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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:

He says the NSA started spying on President Obama when he was a candidate for Senate:

Many of Tice’s allegations have been confirmed by other government whistleblowers. And see this. Washington’s Blog called Tice to find out more about what he saw when he was at NSA.

Army illegally supplied  intelligence on nonviolent antiwar protesters to FBI and police in multiple states Tacoma, WA – Recently obtained public records confirm an Army-led, multi-agency spy network that targeted “leftists/anarchists” as domestic terrorists. The Army used illegal infiltration to gather information on nonviolent antiwar protesters, disseminate it to the FBI and police departments in multiple states, and in some cases used it to disrupt planned protests by preemptively and falsely arresting activists. Public records obtained last month by Olympia activist Paul French reveal new evidence in the widely-watched Army spying case Panagacos v. Towery. An email from November 2007, in particular, shows that intelligence analyst John J. Towery was paid by the Army to infiltrate political groups and share unlawfully obtained intelligence with a growing network of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and police departments in Los Angeles, Portland, Eugene, Everett, and Spokane. The Towery email not only represents a broader spying program than previously thought, it also confirms the program was led by the Army, a fact contradicted by Towery’s 2009 sworn statements.

“The latest revelations show how the Army not only engaged in illegal spying on political dissidents, it led the charge and tried to expand the counterintelligence network targeting leftists and anarchists,” said Larry Hildes, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the Panagacos lawsuit in 2010. “By targeting activists without probable cause, based on their ideology and the perceived political threat they represent, the Army clearly broke the law and must be held accountable.” Previously obtained public records indicate that absent such accountability, the Army will continue to spy on and target protesters, which it did until at least 2010, long after Towery’s identity was exposed. Public records previously obtained in 2009 already established that over a two-year period beginning in 2006, Towery (under the alias “John Jacob”) spied on the Olympia antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as several other organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. It has also already been established that Towery’s intelligence was passed on to the Washington State Fusion Center, a communications hub of  local, state and federal law enforcement, and then used by local police to target activists for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution

The recently disclosed Towery email was a follow-up to a 2007 Domestic Terrorism Conference he attended in Spokane, during which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on some of the Panagacos plaintiffs were distributed. The Towery email shows the development of a multi-agency spying apparatus in intimate detail. “I thought it would be a good idea to develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro,” wrote the Army analyst to several law enforcement officials. Towery references books, “zines and pamphlets,” and a “comprehensive web list” as source material, but cautions the officials on file sharing “because it might tip off groups that we are studying their techniques, tactics and procedures.” Towery, who worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, not only coordinated his actions with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, many of whom are named defendants in the Panagacos case, he also admitted to eavesdropping on a confidential, privileged attorney-client email listserv of criminal defendants and their legal counsel. Such conduct is considered a constitutional violation, but Towery also took sensitive information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial in 2007 and passed it on to fusion center officials who then transmitted it to prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.

All of the evidence found in this timeline can also be found in the Summary of Evidence we submitted to the court in Jewel v. National Security Agency (NSA). It is intended to recall all the credible accounts and information of the NSA's domestic spying program found in the media, congressional testimony, books, and court actions. The timeline also includes documents leaked by the Guardian in June 2013 that confirmed the domestic spying by the NSA. The documents range from a Top Secret Court Order by the secret court overseeing the spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), to a working draft of an NSA Inspector General report detailing the history of the program. The "NSA Inspectors General Reports" tab consists of one of three documents: a July 10, 2009 report written by Inspectors General of the Department of Justice (DOJ), NSA, Department of Defense (DOD), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; an internal working draft NSA Inspector General report leaked by the Guardian on June 27, 2013; and, an "End to End Review" of the Section 215 program conducted by the NSA for the FISA Court. For a short description of the people involved in the spying you can look at our Profiles page, which includes many of the key characters from the NSA Domestic Spying program.

HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.

Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.

The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant

12 August 1988  Cover, pages 10-12   Somebody's  listening  . . . and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell on how spying entered the 21st century . . .  They've got it taped In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time   American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China. New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be built around the world, and a chain of new satellites launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning international telecommunications traffic.

Both the new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised. They rely on near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications in order to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, revealed that the system had been used to target the telephone calls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. The fact that Thurmond, a southern Republican and usually a staunch supporter of the Reagan administration, is said to have been a target has raised fears that the NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes. These were originally exposed and criticised during the Watergate investigations, and their closure ordered by President Carter. After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later told the Plain Dealer that he did not believe the allegation. But Thurmond, a right-wing Republican, may have been unwilling to rock the boat. Staff members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said that staff were "digging into it" despite the "stratospheric security classification" of all the systems involved. The Congressional officials were first told of the Thurmond interception by a former employee of the Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation, Margaret Newsham, who now lives in Sunnyvale, California. Newsham had originally given separate testimony and filed a lawsuit concerning corruption and mis-spending on other US government "black" projects. She has worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed. Citing a special Executive Order signed by President Reagan. she told me last month that she could not and would not discuss classified information with journalists. But according to Washington sources (and the report in the Plain Dealer, she informed a US Congressman that the Thurmond interception took place at Menwith Hill, and that she p

A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA (UK-USA), assigns parts of the globe to each participating agency. GCHQ at Cheltenham is the co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa and the Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains). The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union and most of the Americas. Australia--where another station in the NSA listening network is located in the outback--co-ordinates the electronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and South East Asia.

Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats.

Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation — exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada’s criminal code, CSE is not allowed to eavesdrop on Canadians’ communications. But the agency can be granted special ministerial exemptions if its efforts are linked to protecting government infrastructure — a loophole that the Snowden documents show is being used to monitor the emails. The latest revelations will trigger concerns about how Canadians’ private correspondence with government employees are being archived by the spy agency and potentially shared with police or allied surveillance agencies overseas, such as the NSA. Members of the public routinely communicate with government employees when, for instance, filing tax returns, writing a letter to a member of parliament, applying for employment insurance benefits or submitting a passport application.

Chris Parsons, an internet security expert with the Toronto-based internet think tank Citizen Lab, told CBC News that “you should be able to communicate with your government without the fear that what you say … could come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.” Parsons said that there are legitimate cybersecurity purposes for the agency to keep tabs on communications with the government, but he added: “When we collect huge volumes, it’s not just used to track bad guys. It goes into data stores for years or months at a time and then it can be used at any point in the future.” In a top-secret CSE document on the security operation, dated from 2010, the agency says it “processes 400,000 emails per day” and admits that it is suffering from “information overload” because it is scooping up “too much data.” The document outlines how CSE built a system to handle a massive 400 terabytes of data from Internet networks each month — including Canadians’ emails — as part of the cyber operation. (A single terabyte of data can hold about a billion pages of text, or about 250,000 average-sized mp3 files.)

A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.” More from Sanchez: "I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg."

A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.”

Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who has served as a conduit for Snowden's leaks, recently said that there will me many more "significant revelations that have not yet been heard." Greenwald told The New York Times that he received “thousands” of classified documents — “dozens” of which are newsworthy — from the the 29-year-old ex-Booz Allen employee who was contracted by the NSA. Sanchez said that what lawmakers learned "is significantly more than what is out in the media today," which is interesting when considering previous reports by journalists and whistleblowers.

Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, has often used his perch on the Senate Intelligence Committee to ask national-security officials if they're misbehaving. He typically focuses on abuses that are actually happening, so his latest exchange with CIA Director John Brennan demands wider attention. Udall asked if the CIA is engaged in domestic spying or searches on American citizens. An idle question? One wouldn't think so. And the CIA director appeared to evade the question. For that reason, I suspect, but certainly cannot prove, that the intelligence agency is, in fact, engaged in this behavior. But don't take my word for it. Look at the transcript and judge for yourself:  UDALL: This committee was created to address a severe breach of trust that developed when it was revealed that the CIA was conducting unlawful domestic searches. The Church Committee went to work, found that to be true.

I want to be able to reassure the American people ... that the CIA and the director understand the limits of their mission and authorities. We're all aware of executive order 12333. That order prohibits the CIA from engaging in domestic spying and searches of US citizens within our borders. Can you assure the committee that the CIA does not conduct such domestic spying and searches?  BRENNAN: I can assure the committee that the CIA follows the letter and the spirit of the law in terms of what the CIA's authorities are, in terms of its responsibilities to collect intelligence that will keep this country safe. Yes, Senator, I do.  Hmm. Reframing the question. Answering indirectly. Concluding with syntax that doesn't fit. It all seems suspicious. When Udall asked, "Can you assure the committee that the CIA does not conduct such domestic spying and searches?" Brennan could've replied, "Yes." But that isn't what he said at all. Why, do you think? There could be an explanation I'm missing, but Udall doesn't typically mislead with questions. This is a subject to watch.

The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”.

Yesterday, the Guardian released a comprehensive poll showing widespread concern about NSA spying. Two-thirds of Americans think the NSA's role should be reviewed. The poll also showed Americans demanding accountability and more information from public officials—two key points of our recently launched stopwatching.us campaign. But there's more. So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government "collecting phone records of ordinary Americans." And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying.

The only poll showing less than a majority on the side of government overreach was Pew Research Center, which asked Americans whether it was acceptable that the NSA obtained "secret court orders to track the calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism." Pew reported that 56% of Americans said it was "acceptable." But the question is poorly worded. It doesn't mention the widespread, dragnet nature of the spying. It also neglects to describe the "information" being given—metadata, which is far more sensitive and can provide far more information than just the ability to "track the calls" of Americans. And it was conducted early on in the scandal, before it was revealed that the NSA doesn't even have to obtain court orders to search already collected information. Despite the aggregate numbers, many of the polls took place at the same time Americans were finding out new facts about the program. More questions must be asked. And if history is any indication, the American people will be finding out much more. Indeed, just today the Guardian reported that its working on a whole new series with even more NSA revelations about spying. One thing is definitely clear: the American public is demanding answers and needs more information. That's why Congress must create a special investigatory committee to reveal the full extent of the programs. Democracy demands it. Go here to take action. 

HE INTERCEPT HAS OBTAINED a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States. The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing “dirt boxes” and dozens of more obscure devices that can be mounted on vehicles, drones, and piloted aircraft. Some are designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly carried by an individual. They have names like Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus. Within the catalogue, the NSA is listed as the vendor of one device, while another was developed for use by the CIA, and another was developed for a special forces requirement. Nearly a third of the entries focus on equipment that seems to have never been described in public before.

The Intercept obtained the catalogue from a source within the intelligence community concerned about the militarization of domestic law enforcement. (The original is here.) A few of the devices can house a “target list” of as many as 10,000 unique phone identifiers. Most can be used to geolocate people, but the documents indicate that some have more advanced capabilities, like eavesdropping on calls and spying on SMS messages. Two systems, apparently designed for use on captured phones, are touted as having the ability to extract media files, address books, and notes, and one can retrieve deleted text messages. Above all, the catalogue represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes. The mass shooting earlier this month in San Bernardino, California, which President Barack Obama has called “an act of terrorism,” prompted calls for state and local police forces to beef up their counterterrorism capabilities, a process that has historically involved adapting military technologies to civilian use. Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and others are increasingly alarmed about how cellphone surveillance devices are used domestically and have called for a more open and informed debate about the trade-off between security and privacy — despite a virtual blackout by the federal government on any information about the specific capabilities of the gear.

ANY OF THE DEVICES in the catalogue, including the Stingrays and dirt boxes, are cell-site simulators, which operate by mimicking the towers of major telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When someone’s phone connects to the spoofed network, it transmits a unique identification code and, through the characteristics of its radio signals when they reach the receiver, information about the phone’s location. There are also indications that cell-site simulators may be able to monitor calls and text messages. In the catalogue, each device is listed with guidelines about how its use must be approved; the answer is usually via the “Ground Force Commander” or under one of two titles in the U.S. code governing military and intelligence operations, including covert action.

If you’re reading this, then I’m willing to bet that you’ve been called many different names throughout your life. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say they were names like kook, paranoid, conspiracy theorist, alarmist, insane, or gullible. And after this week, you can go by a new name: Vindicated. I’m of course talking about recent revelations from the NSA. Long before Edward Snowden came along, it was no secret that the NSA was spying on everyone without good cause. Anyone who believed that fact was called a conspiracy theorist, but their fears were eventually validated. These same people also understood that the NSA’s surveillance powers would never be used exclusively against terrorists and hostile governments. The power they have is just too tempting for any government. If various government agencies weren’t using the NSA’s surveillance apparatus to solve domestic crimes, it was only a matter of time before it was used for just that.

And again, they called us conspiracy theorists for believing that. And again, we were right all long. A while back, we noted a report showing that the “sneak-and-peek” provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy. The ACLU of Massachusetts blog Privacy SOS explains why this is important: What does this rule change mean for you? In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages. FBI agents don’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They can simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations. And if they find something that suggests, say, involvement in illegal drug activity, they can send that information to local or state police. That means information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called “national security” will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes.

Anybody who knows anything about how governments work, should not surprised. You can’t give them any kind of power, and expect them to use it responsibly. You can’t give them any stipulations. Eventually they’ll find a legal loophole to work around any limitations that have been placed on them. In other news, the Pentagon admitted this week that they’ve been deploying military drones over the United States for domestic surveillance purposes. Much like the NSA’s surveillance apparatus, we were assured that drones were for terrorists in faraway lands. Nothing so Orwellian would ever be used against ordinary American citizens at home. Yet here we are, with more to come.

OTTAWA — Canada’s foremost jurist on national security law has slammed CSIS for deliberately keeping the Federal Court of Canada “in the dark” about outsourcing its spying on Canadians abroad to foreign agencies, according to a redacted version of a classified court decision made public Friday.In a thundering rebuke, Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) purposely misled him when he granted it numerous warrants beginning in 2009 to intercept the electronic communications of unidentified Canadians abroad suspected as domestic security threats.“This was a breach of the duty of candour owed by the service and their legal advisers to the court,” Mosley said in his Further Reasons for Order.CSIS also mistakenly assigned powers to the warrants that the court never authorized and which do not exist in law, he said.“It is clear that the exercise of the court’s warrant issuing authority has been used as protective cover for activities that it has not authorized,” Mosley wrote.Furthermore, tasking foreign security intelligence services to spy on Canadians overseas “carries the risk of the detention of or other harm to a Canadian person based on that information.“Given the unfortunate history of information sharing with foreign agencies over the past decade and the reviews conducted by several royal commissions, there can be no question that the Canadian agencies are aware of those hazards. It appears to me that they are using the warrants as authorization to assume those risks.”

Legal observers say this case and Mosley’s scolding will harm CSIS’s credibility and raise questions about whether the service has broken Criminal Code provisions dealing with the invasion of privacy.“When a judge says the government breached its duty of candour that is a very big ‘ouch’ moment,” Craig Forcese, a national security law scholar at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a recent blog posting.At the time the first warrants were issued, CSIS told the court “on clearly stated grounds” that the electronic intercepts would be carried out from within Canada by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the country’s foreign signals intelligence spy service.CSIS is largely restricted to domestic spying operations. If an investigation involves the use of intrusive techniques, such as electronic intercepts, Section 21 of the CSIS Act requires it to obtain a warrant approved by a Federal Court judge to guard the Charter right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.CSEC, meanwhile, is not allowed to spy on Canadians anywhere unless it is to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies such as CSIS.And the federal court only has jurisdiction to authorize warrants under the CSIS Act as long as the communications in question are intercepted within Canada.

Yet once the so-called 30-08 warrants were approved by the court, CSEC, on behalf of CSIS, turned around and handed the jobs to one or more of its partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-gathering alliance between Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.Mosley found out about the situation late this summer and summoned CSIS, CSEC and government officials and lawyers to court to explain themselves. The public version of his reasons for order was released Friday.

We the people want a little free stuff.

The National Security Agency has been secretly granted legal authority to operate a massive domestic eavesdropping system that vacuums up Americans' phone calls and Internet communications, newly leaked documents show. A pair of classified government documents (No. 1 and No. 2) signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and posted by the Guardian on Thursday show that NSA analysts are able to listen to Americans' intercepted phone calls without asking a judge for a warrant first. That appears to be at odds with what President Obama said earlier this week in defense of the NSA's surveillance efforts. "I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails," Obama said. The new documents indicate, however, that NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts are granted broad access to data vacuumed up by the world's most powerful intelligence agency -- but are supposed to follow certain "targeting" and "minimization" procedures to limit the number of Americans who become individual targets of warrantless surveillance.

Analysts are expected to exercise "reasonable judgment" in determining which data to use, according to the documents, and "inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years." The documents also refer to "content repositories" that contain records of devices' "previous Internet activity," and say the NSA keeps records of Americans' "electronic communications accounts/addresses/identifiers" in an apparent effort to avoid targeting them in future eavesdropping efforts. The Holder procedures were blessed in advance by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Guardian reported, meaning that the judges would have issued a general order that authorizes the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance as long as it's primarily aimed at foreign targets, subject to some limited judicial oversight. Today's disclosure jibes with what Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked top-secret documents, alleged in an online chat earlier this week. Snowden said, referring to the contents of e-mail and phone calls, that "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."

On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a carefully-worded statement in response to a CNET article and other reports questioning when intelligence analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. Clapper said: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper's statement was viewed as a denial, but it wasn't. Today's disclosures reveal why: Because the Justice Department granted intelligence analysts "proper legal authorization" in advance through the Holder regulations. "The DNI has a history of playing games with wording, using terms with carefully obscured meanings to leave an impression different from the truth," Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated domestic surveillance cases, told CNET earlier this week.

The NSA’s spying on everyone’s metadata can tell them just about everything about us … and it violates our Constitutional right to freedom of association. But people are getting distracted from the big picture by focusing on metadata. As security expert Bruce Schneier wrote yesterday: What frustrates me about all of this — [the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board] report, the president’s speech, and so many other things — is that they focus on the bulk collection of cell phone call records. There’s so much more bulk collection going on — phone calls, e-mails, address books, buddy lists, text messages, cell phone location data, financial documents, calendars, [smartphone apps] etc. — and we really need legislation and court opinions on it all. But because cell phone call records were the first disclosure, they’re what gets the attention. Indeed, Schneier confirmed last October what we’ve been saying for years … don’t get too distracted by the details, because the government is spying on everything:

Honestly, I think the details matter less and less. We have to assume that the NSA has EVERYONE who uses electronic communications under CONSTANT surveillance. New details about hows and whys will continue to emerge …but the big picture will remain the same. He’s right. As just one example, there is substantial evidence from top NSA and FBI whistleblowers that the government is recording the content of our calls and emails … word-for-word. So what should we make of the government’s denials that it records content? Given that the government has been caught lying about spying again and again, I’m not sure how much weight we should give to such denials. NSA whistleblower Russ Tice notes: They’re collecting content … word-for-word. *** You can’t trust these people. They lie, and they lie a lot.