exclusive to conspiracists is instead an acknowledgement that one has simply failed to read a decent newspaper in the last five years.

Once the cameras go up, they aren’t coming down. Historically, they’ll follow the same pattern of suburban sprawl as our fine citizens have as well. You want to permanently cede that type of power over and trust that your local, regional, state, and federal authorities will never abuse it? Be my guest. Even better, you’ll get to fund it yourself. But, if we are foolish enough to use something as slip-shod as “history” as a basis for decision making, these things never tend to end well.

[BridgeTroll]

The only "shocking" part of this story is why it took a Brit newpaper to "break" the story...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/06/why_the_nsa_needs_your_phone_calls?page=0,0

Why the NSA Needs Your Phone Calls…

… and why you (probably) shouldn't worry about it.

BY STEWART BAKER |JUNE 6, 2013

Suddenly, the national security establishment is drowning in data. On June 5, the Guardian released what appears to be a highly classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA Court, to collect Verizon customers' phone records of calls made to or by Americans. On June 6, the Washington Post revealed the existence of PRISM, which allows the collection of Internet data on a massive scale. Does this mean the end of privacy, law, and the Constitution?

Nope. There are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that these "scandals" signal a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties. Despite this apparent breadth, and even if we assume that the leaked FISA order is genuine, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that it signals a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties.

Let's start with the order. It seems to come from the court established to oversee intelligence gathering that touches the United States. Right off the bat, that means that this is not some warrantless or extrastatutory surveillance program. The government had to convince up to a dozen life-tenured members of the federal judiciary that the order was lawful. You may not like the legal interpretation that produced this order, but you can't say it's lawless.

In fact, it's a near certainty that the legal theory behind orders of this sort has been carefully examined by all three branches of the government and by both political parties. As the Guardian story makes clear, Sen. Ron Wyden has been agitating for years about what he calls an interpretation of national security law that seems to go beyond anything the American people understand or would support. He could easily have been talking about orders like this. So it's highly likely that the law behind this order was carefully vetted by both intelligence committees, Democrat-led in the Senate and Republican-led in the House. (Indeed, today the leaders of both committees gave interviews defending the order.) And in the executive branch, any legal interpretations adopted by George W. Bush's administration would have been carefully scrubbed by President Barack Obama's Justice Department.

Ah, you say, but the scandal here isn't what has been done illegally -- it's what has been done legally. Even if it's lawful, how can the government justify spying on every American's phone calls?

It can't. No one has repealed the laws that prohibit the National Security Agency (NSA) from targeting Americans unless it has probable cause to believe that they are spies or terrorists. So under the law, the NSA remains prohibited from collecting information on Americans.

On top of that, national security law also requires that the government "minimize" its collection and use of information about Americans -- a requirement that has spawned elaborate rules that strictly limit what the agency can do with information it has already collected. Thus, one effect of "post-collection minimization" is that the NSA may find itself prohibited from looking at or using data that it has lawfully collected.

I would not be surprised to discover that minimization is the key to this peculiarly two-party, three-branch "scandal." That is, while the order calls for the collection of an enormous amount of data, much of it probably cannot actually be searched or used except under heavy restrictions. (If I'm right, the administration is likely to find itself forced quite quickly to start talking about minimization, perhaps in considerable detail.)

But why, you ask, would the government collect all these records, even subject to minimization, especially when Wyden was kicking up such a fuss about it? And, really, what's the justification for turning the data over to the government, no matter how strong the post-collection rules are?

To understand why that might seem necessary, consider this entirely hypothetical example. Imagine that the United States is intercepting al Qaeda communications in Yemen. Its leader there calls his weapons expert and says, "Our agent in the U.S. needs technical assistance constructing a weapon for an imminent operation. I've told him to use a throwaway cell phone to call you tomorrow at 11 a.m. on your throwaway phone. When you answer, he'll give you nothing other than the number of a second phone. You will buy another phone in the bazaar and call him back on the second number at 2 p.m."

Now, this is pretty good improvised tradecraft, and it would leave the government with no idea where or who the U.S.-based operative was or what phone numbers to monitor. It doesn't have probable cause to investigate any particular American. But it surely does have probably cause to investigate any American who makes a call to Yemen at 11 a.m., Sanaa time, hangs up after a few seconds, and then gets a call from a different Yemeni number three hours later. Finding that person, however, wouldn't be easy, because the government could only identify the suspect by his calling patterns, not by name.

So how would the NSA go about finding the one person in the United States whose calling pattern matched the terrorists' plan? Well, it could ask every carrier to develop the capability to store all calls and search them for patterns like this one. But that would be very expensive, and its effectiveness would really only be as good as the weakest, least cooperative carrier. And even then it wouldn't work without massive, real-time information sharing -- any reasonably intelligent U.S.-based terrorist would just buy his first throwaway phone from one carrier and his second phone from a different carrier.

The only way to make the system work, and the only way to identify and monitor the one American who was plotting with al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, would be to pool all the carriers' data on U.S. calls to and from Yemen and to search it all together -- and for the costs to be borne by all of us, not by the carriers.

In short, the government would have to do it.

To repeat, this really is hypothetical; while I've had clearances both as the NSA's top lawyer and in the top policy job at the Department of Homeland Security, I have not been briefed on this program. (If I had, I wouldn't be writing about it.) But the example shows that it's not that hard to imagine circumstances in which the government needs to obtain massive amounts of information about Americans yet also needs to remain bound by the general rule that it may only monitors those whom it legitimately suspects of being terrorists or spies.

The technique that squares that circle is minimization. As long as the minimization rules require that all searches of the collected data must be justified in advance by probable cause, Americans are protected from arbitrary searches. In the standard law enforcement model that we're all familiar with, privacy is protected because the government doesn't get access to the information until it presents evidence to the court sufficient to identify the suspects. In the alternative model, the government gets possession of the data but is prohibited by the court and the minimization rules from searching it until it has enough evidence to identify terror suspects based on their patterns of behavior.

That's a real difference. Plenty of people will say that they don't trust the government with such a large amount of data -- that there's too much risk that it will break the rules -- even rules enforced by a two-party, three-branch system of checks and balances. When I first read the order, even I had a moment of chagrin and disbelief at its sweep.

But for those who don't like the alternative model, the real question is "compared to what"? Those who want to push the government back into the standard law enforcement approach of identifying terrorists only by name and not by conduct will have to explain how it will allow us to catch terrorists who use halfway decent tradecraft -- or why sticking with that model is so fundamentally important that we should do so even if it means more acts of terrorism at home.

[Bridges]

That article is exactly what has me so concerned.  The "this is nothing, stop worrying" approach.   We've already internalized spying on our citizens in our country.  Already, Glenn Greenwald has discovered that some of this information was used to seek personal vendettas by the individuals in the NSA.  He mentioned it on NPR's Morning Edition this morning. 

This type of surveillance happened under the Bush Administration, but he disclosed most of it.  Now it's happening under the Obama Administration, with less disclosure.  The slope has proven itself slippery.  Now is the time to make the changes, cause when the next administration or the one after that takes over, this will be harder to stop. 

[BridgeTroll]

That article is exactly what has me so concerned.  The "this is nothing, stop worrying" approach.   We've already internalized spying on our citizens in our country.

But... that is not what the article is saying.  It is outlining what the program can and cannot do and the checks and balances that are supposed to safeguard our rights.  The author even says...

Plenty of people will say that they don't trust the government with such a large amount of data -- that there's too much risk that it will break the rules -- even rules enforced by a two-party, three-branch system of checks and balances. When I first read the order, even I had a moment of chagrin and disbelief at its sweep.

I certainly understand your concerns about the "slippery slope"... and I am sure you share the same concerns regarding guncontrol and government control of healthcare...

[KenFSU]

2007:

http://www.youtube.com/v/B6fnfVJzZT4

[Bridges]

The article states:

It can't. No one has repealed the laws that prohibit the National Security Agency (NSA) from targeting Americans unless it has probable cause to believe that they are spies or terrorists. So under the law, the NSA remains prohibited from collecting information on Americans.

Except, that, that's what they've been doing.  Listen to Glenn Greenwald talk about it http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/07/189446096/profound-questions-about-privacy-follow-latest-revelations

Not to mention that PRISM revealed deeper levels of spying. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

I certainly understand your concerns about the "slippery slope"... and I am sure you share the same concerns regarding guncontrol and government control of healthcare...

Yes, every issue is the same, always.  No nuance to any of it.  Spying is the same as healthcare.  And spying indiscriminately and sweeping like this is the same as closing gun show loopholes. 

Of course, this is exactly the kind of BS that makes us distracted from issues.  Comparison from "my side" and "I told you so".   

[BridgeTroll]

In my eyes... the Prism issue may be more sinister and "in the dark" than the telephony issue.  Regarding the slippery slope... it is interesting that some slopes are slipperyer that others... depending on the viewpoints of those who are sliding down it...