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John Kerry, the US secretary of state, conceded on Thursday that some of the country's surveillance activities had gone too far, saying that certain practices had occurred "on autopilot" without the knowledge of senior officials in the Obama administration.In the most stark comments yet by a senior administration official, Kerry promised that a previously announced review of surveillance practices would be thorough and that some activities would end altogether."The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there," he told a conference in London via video link."In some cases, some of these actions have reached too far and we are going to try to make sure it doesn't happen in the future."

In recent days, the Obama administration has put some distance between it and the National Security Agency (NSA). Kerry's comments are a reflection in particular of a concern about the diplomatic fallout from the revelation that the US monitored the cellphone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.The tactic has irritated senior intelligence officials. On Thursday evening, the director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, blamed US diplomats for requests to place foreign leaders under surveillance.During a pointed exchange with a former US ambassador to Romania, James Carew Rosapepe, Alexander said: "We, the intelligence agencies, don't come up with the requirements. The policy-makers come up with the requirements."He added: "One of those groups would have been, let me think, hold on, oh: ambassadors."

Alexander said that the NSA collected information when it was asked by policy officials to discover the "leadership intentions" of foreign countries. "If you want to know leadership intentions, these are the issues," he said at a discussion hosted by the Baltimore Council on Foreign Relations.Earlier in Washington, the debate continued about whether further legal constraints should be placed on the NSA. The Senate intelligence committee approved a bill that placed largely cosmetic restrictions on the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programme.The bill, sponsored by committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, allows the NSA continue to collect phone metadata of millions of Americans for renewable 90-day periods, but orders it to be more transparent about the practice.

The top lawyer for the US intelligence community and the National Security Agency said on Wednesday that the spy agencies are giving new consideration to the privacy rights of non-Americans in the wake of a diplomatic row over the surveillance of foreign leaders. Speaking at a conference on national security law sponsored by the American Bar Association on Thursday, the general counsel for the office of the director of national intelligence, Robert Litt, said intelligence chiefs were giving "a lot of thought" to the issue. His comments came a day after General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, stated that the spy agency is open to scaling back some of its operations on foreign leaders, following an unfolding diplomatic crisis sparked by revelations that the NSA spied on German chancellor Angela Merkel. 

US law provides greater legal protection to those defined as "US persons", which includes American citizens and foreigners living in the US. "On the issue of US person versus non-US person, that’s an issue we’re giving a lot of thought to now,” said Litt. “It’s not surprising that the law gives more protections to US citizens or persons who are in this country,” Litt added. “That doesn’t mean that we have no protection for non-US persons, and the principal protection we have is the requirement that the collection, retention and dissemination of information has to be for a valid foreign intelligence purpose.” Litt said the intelligence agencies were “giving some thought to whether there are ways that we can both introduce a little more rigor into that requirement and perhaps a little more transparency into how we enforce that requirement.” Litt and NSA general counsel Rajesh De would not answer a question from the Guardian about the legal basis for a different, unfolding NSA controversy: the new allegation that the NSA intercepts data transiting between the foreign data centers of Google and Yahoo, two longtime NSA partners, published in the Washington Post.

But De took issue with a suggestion that the Post story prompted that the NSA interception would at times rely on a seminal executive order that defines basic powers and operations of the intelligence agencies, known as Executive Order 12333, rather than the relatively restrictive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa. “The implication, the insinuation, the suggestion or the outright statement that an agency like NSA would use authority under Executive Order 12333 to evade, skirt or go around Fisa is simply inaccurate,” De said. On Tuesday, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testified to the House intelligence panel that they considered US corporations to be “US persons,” meaning their communications and associated data enjoyed legal privileges associated with citizenship. But neither Litt nor De would explain whether that category protected communications data transiting between the data centers of US companies.

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients. While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,”  is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”. Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.

There are also accounts of simple bumbling by NSA employees, including the apparently common mistake of targeting their own communications for surveillance. In one unintentionally amusing passage, an NSA analyst is said to have “targeted his personal cellphone,” because he “mistakenly thought it would be acceptable to [redacted].” Another common example is the practice of NSA analysts accidentally designating their own communications as being those of a foreign intelligence target.

President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy. In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence. “In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

Though insisting he will not make a final decision until January, this is the furthest the president has gone in backing calls to dismantle the programme to collect telephone data, a practice the NSA claims has legal foundation under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This week, a federal judge said the program “very likely” violates the US constitution. “There are ways we can do this potentially that give people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, sufficient oversight and transparency,” Obama added. “Programmes like 215 could be redesigned in ways that give you the same information when you need it without creating these potentials for abuse. That’s exactly what we should be doing: to evaluate things in a very clear specific way and moving forward on changes. And that’s what I intend to do.”

The president would not comment on a suggestion last weekend by Richard Ledgett, the NSA official investigating the Snowden leaks, that an amnesty might be appropriate in exchange for the return of the data Snowden took from the agency. Obama said he could not comment specifically because Snowden was “under indictment”, something not previously disclosed. While the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden on espionage-related charges in June, there has been no public subsequent indictment, although it is possible one exists under gag order. The Justice Department referred comment on a Snowden indictment to the White House. Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, clarified that Obama was referring to the criminal complaint against Snowden. It remains unclear if there is an indictment under seal. 

The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined (i.e., it can include groups or machines or just about anything). The "backdoor searches" were a special loophole added in 2011 allowing the NSA to make use of "US person names and identifiers as query terms." In the past, it had been limited (as per the NSA's mandate) to only non-US persons.

This morning, James Clapper finally responded to a request from Senator Ron Wyden concerning the number of such backdoor searches using US identifiers that were done by various government agencies. And, surprisingly, it's redaction free. The big reveal is... that it's not just the NSA doing these searches, but the CIA and FBI as well. This is especially concerning with regards to the FBI. This means that the FBI, who does surveillance on Americans, is spying on Americans communications that were collected by the NSA and that they're doing so without anything resembling a warrant. Oh, and let's make this even worse: the FBI isn't even tracking how often it does this. It's just doing it willy nilly:

Got that? Basically, the FBI often asks the NSA for a big chunk of data that the NSA probably shouldn't have in the first place -- including tons of Americans' communications, and the FBI gets to dump it into the same database that it is free to query. And the FBI tracks none of this, other than to say that it believes that there are a "substantial" number of such queries. This would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment, giving the FBI broad access to searching through the communications of Americans with what appears to be almost no oversight. Yikes! Oh, and it's not just the NSA, but the CIA as well. Remember, the CIA is not supposed to be doing any surveillance on US persons (like the NSA), but that's not what's happening at all. At least the CIA tracks some (but not all) of its abuse of backdoor searches:

The “USA Freedom Act”—the proponents of which were heralding as “NSA reform” despite its suffocatingly narrow scope—died in the august U.S. Senate last night when it attracted only 58 of the 60 votes needed to close debate and move on to an up-or-down vote. All Democratic and independent senators except one (Bill Nelson of Florida) voted in favor of the bill, as did three tea-party GOP Senators (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Dean Heller). One GOP Senator, Rand Paul, voted against it on the ground that it did not go nearly far enough in reining in the NSA. On Monday, the White House had issued a statement “strongly supporting” the bill. The “debate” among the Senators that preceded the vote was darkly funny and deeply boring, in equal measure. The black humor was due to the way one GOP senator after the next—led by ranking intelligence committee member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (pictured above)—stood up and literally screeched about 9/11 and ISIS over and over and over, and then sat down as though they had made a point.

So the pro-NSA Republican senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult. The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times before—in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11″ and “terrorism” over and over until the bill vesting new powers is passed or the bill protecting civil liberties is defeated.

Eight years ago, when this tawdry ritual was still a bit surprising to me, I live-blogged the 2006 debate over passage of the Military Commissions Act, which, with bipartisan support, literally abolished habeas corpus rights established by the Magna Carta by sanctioning detention without charges or trial. (My favorite episode there was when GOP Sen. Arlen Specter warned that “what the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some nine hundred years,” and then voted in favor of its enactment.) In my state of naive disbelief, as one senator after the next thundered about the “message we are sending” to “the terrorists,” I wrote: “The quality of the ‘debate’ on the Senate floor is so shockingly (though appropriately) low and devoid of substance that it is hard to watch.” So watching last night’s Senate debate was like watching a repeat of some hideously shallow TV show. The only new aspect was that the aging Al Qaeda villain has been rather ruthlessly replaced by the show’s producers with the younger, sleeker ISIS model. Showing no gratitude at all for the years of value it provided these senators, they ignored the veteran terror group almost completely in favor of its new replacement. And they proceeded to save a domestic surveillance program clearly unpopular among those they pretend to represent.

Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your new smart TV is taking verbal orders. So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text? But precisely when the NSA does it, with which calls, and how often, is a well-guarded secret. It’s not surprising that the NSA isn’t talking about it. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there’s been almost no public discussion of the NSA’s use of automated speech recognition.

Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your new smart TV is taking verbal orders. So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text? But precisely when the NSA does it, with which calls, and how often, is a well-guarded secret. It’s not surprising that the NSA isn’t talking about it. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there’s been almost no public discussion of the NSA’s use of automated speech recognition. One minor exception was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned “machine transcribed speech.”

One minor exception was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned “machine transcribed speech.” Assange, who went on to found WikiLeaks, said at the time: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.” The most comprehensive post-Snowden descriptions of NSA’s surveillance programs are strangely silent when it comes to speech recognition. The report from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies doesn’t mention it, and neither does the October 2011 FISA Court ruling, or the detailed reports from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

The National Security Agency used the holiday lull to “minimise the impact” of a tranche of documents by releasing them on Christmas Eve, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday. The documents, which were released in response to a legal challenge by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily – in some places totally –redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2007. A court ordered the documents released this past summer, and a 22 December deadline for that release was agreed upon, according to Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s national security project, because the NSA said it needed “six or seven months” to complete its review and redaction process. A spokesperson for the NSA said that the 22 December deadline, “which was agreed to by all parties,” was met.

But according to Toomey, the ACLU didn’t receive the documents until “late in the day on the 23rd” – the NSA sent them by FedEx late on the 22nd – and the NSA didn’t publicly release them until Christmas Eve. “I certainly think the NSA would prefer to have the documents released right ahead of the holidays in order to have less public attention on what they contain,” Toomey said. The redactions on the document are extreme, and their omissions tantalising. One entry, from the 4th quarter of 2008, reads: “On [redacted] [redacted] used the US SIGINT System (USSS) to locate [redacted] believed to be kidnapped [redacted] The selectors were tasked before authorization was obtained from NSA. After the NSA Office of General Counsel (OGC) denied the authorization request, [redacted] was found. He had not been kidnapped.” Another reads: “On [redacted] during an experimental collection and processing effort, NSA analysts collected [several lines of text redacted.] The messages were deleted [redacted] when the error was identified.”

Many entries are erased entirely, which means the documents reveal very little about how individuals who misuse the data were disciplined by the NSA, or how quickly errors were resolved. But, according to Toomey, they speak to a total picture of a “large number of different compliance violations. We don’t know how many.” He said the documents deepen the picture of the nature and extent of compliance violations by analysts working for the NSA.

The first (and thus far only) roll-back of post-9/11 surveillance authorities was implemented over the weekend: The National Security Agency shuttered its program for collecting and holding the metadata of Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. While bulk collection under Section 215 has ended, the government can obtain access to this information under the procedures specified in the USA Freedom Act. Indeed, some experts have argued that the Agency likely has access to more metadata because its earlier dragnet didn’t cover cell phones or Internet calling. In addition, the metadata of calls made by an individual in the United States to someone overseas and vice versa can still be collected in bulk — this takes place abroad under Executive Order 12333. No doubt the NSA wishes that this was the end of the surveillance reform story and the Paris attacks initially gave them an opening. John Brennan, the Director of the CIA, implied that the attacks were somehow related to “hand wringing” about spying and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill to delay the shut down of the 215 program. Opponents of encryption were quick to say: “I told you so.”

But the facts that have emerged thus far tell a different story. It appears that much of the planning took place IRL (that’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t have teenagers). The attackers, several of whom were on law enforcement’s radar, communicated openly over the Internet. If France ever has a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry, it could well conclude that the Paris attacks were a failure of the intelligence agencies rather than a failure of intelligence authorities. Despite the passage of the USA Freedom Act, US surveillance authorities have remained largely intact. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act — which is the basis of programs like PRISM and the NSA’s Upstream collection of information from Internet cables — sunsets in the summer of 2017. While it’s difficult to predict the political environment that far out, meaningful reform of Section 702 faces significant obstacles. Unlike the Section 215 program, which was clearly aimed at Americans, Section 702 is supposedly targeted at foreigners and only picks up information about Americans “incidentally.” The NSA has refused to provide an estimate of how many Americans’ information it collects under Section 702, despite repeated requests from lawmakers and most recently a large cohort of advocates. The Section 215 program was held illegal by two federal courts (here and here), but civil attempts to challenge Section 702 have run into standing barriers. Finally, while two review panels concluded that the Section 215 program provided little counterterrorism benefit (here and here), they found that the Section 702 program had been useful.

There is, nonetheless, some pressure to narrow the reach of Section 702. The recent decision by the European Court of Justice in the safe harbor case suggests that data flows between Europe and the US may be restricted unless the PRISM program is modified to protect the information of Europeans (see here, here, and here for discussion of the decision and reform options). Pressure from Internet companies whose business is suffering — estimates run to the tune of $35 to 180 billion — as a result of disclosures about NSA spying may also nudge lawmakers towards reform. One of the courts currently considering criminal cases which rely on evidence derived from Section 702 surveillance may hold the program unconstitutional either on the basis of the Fourth Amendment or Article III for the reasons set out in this Brennan Center report. A federal district court in Colorado recently rejected such a challenge, although as explained in Steve’s post, the decision did not seriously explore the issues. Further litigation in the European courts too could have an impact on the debate.

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach. The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.

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. 

British authorities are capable of tapping into bulk communications data collected by other countries' intelligence services—including the National Security Agency—without a warrant, according to secret government documents released Tuesday. The agreement between the NSA and Britain's spy agency, known as Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, potentially puts the Internet and phone data of Americans in the hands of another country without legal oversight when obtaining a warrant is "not technically feasible."   The data, once obtained, can be kept for up to two years, according to internal policies disclosed by the British government. GCHQ was forced to reveal that it can request and receive vast quantities of raw, unanalyzed data collected from foreign governments it partners with during legal proceedings in a closed court hearing in a case brought by various international human-rights organizations, including Privacy International, Liberty U.K., and Amnesty International. The suit challenges certain aspects of GCHQ's surveillance practices.

It is well known that the NSA and GCHQ closely share intelligence data with one another, as part of a long-standing surveillance partnership. Some details of the agencies' spy pact were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year, including the existence of GCHQ's Tempora program, which taps into fiber-optic cables to scoop up online and telephone traffic across the Web for up to 30 days. But this is the first time the British government has disclosed that it does not require a warrant to access data collected and maintained by its American counterparts. The revelation appears to counter statements made by an oversight committee of the British Parliament in July of last year that "in each case where GCHQ sought information from the U.S., a warrant for interception, signed by a minister, was already in place."   It is unclear whether any restrictions on Britain's access to NSA surveillance data is imposed by the U.S. However, documents provided by Snowden to The Guardian last year reveal that the NSA shares raw intelligence data with Israel without removing information about U.S. citizens.

In a statement, the NSA said it works with a number of partner countries to further its "foreign intelligence mission." But it did not specify whether it was aware of or condoned Britain's apparent warrantless access of its data. "Whenever NSA shares intelligence information, we comply with all applicable rules, including rules designed to safeguard U.S. person information," the agency said. "NSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself." American privacy advocates quickly condemned any warrantless access of U.S. communications data by British authorities.   "The 'arrangement' disclosed today suggests that the two countries are circumventing even the very weak safeguards that have been put in place," Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement to National Journal. "It underscores both the inadequacy of existing oversight structures and the pressing need for [surveillance] reform."

Defenders of the NSA's program always point to two things: it's all legal and it's all subject to oversight. Part of the "oversight" is the FISA "thumbs up" system that has approved every request for two years in a row. The other part of the "oversight" is Congress itself. Unfortunately, members of Congress have been lied to directly about the extent of the collections occurring under Section 215 (and 702), so that's one strike against the "oversight." Now, it appears that members of Congress are being selectively provided with information about the programs.

Senior figures inside British intelligence have been alarmed by GCHQ's secret decision to tap into transatlantic cables in order to engage in the bulk interception of phone calls and internet traffic.According to one source who has been directly involved in GCHQ operations, concerns were expressed when the project was being discussed internally in 2008: "We felt we were starting to overstep the mark with some of it. People from MI5 were complaining that they were going too far from a civil liberties perspective … We all had reservations about it, because we all thought: 'If this was used against us, we wouldn't stand a chance'."The Guardian revealed on Friday that GCHQ has placed more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m "telephone events" a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a programme codenamed Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the "metadata" which records who has contacted who. The programme is shared with GCHQ's American partner, the National Security Agency.

Internet traffic is also liable to be routed internationally even if the message is exchanged between two people within the UK. "At one point, I was told that we were getting 85% of all UK domestic traffic – voice, internet, all of it – via these international cables."

The source claimed that even the conventional warrant system has been distorted – whereas police used to ask for a warrant before intercepting a target's communications, they will now ask GCHQ to intercept the target's communications and then use that information to seek a warrant.There is a particular concern that the programme allows GCHQ to break the boundary which stopped it engaging in the bulk interception of internal UK communications. The Ripa requirement that one end of a communication must be outside the UK was a significant restriction when it was applied to phone calls using satellites, but it is no longer effective in the world of fibre-optic cables. "The point is that this is an island," the source said. "Everything comes and goes – nearly everything – down fibre-optic cables. You make a mobile phone call, it goes to a mast and then down into a fibre-optic cable, under the ground and away. And even if the call is UK to UK, it's very likely – because of the way the system is structured – to go out of the UK and come back in through these fibre-optic channels."

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers is expressing alarm at reported changes at the National Security Agency that would allow the intelligence service’s information to be used for policing efforts in the United States.“If media accounts are true, this radical policy shift by the NSA would be unconstitutional, and dangerous,” Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Blake FarentholdBlake FarentholdLawmakers warn of 'radical' move by NSA to share information Overnight Tech: Netflix scores win over Postal Service Lawmakers go green for St. Patrick's Day MORE (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to the spy agency this week. “The proposed shift in the relationship between our intelligence agencies and the American people should not be done in secret.ADVERTISEMENT“NSA’s mission has never been, and should never be, domestic policing or domestic spying.”The NSA has yet to publicly announce the change, but The New York Times reported last month that the administration was poised to expand the agency's ability to share information that it picks up about people’s communications with other intelligence agencies.The modification would open the door for the NSA to give the FBI and other federal agencies uncensored communications of foreigners and Americans picked up incidentally — but without a warrant — during sweeps.  

Robert Litt, the general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Times that it was finalizing a 21-page draft of procedures to allow the expanded sharing.  Separately, the Guardian reported earlier this month that the FBI had quietly changed its internal privacy rules to allow direct access to the NSA’s massive storehouse of communication data picked up on Internet service providers and websites.The revelations unnerved civil liberties advocates, who encouraged lawmakers to demand answers of the spy agency.“Under a policy like this, information collected by the NSA would be available to a host of federal agencies that may use it to investigate and prosecute domestic crimes,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel and the American Civil Liberties Union. “Making such a change without authorization from Congress or the opportunity for debate would ignore public demands for greater transparency and oversight over intelligence activities.”In their letter this week, Lieu and Farenthold warned that the NSA’s changes would undermine Congress and unconstitutionally violate people’s privacy rights.   

“The executive branch would be violating the separation of powers by unilaterally transferring warrantless data collected under the NSA’s extraordinary authority to domestic agencies, which do not have such authority,” they wrote.“Domestic law enforcement agencies — which need a warrant supported by probable cause to search or seize — cannot do an end run around the Fourth Amendment by searching warrantless information collected by the NSA.”

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "back door" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases.Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.“These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.” The legal authority to perform the searches, revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, was denounced by Wyden as a “backdoor search loophole.”Many of the NSA's most controversial programs collect information under the law affected by the so-called loophole. These include Prism, which allows the agency to collect data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and other tech companies, and the agency's Upstream program – a huge network of internet cable taps.

Clapper did not say how many warrantless searches had been performed by the NSA. It was not the first time the searches had been confirmed: after the Snowden leaks, the office of the director of national intelligence declassified documents that discussed the rule change. But Clapper's letter drew greater attention to the issue.Confirmation that the NSA has searched for Americans’ communications in its phone call and email databases complicates President Barack Obama’s initial defenses of the broad surveillance in June.“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama said. “As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”Obama was referring specifically to the bulk collection of US phone records, but his answer misleadingly suggested that the NSA could not examine Americans’ phone calls and emails.

It is a rare thing to bring truth to bear on the most powerful and secretive arm of the state. Never before has the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the British court tasked with reviewing complaints against the security services – ruled against the government. Not once have the spooks been taken to task for overstepping the lawful boundaries of their conduct. Not a single British spy has been held accountable for mass surveillance, unlawful spying or snooping on private emails and phone calls. Until today. Privacy International has spent the past 25 years fighting back against the ever-expanding British surveillance state. Together with our allies, we’ve resisted the snooper’s charter (multiple times), mandatory ID cards and the provision of passenger name records. Yet in June 2013 we were as shocked as everyone else to learn that GCHQ, in collaboration with the NSA, had acquired the capabilities to completely control, monitor, copy, read and analyse the world’s private communications. It was, until that point, unfathomable that the security services could have so audaciously stretched the boundaries of democratic legitimacy – and could have so severely violated the civil liberties and human rights of not only Britons, but of hundreds of millions of innocent people across the globe.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we learned that GCHQ has access to emails and messages that the NSA siphons off directly and en masse from Google, Skype and Facebook. We discovered that the NSA collects 194m text messages and 5bn location records every day – and GCHQ can read them too. And, of course, we learned that GCHQ is operating a mass surveillance system that, combined with its access to the NSA’s own mass surveillance architecture, means it can read almost anyone’s communications, at any time, without judicial authorisation or any meaningful oversight. In July 2013, the Intelligence and Security Committee assured us that GCHQ access to NSA surveillance material, in particular through the Prism programme, was entirely lawful. Unsurprisingly, we did not find the reassurances of a body that has consistently and blindly backed the services that it is meant to scrutinise comforting.

That’s why we decided to take GCHQ to court. Alongside Liberty, Amnesty International and human rights organisations from around the world, we argued that mass surveillance is not an acceptable activity of a democratic government, and that the cosy dealings between GCHQ and the NSA, conducted under a veil of secrecy that was only lifted by a whistleblower’s bravery, had to be brought within public control and scrutiny. The evidence was overwhelming and the history of human rights law was in our favour, but the tribunal – which at that point had never before found that the surveillance activities of GCHQ broke the law – disagreed. Mass surveillance, it found in its decision of December 2014, was legitimate under British law. GCHQ’s access to NSA mass surveillance was also acceptable, it said, given that the government had disclosed details of its relationship with the US during the course of our case.

The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping. Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies. The resistance emerged as the White House said it would curtail foreign intelligence collection in some cases and two senior U.S. senators called for investigations of the practice. France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Sweden have all publicly complained about the NSA surveillance operations, which reportedly captured private cellphone conversations by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among other foreign leaders.

On Monday, as Spain joined the protest, the fallout also spread to Capitol Hill.

Until now, members of Congress have chiefly focused their attention on Snowden's disclosures about the NSA's collection of U.S. telephone and email records under secret court orders. "With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of U.S. allies — including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany — let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers," she said in a statement. Feinstein said the Intelligence Committee had not been told of "certain surveillance activities" for more than a decade, and she said she would initiate a major review of the NSA operation. She added that the White House had informed her that "collection on our allies will not continue," although other officials said most U.S. surveillance overseas would not be affected. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, said Congress should consider creating a special select committee to examine U.S. eavesdropping on foreign leaders.

Written by Ron Paul

Congress’s decline from the Founders’ vision as “first among equals” in government to an echo chamber of the unitary executive, has been a slow but steady process. In the process we have seen a steady stream of unconstitutional wars and civil liberties abuses at home. Nowhere is this decline more evident than in the stark contrast between the Congressional response to intelligence agencies’ abuses during the post-Watergate era and its response to the far more serious NSA abuses uncovered in recent years.

The parallel to the present NSA scandals cannot be ignored. What is completely different, however, is that Congress is today acting as an advocate for the executive branch’s continuing abuses, and as an opponent to the civil liberties of US citizens. Not only has Congress – with a precious few exceptions – accepted the NSA’s mass spying program on American citizens, it has actually been encouraging the president to continue and expand the program!   Where once there was a Congressional committee to challenge and oppose the president’s abuse of power, today the president himself has been even allowed by a complacent Congress to hand pick his own NSA review commission!   Are we really expected to believe that a commission appointed by the president to look into the activities of the president’s intelligence services will come to anything more than a few superficial changes to give the impression of real reform?