Verizon Customer?

[johnnya24]

No evidence has been presented to corroborate Greenwald's fanciful stories, his main source keeps getting caught in lies, ...

At least you're not under oath

[johnnya24]

[chancellor]

No evidence has been presented to corroborate Greenwald's fanciful stories,

Huh? I'd certainly agree that not all of Greenwald's stories have been collaborated, but some certainly have, including:

- NSA collection of all phone metadata of Verizon. Moreover, Clapper all but conceded the NSA has more than Verizon's phone metadata.
- PRISM exists and has access to, at a minimum, FISA court ordered information. The NSA having a legitimate direct link to Facebook, Google, et al servers is certainly in question. But, hell, to use one of your terms, that's a "look here" issue when the really important issue is what's been coughed up by Facebook, Google, and others.
- NSA use of metadata has resulted in US citizens being analyzed, in direct contradiction to Clapper's testimony and what appears to be direct contravention of law. See James Cole's testimony before Congress, money quote being: "A wrong phone number is hit or a person who shouldn't have been targeted gets targeted because there's a mistake in the phone record." Moreover, a citizen has no recourse if targeted in this manner due to qualified immunity.
- Congressional oversight of NSA's work is poor, at best. Corroborated by three earlier whistle-blowers in recent USA Today article linked earlier and this linky: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...claims/276964/

[Hornsby]

Well, in order to make sure everyone is on the same page, can you state specifically what you think Clapper lied about?

He not only lied to Congress, he later admitted that he'd lied premeditatedly. I can't think of a anything worse, and it's blithely being brushed off by the administration, most of congress, and almost all of the public...

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:
“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/06/fire_dni_james_clapper_he_lied_to_congress_about_nsa_surveillance.html

[johnnya24]

Earlier in the thread I mentioned that The Guardian are not the "investigative journalist" newspaper that people imagine them to be. Most of the big stories that they have been involved with over the last few years have involved data that has been handed to them on a plate (Wikileaks, Snowden etc) ... and of course, they just love the image that was presented to the world in The Bourne movies. The reality is a lot different.

The rest of time, The Guardian (which has traditionally been my go-to paper) is a highly editorialized shackled paper that will rarely go out on a limb. They do not provide balanced reporting on a whole range of issues, and currently, they seem firmly in the pocket of the Labour party (it was the Lib Dems 3 years ago), basically just parroting their agenda, the agendas of various corporate interests, and firmly reigned in by their corporate and legal teams.

That's not to say there isn't some tension between their political journalists, many of whom would presumably like to write more freely, and the corporate side. I can't speak to that, but none of the "featured" articles that were promoted yesterday came from the political team, and Greenwald's important piece was relegated behind a couple of corporate schill articles, and a report of Obama's comments yesterday under the heading "NSA 'not reading people's email'" (the editors and sub-editors create the headings and summaries at the Guardian, no the journalists). The thing with the UK is that we don't have any formalities when it comes to Government secrecy and the shackling of the press. Government says, press does. The barriers go up, and that's that. The press cannot question it outside of commenting on public statements (or at least that is how it seems).

I say that because I've been patiently waiting for the "corporate" side of The Guardian to reign this story in. I think it began yesterday.

Glenn Greenwald (who I believe has a relationship / association / partnership with the Guardian, rather than being a straight employee ... I could be wrong) wrote one of his more important pieces on the story. It drew directly from FISA court documents, and other documents that outlined NSA procedures when dealing with US data and metadata.

1. The Guardian released the article at 00.36am
2. They did not feature the article at all on their mobile web page, their mobile app, or their US news page
3. On their main front page they buried the article halfway down the page, under a bunch of corporate schill articles, and hid it behind a "Quote" link, which doesn't even look like a link. The two articles they sub-headlined above this story where wrote by Charles Arthur, the technology editor who is a notorious corporate schill, and Kate Connolly, who has not wrote a single piece on the NSA saga before this.

Have the Guardian's overlords decided to bail on Greenwald and Snowden by backing off the story? For regular readers of The Guardian, it seemed like only a matter of time.

[johnnya24]

This was one of the questions I was dying for someone to ask at the Intelligence hearing on Tuesday. Of course that was never going to happen.

Here's a collation of the number of FISA court requests and rejections since 1978 (last updated May 2012) ...

35 years

10's of thousands of requests.

12 rejections (and how many of those 12 got resubmitted and then accepted?).

FISA court = rubber stamp. No oversight. People making the requests are always right it seems.

[johnnya24]

Skype secretly developed a program called Project Chess in order to make their call data available to the NSA.

Guardian - Skype's secret Project Chess reportedly helped NSA access customers' data

Skype, the web-based communications company, reportedly set up a secret programme to make it easier for US surveillance agencies to access customers' information.

The programme, called Project Chess and first revealed by the New York Times on Thursday, was said to have been established before Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011. Microsoft's links with US security are under intense scrutiny following the Guardian's revelation of Prism, a surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA), that claimed "direct" access to its servers and those of rivals including Apple, Facebook and Google.

Project Chess was set up to explore the legal and technical issues involved in making Skype's communications more readily available to law enforcement and security officials, according to the Times. Only a handful of executives were aware of the plan. The company did not immediately return a call for comment.

The NY Times article - Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.

[johnnya24]

Equally worrying is that, as the various trajectories of the story starts to gather more and more validity and momentum, it has also already peaked as a media event. The vast majority of the media have already moved back to their uncritical banal reporting on nothing issues.

Where are the reporters (or press outlets) picking up on these stories and leads and investigating further? There is avalanche of leads and extensions coming out every day, and there is very little follow up in the mainstream media.

That is the really sad part for me. This is not the world I was led to believe I lived in.

[johnnya24]

Greenwald's latest piece on oversight ... how the FISA courts and NSA oversight works

Here are the documents on which Greenwald's last article was based

They show, as Snowden revealed at the beginning, that it is the analyst and NSA who makes almost all of the decisions when it comes to 702 (PRISM), not the FISA courts. The analyst follows a vague set of guidelines when it comes to the data of US citizens, which appears to be so loosely worded that almost anything could be kept. For instance, it says that

... alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

All gmail emails are encrypted with industry standard 128 bit encryption. Does that mean any email with bog standard levels of encryption are eligible to be retained? Judging by how ridiculously loosely they interpret the law to make things justifiable, it would seem so ... for instance, the deputy AG claimed outright on Tuesday that your phone metadata (call, duration and zip code was the qualification) is not covered under the 4th amendment because of an obscure 1978 Supreme Court ruling regarding the use of landline metadata -- very basic simplistic metadata compared to today's standard -- to catch a specific criminal was legitimate because you do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (the new catchphrase). So their response is "Fuck it ... let's just use this as a justification to search everybody indiscriminately" ... despite the fact that more recent supreme court rulings have shown that this metadata -- the highly intrusive way metadata can be used these days -- should be covered under the 4th Amendment. They just ignore the spirit of recent rulings, and because there is nothing specific stopping them from using the antiquated 1978 ruling, they just plough ahead regardless. And presumably now that they have been caught, just like Bush, they'll simply change the rules.

... and of course, these analysts have carte blanche with everyone else's data ... fuck you very fucking much Google (and the rest ... but in particular Google).

[chancellor]

Equally worrying is that, as the various trajectories of the story starts to gather more and more validity and momentum, it has also already peaked as a media event. The vast majority of the media have already moved back to their uncritical banal reporting on nothing issues.

I can't speak to the UK like you can, but in the US, two significant factors are in play here: first, people don't want to hear about it. While that sounds strange, we have a sector of the population who thinks Obama is a messiah, and if he's good with this, gosh, it must be the right thing. Another sector believes he's one step below the antichrist, and this simply confirms their suspicions. But those are the somewhat politically informed people. A huge sector don't give a damn, and don't want to since they aren't involved in anything remotely deemed "political". It interferes with their view of important news - like what Princess Kate's nursery will look like, or what Kim and Kayne' baby name will be, or what some fat cook lady called black people. As a result, media moves on, since the story doesn't "sell".

Second, there's no media incentive to do so. In the past, a reporter who unveiled something like this was a hero, recognized through the industry, maybe even earning major recognition like a Pulitzer Prize. Now, as you've seen with Greenwald, you become a pariah. And while I do believe we have a left-slant in the US overall in media, that doesn't help those who break something like this.

Where are the reporters (or press outlets) picking up on these stories and leads and investigating further? There is avalanche of leads and extensions coming out every day, and there is very little follow up in the mainstream media.

While I believe it's primarily the two factors above, if you're into conspiracy theory, one can look at Michael Hastings recent demise and wonder, too.

[johnnya24]

I can't speak to the UK like you can, but in the US, two significant factors are in play here: first, people don't want to hear about it. While that sounds strange, we have a sector of the population who thinks Obama is a messiah, and if he's good with this, gosh, it must be the right thing. Another sector believes he's one step below the antichrist, and this simply confirms their suspicions. But those are the somewhat politically informed people. A huge sector don't give a damn, and don't want to since they aren't involved in anything remotely deemed "political". It interferes with their view of important news - like what Princess Kate's nursery will look like, or what Kim and Kayne' baby name will be, or what some fat cook lady called black people. As a result, media moves on, since the story doesn't "sell".

Second, there's no media incentive to do so. In the past, a reporter who unveiled something like this was a hero, recognized through the industry, maybe even earning major recognition like a Pulitzer Prize. Now, as you've seen with Greenwald, you become a pariah. And while I do believe we have a left-slant in the US overall in media, that doesn't help those who break something like this.

While I believe it's primarily the two factors above, if you're into conspiracy theory, one can look at Michael Hastings recent demise and wonder, too.

Pretty much the same. The same non-choice between the main political parties (and yet the appearance of difference); the same shackled press; the same public obsession with trivialities like celebrity; the same degree of apathy; and the same willingness among a growing % of the population to allow neo-fascism to fester and grow within our political system (let's not forget that lots of people support this).

On the point about the media. It is so so difficult to get a job at one of the main newspapers in the UK (I imagine in the USA also). If you don't know someone, or didn't go to the right school, you've no chance. I've had many talented friends and contacts who would have pee'd themselves to get even a freelance article published in one of the main newspapers. So journalists who get a position in one of those institutions, knowing that the editorial staff are under orders to follow a set agenda, knowing that nothing risky will get published anyway, will not risk their position by taking chances. It affects how they do their job. What's the point of "investigating" if it will never get printed? What's the point of even learning how to investigate? It seeps into every corner of the media ... even sports reporting. Any reporter who takes a stance will get black balled and ostracized. That's how the system self-polices dissent these days, everywhere, not just newspapers ... by keeping peoples opinions shackled through fear of the economic or career repercussions ... isn't that right Bob.

As for Michael Hastings, 10/15 years ago you could easily have dismissed any conspiracy theory as fanciful nonsense. It says a lot about how things have changed that folk are not surprised by anything anymore. I don't believe that's what happened, but I can't dismiss it either. These people are now proven to be utterly shameless and act without boundaries or fear or repercussion. Organised premeditated lying to Congress ... meh ... nothing to worry about there. When you give this amount of unaccountable power to organised military institutions, what do we expect will happen? ... I mean what does history tell us will happen?

[johnnya24]

Steve Wozniak breaks the silicon valley silence:

On Edward Snowden:

"I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot,"

On the Govt:

"Read the facts: it's government of, by and for the people. We own the government; we are the ones who pay for it and then we discover something that our money is being used for – that just can't be, that level of crime."

On helping create the conditions for all this:

"I actually feel a little guilty about that – but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world; any thought you had, you could share freely. That it was going to overcome a lot of the government restrictions.

"We didn't realise that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren't. In the old days of mailing letters, you licked it, and when you got an envelope that was still sealed, nobody had seen it; you had private communication. Now they say, because it's email, it cannot be private; anyone can listen."

... and yet its OK for the DOJ and NSA to use antiquated supreme court rulings that similarly could not have had any notion of how this data and technology could be used.

On the Patriot Act:

"All these things about the constitution, that made us so good as people – they are kind of nothing.

"They are all dissolved with the Patriot Act. There are all these laws that just say 'we can secretly call anything terrorism and do anything we want, without the rights of courts to get in and say you are doing wrong things'. There's not even a free open court any more. Read the constitution. I don't know how this stuff happened. It's so clear what the constitution says."

He said he had been brought up to believe that "communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them – these kinds of things were part of Russia. We are getting more and more like that."

[johnnya24]

Contrast those comments with David Drummond's car crash Q&A at the Guardian yesterday (Google's Chief Legal Officer). They deleted / censored half the comments, then closed the comments section. Lie lie lie lie, deny deny deny. Taking their cues from the President, and the NSA, FBI, DHS et al in front of Congress.

To summarize ...

"NSA access ... Whaaaaaaat?"

*SMOKEBOMB*



... then add in the Skype revelations to make it even more implausible.

[johnnya24]

Time for round 3 ... this relates to the extent of the indirect gathering of data ...

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications

One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."

That doesn't fit with what General Alexander said at the Congressional Hearing last week, or the week before ... does that mean he lied? Meh .. what am I thinking, of course not ... nothing to see here ... move along ... these are not the droids you are looking for.


I mentioned this before, but if I were an American, I'd be more concerned with GCHQ and their buddy-buddy relationship with the NSA than with the NSA alone. The current administration are obsessed with "legal justification" (see the Drone Strike "legal Justifications" from 3 months back) ... which is another way of say "illegal, but legal", and one of the easiest circumvents to domestic law is to get someone else to do the snooping you cannot do yourself, and then get them to give it to you.

Under UK law, they are not allowed to dig into peoples private data without a warrant and real justifiable cause. They are however, apparently allowed to store and analyze any data that is freely given to them by other sources (NSA etc). This is how the UK collects data about UK citizens ... the NSA hand it over (without request), and the UK are permitted to retain all data attained this way, and pretty do what they want with it. William Hague in his duplicitous defense of GCHQ when the story first broke made sure to make the distinction between requesting and receiving (legal justification) ... not that the UK necessarily need legal justification ... they just don't answer questions.

How does this work the other way? Can the US simply keep data freely given to them by foreign agencies?

[johnnya24]

One thing that has become clear is how antiquated many of our laws are in the face of the technological revolution. Exactly the same with the financial crisis when these investment banks were simply making up the rules as the went along ... because there was no regulation in place to understand let alone police these new markets and methods. Then wheel in the lawyers to provide "legal justification" in order to avert prosecution. Our Governments are doing exactly the same thing. It's disgusting. Obama did exactly this with the Drone strikes to shut up congress earlier this year. I guess none of us realised that Obama, the former professor of Constitutional Law, was going to use his skills and knowledge for subverting the constitution, not protecting it.

Any supreme court rulings that have occurred during the technology age, have a very different take on how metadata etc is a clear breach of the 4th amendment (i.e. storing any geo-location details was ruled unconstitutional). But since these rulings do not cover everything, our govt's simply focus their justifications on what hasn't yet been ruled on. The deputy AG claimed under oath stated that the Verizon data was not protected under the 4th amendment, therefore they had carte blanche to that data under the 1978 ruling (which was related to particular criminal case, and said nothing about indiscriminate blanket surveillance of everyone, all-the-time).

When they do it, it's pure deception. Why use deception if you have nothing to hide? Maybe the Congressional dictionary has an alternate definition of "transparency".

Greenwald's latest piece

On the Espionage Act charges against Edward Snowden

The US government has charged Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories, so I just want to briefly note a few points about this.

Prior to Barack Obama's inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That's because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now sevensuch prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect "noble" and "patriotic" whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said recently that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency has brought investigative journalism to a "standstill", while James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper that "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom." Read what Mayer and Goodale wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration's threat to the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?