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Paul Merrell

Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy' | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...-new-spying-powers-becomes-law

surveillance state GCHQ UK snoopers'-charter legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It's 2016 going on 1984. The UK has just passed a massive expansion in surveillance powers, which critics have called "terrifying" and "dangerous".
  • The new law, dubbed the "snoopers' charter", was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government. Four years and a general election later -- May is now prime minister -- the bill was finalized and passed on Wednesday by both parliamentary houses. But civil liberties groups have long criticized the bill, with some arguing that the law will let the UK government "document everything we do online". It's no wonder, because it basically does. The law will force internet providers to record every internet customer's top-level web history in real-time for up to a year, which can be accessed by numerous government departments; force companies to decrypt data on demand -- though the government has never been that clear on exactly how it forces foreign firms to do that that; and even disclose any new security features in products before they launch.
  • Not only that, the law also gives the intelligence agencies the power to hack into computers and devices of citizens (known as equipment interference), although some protected professions -- such as journalists and medical staff -- are layered with marginally better protections. In other words, it's the "most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy," according to Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group. The bill was opposed by representatives of the United Nations, all major UK and many leading global privacy and rights groups, and a host of Silicon Valley tech companies alike. Even the parliamentary committee tasked with scrutinizing the bill called some of its provisions "vague".
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  • And that doesn't even account for the three-quarters of people who think privacy, which this law almost entirely erodes, is a human right. There are some safeguards, however, such as a "double lock" system so that the secretary of state and an independent judicial commissioner must agree on a decision to carry out search warrants (though one member of the House of Lords disputed that claim). A new investigatory powers commissioner will also oversee the use of the powers. Despite the uproar, the government's opposition failed to scrutinize any significant amendments and abstained from the final vote. Killock said recently that the opposition Labour party spent its time "simply failing to hold the government to account". But the government has downplayed much of the controversy surrounding the bill. The government has consistently argued that the bill isn't drastically new, but instead reworks the old and outdated Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). This was brought into law in 2000, to "legitimize" new powers that were conducted or ruled on in secret, like collecting data in bulk and hacking into networks, which was revealed during the Edward Snowden affair. Much of those activities were only possible thanks to litigation by one advocacy group, Privacy International, which helped push these secret practices into the public domain while forcing the government to scramble to explain why these practices were legal. The law will be ratified by royal assent in the coming weeks.
Paul Merrell

Trump, Kissinger and Ma playing on a crowded chessboard | Asia Times - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...-ma-playing-crowded-chessboard

geopolitics U.S.-foreign-policy China Russia Jack-Ma Kissinger Trump

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • And that brings us once again to Henry Kissinger, the putative dalang — puppet master — of Trump’s foreign policy. As leaked late last year in Germany’s Bild Zeitung newspaper, Kissinger has drafted a plan to officially recognize Crimea as part of Russia and lift the Obama administration’s economic sanctions.
  • The plan fits into Kissinger’s overall strategy — call it a traditional British Balance of Power, or Divide and Rule, approach — of breaking up the Eurasian front (Russia-China-Iran) that constitutes the real “threat” to what Mattis defines as the “established world order.” The strategy consists in seducing the alleged weaker top “threat” (Russia) away from the stronger (China), while keeping on antagonizing/harassing the third and weakest pole, Iran. Kissinger is certainly more sophisticated than predictable US Think Tankland in his attempt to dismember the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, one of key nodes of the Russia-China strategic partnership. The SCO has been on the go for a decade and a half now. Iran, an observer, will soon become a full member, as will India and Pakistan; and Turkey — after the failed coup against Erdogan — is being courted by Moscow. German analyst Peter Spengler adds a juicy teaser — if Kissinger’s “Metternichian approach would include some degree of ‘harmonization’ with Russia, how will a Trump presidency then manage to contain the re-engineered ally Germany?” After all, a key priority for sanctions-averse German industrialists is to vastly expand business with Russia.
  • Kissinger’s strategy essentially tweaks the early 1970s Trilateral Commission, largely advanced by his rival dalang Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, according to which geopolitics is to be managed by North America, Western Europe and Japan.
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  • The US deep state plutocracy never sleeps. Admitting both Russia and China, linked by a strategic partnership, as equal stakeholders in the “established world order” is anathema; that would imply the end of US hegemony. And that’s where the top Western would-be dalangs diverge, as they look for the most efficient Divide and Rule opening. Kissinger privileges Russia; Dr Zbig privileges China, painting it as a threat to Russia. Meanwhile, Russian Eurasianists — in frontal opposition to the Atlanticists — visualize the US, China and Russia on an equal geopolitical footing. It will be fascinating to watch how the New Great Game develops in the Central Asian “stans”. That’s a privileged theater in which to see the Russia-China strategic partnership, or division of labor, in action: China goes no holds barred on investment — via One Belt, One Road, aka the New Silk Roads — while Russia remains paramount in politics and security.
  • The bottom line: Moscow feels no existential “threat” from Beijing because for China, Central Asia and the Russian Far East register essentially as economic/investment opportunities along the New Silk Roads.
  • Once again, Kissinger’s strategy will run into a solidified Russia-China strategic partnership — already manifested in Pipelineistan (multibillion-dollar oil and gas projects); security deals; the SCO; cooperation inside BRICS; exchange of cutting-edge military technology; and the progressive interlocking of the New Silk Roads and the Eurasian Economic Union. When the New Silk Roads hit the next level, by the start of the next decade, the Eurasian heartland, as well as the rimland, will be deeply immersed in a connectivity frenzy. Welcome to Mackinder and Spykman revisited — and there’s no “offer” Washington can come up with to make it go away.
  • Into this crucial juncture steps Jack Ma. The Trump-Ma meeting at Trump Tower was niskala disguised as sekala. The House That Ma Built — Alibaba — is no less than the New Great Wall, resisting the assault of behemoth Amazon.com in the ultimate commercial arena of the 21st century: e-commerce. Ma also happens to be very close to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Like an upgraded we-mean-business Deng Xiaoping, Ma proposed, on the record, the creation of 1 million US jobs. That’s an offer Trump cannot possibly refuse. And this after shadow US Secretary of State Jared Kushner had a Chateau Lafite Rothschild-inundated lunch with another Chinese tycoon, Anbang Insurance Group’s Wu Xiahoui, who married Deng’s niece and whose company owns the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan.
  • Ma’s business firepower should not be underestimated. Alibaba is involved in a massive project to modernize even rural China. He’s the face of Chinese business not only internally but globally. Xi Jinping knows this all too well — who better than Ma as China’s top business ambassador? This is not, as Japanese interests spin it, about the “death” of Made in China; it is about globalized China exporting business and jobs to the West. All of the above points to a very crowded chessboard. Trump will do business and clinch deals with China, while his deep state-tinged cabinet barks the usually explosive national security rhetoric, dalang Kissinger plots a Russia-China split, and Moscow-Beijing secretly concoct concerted moves. Place your bets on who will be the major partner in the Trump, Kissinger and Ma law firm.
Gary Edwards

Arnold Ahlert: Liberty at Risk - The Patriot Post - 1 views

patriotpost.us/42083

liberty

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 16
     
    "The American Left's desire to crush Liberty and dissent in order to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" has reached metastatic levels. In the last three weeks alone, the following stories have surfaced. All of which indicate we are well on our way toward relinquishing our birthright. Even worse, millions of Americans are apparently more than willing to do so. First, this week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the United States v. Texas case that will determine whether a president can unilaterally rewrite immigration law. If SCOTUS rules in Barack Obama's favor, the separation of powers outlined in the first three articles of the Constitution will be rendered moot and, as political analyst Charles Krauthammer wryly observed, "you can send Congress home." And the Left is not content to stop there. A coalition of 118 cities and counties have filed a legal brief asserting they will lose up to $800 million in economic benefits if large numbers of illegal aliens remain subject to deportation. Second, the IRS has admitted it abides the use of fraudulent Social Security numbers used by illegal aliens to process tax payments - and refunds. Third, in New York and California, Democratic attorneys general Eric Schneiderman and Kamala Harris are pursuing fraud investigations against Exxon, based on the premise they can "prosecute persons and institutions with nonconforming views on global warming," writes National Review's Kevin Williams. "Prosecuting political institutions and businesses for political activism is brown-shirt business." Fourth, the Obama administration, already under fire for its determination to flood America with Syrian "refugees," announced it will reduce its vetting process to three months, instead of 18-24 months. They claim the reduced time is necessary to handle a sped-up "surge operation" whose population is 99% Sunni Muslim. Even more insulting, Gina Kassem, the regional refugee coordinator at t
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Apr 16
     
    I'll leave well enough alone on Mr. Ahert's positions regarding the U.S. v. Texas case and IRS reliance on fraudulent Social Security numbers; I have not studied those issues. But Mr. Ahert has not done his homework on the Exxon investigations and on the law governing the Syrian refugee situation. Re Exxon, the criminal investigations are to determine whether Exxon committed fraud against *investors* by concealing its knowledge of climate change the company was contributing to --- and knew of decades ago. We don't yet know the outcome of those investigations, but this is a far cry from prosecuting "persons and institutions with nonconforming views on global warming." If pursued, it will be a prosecution of a company -- and conceivably its managers -- who damned well knew through in-house scientific studies it sponsored that global warming was man-made and that their own company was a major causative agent. On the Syrian refugee situation, the right of war refugees to refuge in the U.S. and all other nations is, under the U.S. Constitution's Treaty Clause, "the law of this land." There is nothing in that body of international law created by treaty that permits the U.S. or any other nation to delay providing refuge for purposes of vetting refugees for possible terrorists among them. Vetting can, however, proceed lawfully after refugees are admitted while being held in refugee camps. One need only ask how one would feel were the tables turned and it was yourself fleeing from U.S. violence? Would you want to be forced to linger in the war zone while your anti-terrorism bona fides were established over a period of months? Refuge must be granted when it is needed, not months or years later, regardless of how much "terrorist" hysteria our mainstream media and the military-industrial complex drums up to fan the flames of war and industry profits. And this is all the more a moral case because it is the U.S. and its allies' illegal proxy war in Syria that is creating
Paul Merrell

Turkish WikiLeaks Cache Links AKP and Libya's Al-Qaeda Chief Belhaj - nsnbc internation... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...he-links-akp-and-libyas-belhaj

war & peace wikileaks Turkey AKP leaked-docs Libya

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • WikiLeaks released about 300,000 e-mails styled to Turkey’s ruling AKP. While no link to the “failed” military coup on July 15 was discovered, the cache contains mails suggesting that Libyan Al-Qaeda leader AbdelHakim Belhaj reached out to acquire help with laundering and investing funds stolen from the ousted Libyan government in 2011. The former “victim of US rendition” later hobnobbed with celebrities like U.S. Senator John McCain.
  • WikiLeaks released a cache with 294,548 emails on Tuesday. All of the emails which were released were attributed to Turkey’s AKP at akparti.org.tr, which is the primary domain of Turkey’s ruling party. The mails cover a period from 2010 up until July 6, 2016. That is, a few days before the “failed” military coup on July 15. An initial search has not resulted in the discovery of mails that would suggest foreknowledge about the coup and it is not sure that it will. After all, who would post mails about such a highly sensitive issue over a relatively unsecured party server, or over the internet in general. Although, after the FBI concluded that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received mails on issues that were classified Top Secret / Compartmentalized via a personal e-mail server, one would not be surprised if there were mails about the upcoming coup in the cache. Time will show. A brief search for “buzz words” that reflect Turkey’s role in the so-called Arab Spring and the wars in and against Libya and Syria, however, gave an immediate “bonus” result.
  • One of the mails styled to a AKP member via the party server appears to have been sent from AbdelHakim Belhaj. Belhaj was up until the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 the chief of the Libyan Al-Qaeda franchise the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). After the overthrow of the Libyan government, Belhaj (Belhadj) would become the chief of the Tripoli Military Council and hobnob with celebrities like U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US. Senator John McCain. Not bad, for someone who previously has been through the treadmill of the United States’ illegal extraordinary rendition program. Belhadj is today one of the most controversial figures in Libyan politics and, according to many, one of the main stumbling blocks on a road to peace and reconciliation. It is noteworthy that Abdelhakim Belhaj (Belhadj) and his second in command in the LIFG, Mahdi Al-Harati, have been linked to the British intelligence service MI6. Al-Harati would after 2011 move on to Syria. In 2012 al-Harati led two major campaigns of the so-called Libyan Brigade against the Syrian Arab Army from Jordan. Both campaigns failed at ousting the Syrian government, but increased the chaos in the country.
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  • The defeat of the about 20,000 strong Libyan Brigade and other, predominantly Muslim Brotherhood linked “rebels” in 2012 would lead to the influx of Salafi / Wahhabi fighters in 2013, as outlined in a detailed report entitled “Tentative Jihad” published by the International Crisis Group. Ironically, McCain would later appear on a photo, taken in a safe house in Idlib, Syria, meeting with Ilamic State leader al-Baghdai (a.k.a. al-Bhadri or Caliph Ibrahim). Links between the AKP and the LIFG have been alleged since 2011. The email discovered in the WikiLeaks cache, however, may be the first that substantiates a direct link between a member of the AKP and Belhaj. Because Turkey has blocked access to WikiLeaks, and because the website allegedly has been subject to a sustained cyber attack, we will re-publish the email in its entirety here:
Paul Merrell

Senate narrowly rejects new FBI surveillance | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...y-rejects-new-fbi-surveillance

surveillance state FBI web-search-metadata NSLs

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • The Senate narrowly rejected expanding the FBI's surveillance powers Wednesday in the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.  Senators voted 58-38 on a procedural hurdle, with 60 votes needed to move forward. Majority Leader Mitch McConnellMitch McConnellOvernight Finance: Wall Street awaits Brexit result | Clinton touts biz support | New threat to Puerto Rico bill? | Dodd, Frank hit back The Trail 2016: Berning embers McConnell quashes Senate effort on guns MORE, who initially voted "yes," switched his vote, which allows him to potentially bring the measure back up. 
  • The Senate GOP proposal—being offered as an amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill—would allow the FBI to use "national security letters" to obtain people's internet browsing history and other information without a warrant during a terrorism or federal intelligence probe.  It would also permanently extend a Patriot Act provision — currently set to expire in 2019 — meant to monitor "lone wolf" extremists.  Senate Republicans said they would likely be able to get enough votes if McConnell schedules a redo.
  • Asked if he anticipates supporters will be able to get 60 votes, Sen. John CornynJohn CornynSenate to vote on two gun bills Senate Dems rip GOP on immigration ruling Post Orlando, hawks make a power play MORE (R-Texas) separately told reporters "that's certainly my expectation." McConnell urged support for the proposal earlier Wednesday, saying it would give the FBI to "connect the dots" in terrorist investigations.  "We can focus on defeating [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] or we can focus on partisan politics. Some of our colleagues many think this is all some game," he said. "I believe this is a serious moment that calls for serious solutions."  But Democrats—and some Republicans—raised concerns that the changes didn't go far enough to ensure Americans' privacy.  Sen. Ron WydenRon WydenPost Orlando, hawks make a power play Democrats seize spotlight with sit-in on guns Democrats stage sit-in on House floor to push for gun vote MORE (D-Ore.) blasted his colleagues for "hypocrisy" after a gunman killed 49 people and injured dozens more during the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla. "Due process ought to apply as it relates to guns, but due process wouldn't apply as it relates to the internet activity of millions of Americans," he said ahead of Wednesday's vote. "Supporters of this amendment...have suggested that Americans need to choose between protecting our security and protecting our constitutional right to privacy." 
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  • The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also came out in opposition the Senate GOP proposal on Tuesday, warning it would urge lawmakers to vote against it. 
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 16
     
    Too close for comfort and coming around the bernd again. 
Paul Merrell

Barnhardt.biz - Commodity Brokerage - 0 views

barnhardt.biz

banksters financial-collapse bankruptcy

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • CLICK HERE for the Sentinel Federal Appeals Court Ruling of August 9, 2012 This commentary came from the fellow who sent this to me. I think it is spot-on. Miss Barnhardt, I thought you might be interested in reading the actual opinion of the In Re Sentinel Group case, which I have attached in PDF. It was very hard to find for some reason, and I had to access my Westlaw account in order to get it. I think it would be well worth your time to read it, as I am afraid that it appears to confirm what you have been saying. The entire case reads like an after-the-fact rationalization of a predetermined conclusion. Years ago when I was with a different firm, I worked on numerous major institutional fraud and auditing cases, and I cannot recall a ruling even remotely similar - let alone from a federal court of appeals.
  • Please pay particular attention to the section on equitable subordination, on pages 6 through 8. Unbelievably, the court acknowledged in that section that even though some of the bankers lied under oath during the trial, that fact did not prove "sufficiently egregious" actions on the part of the bank. I will quote the opinion: "Instead of finding that their testimony [i.e. their lies] justified a finding of egregious bank behavior, the district court essentially found that the bank officials were such artless liars that they couldn't have been concealing deliberate wrongdoing." See page 7, column 2.
  • So in other words, a U.S. Court of Appeals has found that if a banker lies under oath during a trial, that fact proves that the bank was innocent of any misconduct with respect to the subject matter of those lies. Did we get transported to bizarro world without knowing it?
Paul Merrell

Is Thailand Heading for a Coup This Week? | VICE United Kingdom - 0 views

www.vice.com/...d-heading-for-a-coup-this-week

banksters Thailand protests coup

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Mass protests, made up largely of middle-class urbanites, have been taking place in Bangkok since November of last year. The demonstrations are in reaction to Shinawatra's party, the Pheu Thai Party, trying to rush an amnesty bill through parliament, which, if passed, would see her brother – controversial former PM, Thaksin Shinawatra – being able to return from exile. Because the protesters widely view him as corrupt – owing predominately to the fact he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for corruption while serving as prime minister – they don't want that to happen, and their plan is to oust the ruling party and replace them with an unelected people's council. Their newest plan to ramp up the pressure is to move their main rally site from Bangkok’s historic quarter to the heart of the capital, sparking concerns ranging from traffic gridlock to a fear of bloodshed and military intervention.
  • But as the protesters prepare to move, the Royal Thai Army – generally considered to be sympathetic to the anti-government movement – has been busy ferrying troops and tanks into the city. The generals say it is in preparation for the annual Armed Forces Day, which is to be held later this month (as it is every year). However, many are sceptical, and Bangkok’s rumour mill has worked itself into a frenzy over what the influx of troops really means. In addition – just in case tanks and imminent city shutdowns weren't enough – the protest movement’s own astrologer has apparently nominated the 14th of next week as an auspicious day for a military takeover, which has many convinced that a coup is inevitable. That said, much of the talk about coups and the potential for violence has come from the current government and its own supporters, happy to drum up a bit of fear into the rest of the country over what they say the protesters are planning. But a bit of fear is perhaps not entirely misplaced. There have been almost nightly attacks on the current protest camp, and fears that this will continue when they move to the city centre have left many demonstrators nervous. On Saturday, at least seven protest guards were injured when unknown gunmen on motorcycles reportedly opened fired with M16 assault rifles. The day before, battles had taken place in a town just north of Bangkok when anti-government and pro-government supports clashed, leaving a number of people injured.
  • In fact, in almost every situation where supporters from both sides have confronted each other, violence – often involving guns – has broken out almost immediately. These outbreaks of violence stoke fears that the move further into Bangkok is a provocation designed to escalate violence, thus opening the door to military intervention – an accusation that the protesters firmly deny. In an interview earlier this week, Army Chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha said that, "The military does not shut nor open the door to a coup. Anything can happen, depending on the situation." Other army spokespersons have since tried to allay fears of an imminent coup, but considering Thailand’s history (18 coups in the last 80 years), not many of those fears have been quelled. The reality is that a coup is entirely possible, if not likely. It could come in the aftermath of potential chaos next week, or following an indecisive outcome in the upcoming elections, which are scheduled to be held on the 2nd of February. The elections are being boycotted by the opposition, and (if they take place at all) are unlikely to produce the required number of parliamentarians to fill the house. In this scenario, the army may well feel justified in taking over the running of the country.
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  • However, we might not need to wait that long. Last week, the National Anti Corruption Commission found evidence for 308 lawmakers to be charged for supporting a bill that looked to amend certain workings of the government. According to at least one interpretation of the constitution, all those members are now – or will be – suspended, leaving a vacuum that, again, the army may feel obligated to fill. And the rumours don’t stop at coups. There is talk of civil war, of a divided country: the north, run from Chiang Mai (where Yingluck lives when she's not in Bangkok), versus those in the south, in Bangkok – the power base of the opposition and current protest movement. It could happen. It could all spiral out of control and there could be widespread bloodshed. But it's unlikely. This isn’t a grassroots revolution where the masses are rising up against the ruling, power-hungry elite. These are heavily invested, largely middle-class members of society who would have nothing to gain from a crumbling nation.
  • Instead, according to long-term observers of Thailand's political landscape, this whole affair is about more than removing the present government. They suggest it's wrapped up in what will happen when the current – and deeply revered – king dies, but due to Thailand’s strict lèse-majesté law, not much more can be said on the matter. Internationally, Thailand is too deeply integrated into the global community for it to fall into bloody conflict unnoticed. It’s not a pariah state, nor a country shielding itself from globalisation or the winds of international opinion. Earlier today, for the first time, it was reported that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been holding talks between Yingluck and the leader of the opposition party in an effort to help them bridge their differences. Ultimately, though, nobody knows what is going to happen. The city has been busily preparing itself for the shutdown, with schools closing, public transport routes bolstered and measures underway to help maintain some semblance of normalcy. The US Embassy in Thailand recently updated their own travel advice, suggesting that their citizens living in Bangkok stock up on food and supplies for the next two weeks. However, most people are just waiting to see what happens, with few precautions being taken by local businesses and no reports of a rush on shops.
  • So the shutdown could be a major inconvenience and nothing more, or it could be the start of a whole new violent chapter for Thailand. At the very least, next week should provide a little more clarity on where Thailand is headed amid its current political turmoil.
Paul Merrell

Why AT&T's Surveillance Report Omits 80 Million NSA Targets | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ma-bell-non-transparency

surveillance state NSA transparency Obama AT&T

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • AT&T this week released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the U.S. government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans. AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information — spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants — in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts. There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks. An accurate transparency report should include a line indicating that AT&T has turned over information on each and every one of its more than 80 million-plus customers. It doesn’t.
  • That’s particularly ironic, given that it was Snowden’s revelations about this so-called “Section 215″ metadata spying that paved the way for the transparency report. In Snowden’s wake, technology companies pushed President Barack Obama to craft new rules allowing them to be more transparent about how much customer data they’re forced to provide the NSA and other agencies. In a Jan. 17 globally televised speech, Obama finally agreed. We will also enable communications providers to make public more information than ever before about the orders they have received to provide data to the government. But when the new transparency guidelines came out on Jan. 27, the language left it unclear whether discussing bulk collection was allowed, says Alex Abdo, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney. AT&T on Monday became the first phone company to release a transparency report under the new rules, and the results seem to confirm that the metadata collection is still meant to stay secret. “This transparency report confirmed our fear that the DOJ’s apparent concession was carefully crafted to prevent real transparency,” Abdo says. “If they want real transparency, they would allow the disclosure of the bulk telephone metadata program.”
  • The guidelines allow for the disclosure, in chunks of 1,000, of “the number of customer selectors [phone numbers] targeted under FISA non-content orders.” Since the bulk metadata collection doesn’t “target” any “selectors” it is, by definition, not subject to disclosure. This loophole is no accident of phrasing. In other sections of the guidelines covering National Security Letters — a type of subpoena that doesn’t require a judge’s signature — Obama allows disclosure of the “number of customer accounts affected.” If the guidelines used that same language for the FISA disclosures, AT&T’s transparency report would presumably disclose that more than 80 million customers — that would be all of AT&T’s customers — had been spied upon. The end result, observes Kevin Bankston, the policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, is that Obama’s so-called reform has spawned a misleading report that provides false comfort to AT&T customers — and all Americans.
Paul Merrell

Propaganda Rules The News --Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...-rules-news-paul-craig-roberts

war & peace Ukraine propaganda MSM

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Greenwald is entirely admirable. He has intelligence, integrity, and courage. He is one of the brave to whom my just published book, How America Was Lost, is dedicated. As for RT’s Abby Martin, I admire her and have been a guest on her program a number of times. My criticism of Greenwald and Martin has nothing to do with their integrity or their character. I doubt the claims that Abby Martin grandstanded on “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” in order to boost her chances of moving into the more lucrative “mainstream media.” My point is quite different. Even Abby Martin and Greenwald, both of whom bring us much light, cannot fully escape Western propaganda. For example, Martin’s denunciation of Russia for “invading” Ukraine is based on Western propaganda that Russia sent 16,000 troops to occupy Crimea. The fact of the matter is that those 16,000 Russian troops have been in Crimea since the 1990s. Under the Russian-Ukrainian agreement, Russia has the right to base 25,000 troops in Crimea.
  • So, here we have three of the smartest and most independent journalists of our time, and all three are under the impression created by Western propaganda that Russia has invaded Ukraine. It appears that the power of Washington’s propaganda is so great that not even the best and most independent journalists can escape its influence. What chance does truth have when Abby Martin gets kudos from Glenn Greenwald for denouncing Russia for an alleged “invasion” that has not taken place, and when independent Pat Buchanan opens his column dissenting from the blame-Russia-crowd by accepting that an invasion has taken place?
  • Apparently, neither Abby Martin nor Glenn Greenwald, two intelligent and aware people, knew this fact. Washington’s propaganda is so pervasive that two of our best reporters were victimized by it. As I have written several times in my columns, Washington organized the coup in Ukraine in order to promote its world hegemony by capturing Ukraine for NATO and putting US missile bases on Russia’s border in order to degrade Russia’s nuclear deterrent and force Russia to accept Washington’s hegemony. Russia has done nothing but respond in a very low-key way to a major strategic threat orchestrated by Washington. It is not only Martin and Greenwald who have fallen under Washington’s propaganda. They are joined by Patrick J. Buchanan. Pat’s column calling on readers to “resist the war party on Crimea” opens with Washington’s propagandistic claim: “With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian Troops into Crimea.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37847.htm No such dispatch has occurred. Putin has been granted authority by the Russian Duma to send troops to Ukraine, but Putin has stated publicly that sending troops would be a last resort to protect Crimean Russians from invasions by the ultra-nationalist neo-nazis who stole Washington’s coup and established themselves as the power in Kiev and western Ukraine.
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  • The entire story that the presstitutes have told about the Ukraine is a propaganda production. The presstitutes told us that the deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, ordered snipers to shoot protesters. On the basis of these false reports, Washington’s stooges, who comprise the existing non-government in Kiev, have issued arrest orders for Yanukovych and intend for him to be tried in an international court. In an intercepted telephone call between EU foreign affairs minister Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister Urmas Paet who had just returned from Kiev, Paet reports: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” Paet goes on to report that “all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides . . . and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened.” Ashton, absorbed with EU plans to guide reforms in Ukraine and to prepare the way for the IMF to gain control over economic policy, was not particularly pleased to hear Paet’s report that the killings were an orchestrated provocation. You can listen to the conversation between Paet and Ashton here: http://rt.com/news/ashton-maidan-snipers-estonia-946/ What has happened in Ukraine is that Washington plotted against and overthrew an elected legitimate government and then lost control to neo-nazis who are threatening the large Russian population in southern and eastern Ukraine, provinces that formerly were part of Russia. These threatened Russians have appealed for Russia’s help, and just like the Russians in South Ossetia, they will receive Russia’s help. The Obama regime and its presstitutes will continue to lie about everything.
Paul Merrell

Officials' defenses of NSA phone program may be unraveling - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback tipping-point

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • From the moment the government’s massive database of citizens’ call records was exposed this year, U.S. officials have clung to two main lines of defense: The secret surveillance program was constitutional and critical to keeping the nation safe. But six months into the controversy triggered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the viability of those claims is no longer clear.
  • From the moment the government’s massive database of citizens’ call records was exposed this year, U.S. officials have clung to two main lines of defense: The secret surveillance program was constitutional and critical to keeping the nation safe. But six months into the controversy triggered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the viability of those claims is no longer clear.
  • In a three-day span, those rationales were upended by a federal judge who declared that the program was probably unconstitutional and the release of a report by a White House panel utterly unconvinced that stockpiling such data had played any meaningful role in preventing terrorist attacks.Either of those developments would have been enough to ratchet up the pressure on President Obama, who must decide whether to stand behind the sweeping collection or dismantle it and risk blame if there is a terrorist attack.Beyond that dilemma for the president, the decision by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon and the recommendations from the review panel shifted the footing of almost every major player in the surveillance debate.NSA officials, who rarely miss a chance to cite Snowden’s status as a fugitive from the law, now stand accused of presiding over a program whose capabilities were deemed by the judge to be “Orwellian" and likely illegal. Snowden’s defenders, on the other hand, have new ammunition to argue that he is more whistleblower than traitor.
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  • Similarly, U.S. officials who have dismissed NSA critics as naive about the true nature of the terrorist threat now face the findings of a panel handpicked by Obama and with access to classified files. Among its members were former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morrell and former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, both of whom spent years immersed in intelligence reports on al-Qaeda.A day after the panel’s report was made public, U.S. officials said its findings had stunned senior officials at the White House as well as at U.S. intelligence services, prompting a scramble to assess the potential effect of its proposals as well as to calculate its political fallout.The president is “faced with a program that has intelligence value but also has political liabilities,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official. “Now that he has a set of recommendations from a panel he appointed, if he doesn’t follow them people are going to say, ‘are they just for show?’ Or if he does follow them, he scales back a program that he supported.”Members of the panel met with Obama on Wednesday and said he was receptive to the group’s findings.
  • “Obama didn’t say, we accept this on the spot,” Clarke said in an interview. “But we didn’t get a lot of negative feedback. They’re going to talk to the agencies and see what the agencies’ objections are and then make their decisions.”White House officials declined to comment on specific recommendations Thursday, but press secretary Jay Carney signaled that the administration remains reluctant to dismantle the data-collection program. “The program is an important tool in our efforts to combat threats against the United States and the American people,” Carney said.Several current and former U.S. officials sought to downplay the impact of the court case and the review panel, saying that their influence is likely to be offset by the work of an internal White House group made up of national security officials who are regular consumers of NSA intercepts and may be more cautious about curtailing the agency’s capabilities.
  • However, the developments this week were a reminder that the outcome may be beyond Obama’s control. Leon’s ruling set in motion a legal battle that may culminate in a ruling by the Supreme Court. The panel’s findings gave new momentum to lawmakers who have introduced legislation that would bring an end to the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records.
  • As part of their initial research, members of the review panel spent a day at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. But officials said that neither the NSA chief, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, nor Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper was given a copy of the report in advance or a chance to comment on its findings.A DNI spokesman declined to comment, but officials said U.S. intelligence officials would evaluate the panel’s proposals and prepare material for the White House on the potential effects of implementing its recommendations.
Paul Merrell

Ukraine's threat from within - latimes.com - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...cists-20140313,0,7664312.story

war & peace Ukraine Russia MSM neo-Nazis

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • It's become popular to dismiss Russian President Vladimir Putin as paranoid and out of touch with reality. But his denunciation of "neofascist extremists" within the movement that toppled the old Ukrainian government, and in the ranks of the new one, is worth heeding. The empowerment of extreme Ukrainian nationalists is no less a menace to the country's future than Putin's maneuvers in Crimea. These are odious people with a repugnant ideology. Take the Svoboda party, which gained five key positions in the new Ukrainian government, including deputy prime minister, minister of defense and prosecutor general. Svoboda's call to abolish the autonomy that protects Crimea's Russian heritage, and its push for a parliamentary vote that downgraded the status of the Russian language, are flagrantly provocative to Ukraine's millions of ethnic Russians and incredibly stupid as the first steps of a new government in a divided country.
  • More to the point, why wave a red flag in front of a nervous bull? The answer is that for Svoboda, Right Sector and other Ukrainian far-right organizations, it was barely a handkerchief. These are groups whose thuggish young legions still sport a swastika-like symbol, whose leaders have publicly praised many aspects of Nazism and who venerate the World War II nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, whose troops occasionally collaborated with Hitler's and massacred thousands of Poles and Jews. But scarier than these parties' whitewashing of the past are their plans for the future. They have openly advocated that no Russian language be taught in Ukrainian schools, that citizenship is only for those who pass Ukrainian language and culture exams, that only ethnic Ukrainians may adopt Ukrainian orphans and that new passports must identify their holders' ethnicity — be it Ukrainian, Pole, Russian, Jew or other.
  • Is it so hard to understand Russians' shock that senior U.S. officials (such as Sen. John McCain, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland) flirt with extremists who have been denounced as anti-Semitic, xenophobic, even neo-Nazi by numerous human rights and anti-defamation groups? That they were snapping pictures and distributing pastries among protest leaders, some of whose minions were at that same moment distributing "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on Independence Square? In the few instances where concern over such extremists is acknowledged, it is usually dismissed along the lines of, "Yes, the new government isn't perfect, but moderates will soon prevail." But Russian worry is well-founded. Since the Soviet Union's collapse, millions of ethnic Russians or Russian speakers have endured loss of citizenship in the Baltic republics (where many lived for generations), have been driven out of Central Asian jobs and homes and have suffered particularly virulent discrimination in Georgia (the root cause of the 2008 war with Russia, but also broadly ignored in the West). How did such extremists capture key posts in the new Ukrainian government? If Svoboda was only a minority faction in the parliament (and Right Sector just a fringe paramilitary group), and their ideology is not shared by a majority of Ukrainian moderates, then doesn't that mean that Putin is right? That Ukraine's cobbled-together-under-street-pressure new government is indeed unrepresentative, and therefore illegitimate?
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 14
     
    Wow. An LA Times op-ed that actually addresses the issue of neo-Nazis installed by the U.S. government to rule the Ukraine. If this spreads into other mainstream media, it might slow down our neocon President.
Paul Merrell

NSA grapples with huge increase in records requests - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...3519889

surveillance state NSA litigation constitutional law

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Fueled by the Edward Snowden scandal, more Americans than ever are asking the National Security Agency if their personal life is being spied on.And the NSA has a very direct answer for them: Tough luck, we're not telling you.Americans are inundating the NSA with open-records requests, leading to an 888% increase in such inquiries in the past fiscal year. Anyone asking is getting a standard pre-written letter saying the NSA can neither confirm nor deny that any information has been gathered."This was the largest spike we've ever had," said Pamela Phillips, the chief of the NSA Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Office, which handles all records requests to the agency. "We've had requests from individuals who want any records we have on their phone calls, their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, their IP addresses, anything like that."
  • News reports of the NSA's surveillance program motivates most inquirers, she said.During the first quarter of the NSA's last fiscal year, which went from October to December 2012, it received 257 open-records requests. The next quarter, it received 241. However, on June 6, at the end of NSA's third fiscal quarter, news of Snowden's leaks hit the press, and the agency got 1,302 requests.In the next three months, the NSA received 2,538 requests. The spike has continued into the fall months and has overwhelmed her staff, Phillips said
  • The first court challenge to the federal government's mass surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet records opened Monday with two potential strikes against it, but the judge predicted it could go all the way to the Supreme Court.Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon expressed concern that conservative activist Larry Klayman and others lacked standing to bring the case and that his court lacked jurisdiction -- factors that could further insulate the spy programs from public oversight."To me, this is the overarching question," Leon said, referring to "this court's authority or lack thereof to inject itself into this situation."
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  • The two programs, made public earlier this year by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor now living in Russia, are reviewed by a top-secret court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But challengers from the political right and left are trying to have that court's periodic approvals circumvented.From the right on Monday came Klayman, a former Reagan administration lawyer who leads the advocacy group Freedom Watch. In an hour-long hearing, he called Leon "the last guard ... the last sentry to the tyranny in this country."But Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan said Klayman lacked standing to bring the case because he cannot prove the NSA examined his phone or Internet records. Gilligan also said Leon cannot review the statutory authority granted by Congress under FISA -- only the secret courts and the Supreme Court have that power.
  • Coincidentally, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down a chance to review the NSA's harvesting of Verizon phone records in a case brought by the watchdog group Electronic Privacy Information Center. The justices offered no reason for their decision.The law "makes it very difficult to challenge these determinations,' said Marc Rotenberg, president of the privacy group.Another challenge, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, will be heard by U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Friday. Those two cases are likely to be appealed "upstairs," Leon said -- to appeals courts and possibly the Supreme Court.Both Klayman and the ACLU are seeking preliminary injunctions that would put a halt to the NSA surveillance. Both have targeted a program that sweeps up domestic telephone records, even though the targets are foreign terrorists. Klayman also is challenging a separate program that goes after cellphone and computer data from major wireless companies and Internet service providers.
  • Amnesty International and a coalition of lawyers, journalists and others brought the last Supreme Court challenge to government surveillance programs in 2012. But in February, the justices ruled 5-4 that the challengers lacked standing because they could not prove they had been wiretapped.Even if judges rule against Klayman and the ACLU, the controversial programs may get a full court test because the Justice Department has begun notifying criminal defendants whose arrests were based on warrantless surveillance. That makes the prospect of a future Supreme Court case more likely.
Paul Merrell

Exposed: Google's "Smart Home" Surveillance Plans, or, How To Not Be Colonized | TBYP - 0 views

www.takebackyourpower.net/...-smart-home-surveillance-plans

surveillance state smart-grid smart-meters

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Two weeks ago, the New York Times’ truth-humor strip on “The Home of the Future” came on the heels of Google’s purchase of ‘smart thermostat’ manufacturer Nest for $3.2 Billion.  With power utility commissions such as California already stating their intention to “expand third-party access” to in-home data, the perfect storm is brewing for Google’s mission of making you their product – even in your own home. For context, this is the same Google whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, told MSNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
  • So where does a ‘smart thermostat’ fit in the current corporatist drive for total in-home surveillance? For the last couple of years, utilities around the globe have all been touting their new metering systems with buzzwords such as ‘smart’, ‘advanced’, ‘upgraded’, or ‘modernized’.  All rhetoric aside, these devices are intended to integrate with all appliances in your home to form an inescapable wireless data-mining dragnet, dubbed as the “home area network”, with your HVAC and likely other in-home systems overseen by spy-giant Google, if they get their way. As we’ve seen, even former CIA director David Patraeus was publicly frothing over having the ability to spy through ‘smart’ appliances, intended to wirelessly report back to the meter continuously, while receiving energy-use dictates from the meter. According to a US Congressional Research Report:
  • “With smart meters, police will have access to data that might be used to track residents’ daily lives and routines while in their homes, including their eating, sleeping, and showering habits, what appliances they use and when, and whether they prefer the television to the treadmill, among a host of other details.” Smart grid planners and working groups have even laid these aims out in their internal roadmaps, citing goals such as “new tools for mining data and intel” and “data mining and analytics to become core competency” (see slide 17).
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  • Despite pilot programs indicating no energy savings and mounting opposition now from several hundred activist groups, federal governments such as the US are continuing with their push to incentivize utilities to push forward ‘smart’ grid deployment. Apparently, having a piece of the $11 Billion taxpayer-funded ‘smart’ grid pie, pushed through by the Obama Administration immediately following the 2008 election, is sufficient motivation for utility executives to steamroll forward despite the growing resistance. As an example, PECO, a major utility in Pennsylvania, is slated to receive $200 Million in stimulus funding if they can deploy 600,000 ‘smart’ meters by April 2014. Significantly, anyone can choose to protect their in-home rights by saying no to the deployment of a ‘smart’ meter on their home.  There are no legal requirements in any country or region for an energy customer to accept a ‘smart’ meter.
  • So what can be done to protect rights?  While people cannot vote to prevent corporations from making products such as data-mining thermostats appliances, they do have a voice as utilities try their best to deploy the home-colonizing meters.  Public resistance to ‘smart’ meter deployments has predictably been considerable, as people are learning about not only surveillance capabilities, but also skyrocketing electricity costs, time-of-use billing, risk of fires, home hackability, electrical quality degradation and functional impairments from pulsed microwave radiation — amazingly, all being linked to the new utility metering system.
  • However, utilities are using tactics of intimidation, propaganda, and tacit acceptance – which means that unless you said a clear “no”, they assume a “yes.” In some cases even with a homeowner’s refusal, utilities are forcibly deploying anyway, apparently assuming the liability for doing so, risking litigation. So Google has played their hand with the $3.2 Billion purchase of Nest, desiring to capture the worldwide ‘smart’ home data-mining market, and praying to the all-spying-eye that people will stay tethered to their ‘smart’ wireless toys as their rights roll swiftly towards a cliff.  But will awareness eventually reach a game-changing crescendo?  It seems as though the potential exists. If we want to experience a future other than being ruled by technocrats, now is the time to speak up – even if facing the situation isn’t convenient.  People simply need to know the facts. As stated by former Apple executive Jeffrey Armstrong in our film Take Back Your Power, the question of whether homes will remain free of invasive ‘smart’ metering and appliance technology is “a test case for a technological democracy, if I have ever seen one.” 
Paul Merrell

F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-to-cyberattacks-abroad.html

surveillance state cyberwar FBI targets Anyonymous

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • An informant working for the F.B.I. coordinated a 2012 campaign of hundreds of cyberattacks on foreign websites, including some operated by the governments of Iran, Syria, Brazil and Pakistan, according to documents and interviews with people involved in the attacks.Exploiting a vulnerability in a popular web hosting software, the informant directed at least one hacker to extract vast amounts of data — from bank records to login information — from the government servers of a number of countries and upload it to a server monitored by the F.B.I., according to court statements.
  • The attacks were coordinated by Hector Xavier Monsegur, who used the Internet alias Sabu and became a prominent hacker within Anonymous for a string of attacks on high-profile targets, including PayPal and MasterCard. By early 2012, Mr. Monsegur of New York had been arrested by the F.B.I. and had already spent months working to help the bureau identify other members of Anonymous, according to previously disclosed court papers.One of them was Jeremy Hammond, then 27, who, like Mr. Monsegur, had joined a splinter hacking group from Anonymous called Antisec. The two men had worked together in December 2011 to sabotage the computer servers of Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private intelligence firm based in Austin, Tex.
  • Shortly after the Stratfor incident, Mr. Monsegur, 30, began supplying Mr. Hammond with lists of foreign websites that might be vulnerable to sabotage, according to Mr. Hammond, in an interview, and chat logs between the two men. The New York Times petitioned the court last year to have those documents unredacted, and they were submitted to the court last week with some of the redactions removed.Continue reading the main story “After Stratfor, it was pretty much out of control in terms of targets we had access to,” Mr. Hammond said during an interview this month at a federal prison in Kentucky, where he is serving a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to the Stratfor operation and other computer attacks inside the United States. He has not been charged with any crimes in connection with the hacks against foreign countries.
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  • according to an uncensored version of a court statement by Mr. Hammond, leaked online the day of his sentencing in November, the target list was extensive and included more than 2,000 Internet domains. The document said Mr. Monsegur had directed Mr. Hammond to hack government websites in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil and other government sites, like those of the Polish Embassy in Britain and the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq.
  • The hacking campaign appears to offer further evidence that the American government has exploited major flaws in Internet security — so-called zero-day vulnerabilities like the recent Heartbleed bug — for intelligence purposes. Recently, the Obama administration decided it would be more forthcoming in revealing the flaws to industry, rather than stockpiling them until the day they are useful for surveillance or cyberattacks. But it carved a broad exception for national security and law enforcement operations.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14
     
    Has no one in government ever heard of the concept of leadership by example? Or the Golden Rule?
Paul Merrell

Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly | The Whit... - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/...nited-nations-general-assembly

war & peace Obama-speech U.N. hypocrisy

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly United Nations General Assembly Hall New York City, New York 10:13 A.M. EDT PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen:  We come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope. Around the globe, there are signposts of progress.  The shadow of World War that existed at the founding of this institution has been lifted, and the prospect of war between major powers reduced.  The ranks of member states has more than tripled, and more people live under governments they elected. Hundreds of millions of human beings have been freed from the prison of poverty, with the proportion of those living in extreme poverty cut in half.  And the world economy continues to strengthen after the worst financial crisis of our lives. 
  • And yet there is a pervasive unease in our world -- a sense that the very forces that have brought us together have created new dangers and made it difficult for any single nation to insulate itself from global forces.  As we gather here, an outbreak of Ebola overwhelms public health systems in West Africa and threatens to move rapidly across borders.  Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition.  The brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness.
  • First, all of us -- big nations and small -- must meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms.  We are here because others realized that we gain more from cooperation than conquest. 
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  • Recently, Russia’s actions in Ukraine challenge this post-war order.  Here are the facts.  After the people of Ukraine mobilized popular protests and calls for reform, their corrupt president fled.  Against the will of the government in Kyiv, Crimea was annexed.  Russia poured arms into eastern Ukraine, fueling violent separatists and a conflict that has killed thousands.  When a civilian airliner was shot down from areas that these proxies controlled, they refused to allow access to the crash for days.  When Ukraine started to reassert control over its territory, Russia gave up the pretense of merely supporting the separatists, and moved troops across the border. This is a vision of the world in which might makes right -- a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed. America stands for something different.  We believe that right makes might -- that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones, and that people should be able to choose their own future.
  • nd these are simple truths, but they must be defended. America and our allies will support the people of Ukraine as they develop their democracy and economy.  We will reinforce our NATO Allies and uphold our commitment to collective self-defense.  We will impose a cost on Russia for aggression, and we will counter falsehoods with the truth.  And we call upon others to join us on the right side of history -- for while small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions. Moreover, a different path is available -- the path of diplomacy and peace, and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.  The recent cease-fire agreement in Ukraine offers an opening to achieve those objectives.  If Russia takes that path -- a path that for stretches of the post-Cold War period resulted in prosperity for the Russian people -- then we will lift our sanctions and welcome Russia’s role in addressing common challenges.  After all, that’s what the United States and Russia have been able to do in past years -- from reducing our nuclear stockpiles to meeting our obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to cooperating to remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons.  And that’s the kind of cooperation we are prepared to pursue again -- if Russia changes course. 
  • This speaks to a central question of our global age -- whether we will solve our problems together, in a spirit of mutual interest and mutual respect, or whether we descend into the destructive rivalries of the past.  When nations find common ground, not simply based on power, but on principle, then we can make enormous progress.  And I stand before you today committed to investing American strength to working with all nations to address the problems we face in the 21st century.
  • America is pursuing a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue, as part of our commitment to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and pursue the peace and security of a world without them.  And this can only take place if Iran seizes this historic opportunity.  My message to Iran’s leaders and people has been simple and consistent:  Do not let this opportunity pass.  We can reach a solution that meets your energy needs while assuring the world that your program is peaceful.  America is and will continue to be a Pacific power, promoting peace, stability, and the free flow of commerce among nations.  But we will insist that all nations abide by the rules of the road, and resolve their territorial disputes peacefully, consistent with international law. 
  • In other words, on issue after issue, we cannot rely on a rule book written for a different century.  If we lift our eyes beyond our borders -- if we think globally and if we act cooperatively -- we can shape the course of this century, as our predecessors shaped the post-World War II age.  But as we look to the future, one issue risks a cycle of conflict that could derail so much progress, and that is the cancer of violent extremism that has ravaged so many parts of the Muslim world. Of course, terrorism is not new.  Speaking before this Assembly, President Kennedy put it well:  “Terror is not a new weapon,” he said.  “Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or example.”  In the 20th century, terror was used by all manner of groups who failed to come to power through public support.  But in this century, we have faced a more lethal and ideological brand of terrorists who have perverted one of the world’s great religions.  With access to technology that allows small groups to do great harm, they have embraced a nightmarish vision that would divide the world into adherents and infidels -- killing as many innocent civilians as possible, employing the most brutal methods to intimidate people within their communities.
  • I have made it clear that America will not base our entire foreign policy on reacting to terrorism.  Instead, we’ve waged a focused campaign against al Qaeda and its associated forces -- taking out their leaders, denying them the safe havens they rely on.  At the same time, we have reaffirmed again and again that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam.  Islam teaches peace.  Muslims the world over aspire to live with dignity and a sense of justice.  And when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them, there is only us -- because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country. So we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations. Belief in permanent religious war is the misguided refuge of extremists who cannot build or create anything, and therefore peddle only fanaticism and hate.  And it is no exaggeration to say that humanity’s future depends on us uniting against those who would divide us along the fault lines of tribe or sect, race or religion.
  • But this is not simply a matter of words.  Collectively, we must take concrete steps to address the danger posed by religiously motivated fanatics, and the trends that fuel their recruitment.  Moreover, this campaign against extremism goes beyond a narrow security challenge.  For while we’ve degraded methodically core al Qaeda and supported a transition to a sovereign Afghan government, extremist ideology has shifted to other places -- particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, where a quarter of young people have no job, where food and water could grow scarce, where corruption is rampant and sectarian conflicts have become increasingly hard to contain.   As an international community, we must meet this challenge with a focus on four areas.  First, the terrorist group known as ISIL must be degraded and ultimately destroyed.
  • The second:  It is time for the world -- especially Muslim communities -- to explicitly, forcefully, and consistently reject the ideology of organizations like al Qaeda and ISIL.
  • Later today, the Security Council will adopt a resolution that underscores the responsibility of states to counter violent extremism.  But resolutions must be followed by tangible commitments, so we’re accountable when we fall short.  Next year, we should all be prepared to announce the concrete steps that we have taken to counter extremist ideologies in our own countries -- by getting intolerance out of schools, stopping radicalization before it spreads, and promoting institutions and programs that build new bridges of understanding.
  • Third, we must address the cycle of conflict -- especially sectarian conflict -- that creates the conditions that terrorists prey upon.
  • The good news is we also see signs that this tide could be reversed.  We have a new, inclusive government in Baghdad; a new Iraqi Prime Minister welcomed by his neighbors; Lebanese factions rejecting those who try to provoke war.  And these steps must be followed by a broader truce.  Nowhere is this more necessary than Syria.  Together with our partners, America is training and equipping the Syrian opposition to be a counterweight to the terrorists of ISIL and the brutality of the Assad regime.  But the only lasting solution to Syria’s civil war is political -- an inclusive political transition that responds to the legitimate aspirations of all Syrian citizens, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of creed.
  • My fourth and final point is a simple one:  The countries of the Arab and Muslim world must focus on the extraordinary potential of their people -- especially the youth.
  • We recognize as well that leadership will be necessary to address the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  As bleak as the landscape appears, America will not give up on the pursuit of peace.  Understand, the situation in Iraq and Syria and Libya should cure anybody of the illusion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the main source of problems in the region.  For far too long, that's been used as an excuse to distract people from problems at home.  The violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace.  And that's something worthy of reflection within Israel.
  • Because let’s be clear:  The status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is not sustainable.  We cannot afford to turn away from this effort -- not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza. So long as I am President, we will stand up for the principle that Israelis, Palestinians, the region and the world will be more just and more safe with two states living side by side, in peace and security. So this is what America is prepared to do:  Taking action against immediate threats, while pursuing a world in which the need for such action is diminished.  The United States will never shy away from defending our interests, but we will also not shy away from the promise of this institution and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- the notion that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the presence of a better life. 
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 14
     
    Epic hypocrisy. He bows to international law while waging multiple wars in direct defiance of it. And that's just in the first few paragraphs. It gets worse the farther he gets in his speech.
Paul Merrell

Why Today's Landmark Court Victory Against Mass Surveillance Matters | American Civil L... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...inst-mass-surveillance-matters

surveillance state NSA litigation Patriot-Act ACLU 2nd-Circuit

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 May 15 - No Cached
  • In a landmark victory for privacy, a federal appeals court ruled unanimously today that the mass phone-records program exposed two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is illegal because it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended to permit when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The ruling in ACLU v. Clapper is enormously significant, and not only because the program in question — the first to be revealed by Edward Snowden — is at the heart of a legislative reform effort playing out right now, or because it sparked the most significant debate about government surveillance in decades. The decision could also affect many other laws the government has stretched to the breaking point in order to justify dragnet collection of Americans’ sensitive information. Under the program, revealed in the Guardian on June 5, 2013, telecommunications companies hand over to the NSA, on a daily basis, records relating to the calls of all of their customers. Those records include information about who called whom, when, and for how long. The ACLU sued the NSA over the program just days after it was revealed, and we took the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals after it was dismissed by a district court.
  • A few points on what makes the decision so important. 1. It recognizes that Section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize the government to collect information on such a massive scale.
  • 2. The decision’s significance extends far beyond the phone records program alone. It implicates other mass spying programs that we have learned about in the past two years and — almost certainly ­— others that the government continues to conceal from the public. For example, we know that the Drug Enforcement Administration, for decades, employed a similar definition of “relevance” to amass logs of every call made from the United States to as many as 116 different countries. The same theory was also used to justify the collection of email metadata. Both those programs have been discontinued, but the legal reasoning hasn’t, and it could very well be the basis for programs the government has never acknowledged to the public, including the CIA’s bulk collection of Americans’ financial records.
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  • 4. The importance of adversarial review. The court recognized that public, adversarial litigation concerning the lawfulness of this spying program was vitally important to its decision — and it drew a direct contrast to the secret, one-sided proceedings that occur in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
  • 3. Metadata is incredibly sensitive and revealing. The government has long argued that the phone records program doesn’t reveal the contents of calls, and as such, it is not an invasion of privacy. But metadata, especially in aggregate, can be just as revealing as content, painting a detailed picture of a person’s life. 
  • 5. The congressional reforms under consideration just don’t cut it. Ahead of Section 215’s sunset on June 1, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to push through a straight reauthorization of the provision, extending its life by another five years. After today’s decision came down, he took to the floor to defend the program — a position altogether at odds with the appeals court decision, with the conclusions of multiple executive-branch review groups who found the program hasn’t been effective in stopping terrorism, and with the clear consensus that supports far-reaching surveillance reform. Another bill in play (which the ACLU neither supports nor opposes), the USA Freedom Act of 2015, doesn’t go nearly far enough, most notably in ensuring that the government cannot engage in broad collection of innocent Americans’ private information.
Paul Merrell

U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadat... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_print.html

surveillance state NSA must-read pen-register

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama’s expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life?Authoritative new answers to those questions, drawing upon a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials, offer the clearest map yet of the Bush-era programs and the NSA’s contemporary U.S. operations.STELLARWIND was succeeded by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications, according to the interviews and documents.
  • Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called ­NUCLEON.For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.
  • The debate has focused on two of the four U.S.-based collection programs: PRISM, for Internet content, and the comprehensive collection of telephone call records, foreign and domestic, that the Guardian revealed by posting a classified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon Business Services.The Post has learned that similar orders have been renewed every three months for other large U.S. phone companies, including Bell South and AT&T, since May 24, 2006. On that day, the surveillance court made a fundamental shift in its approach to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to compel production of “business records” that are relevant to a particular terrorism investigation and to share those in some circumstances with the NSA. Henceforth, the court ruled, it would define the relevant business records as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database.The Bush administration, by then, had been taking “bulk metadata” from the phone companies under voluntary agreements for more than four years. The volume of information overwhelmed the MAINWAY database, according to a classified report from the NSA inspector general in 2009. The agency spent $146 million in supplemental counterterrorism funds to buy new hardware and contract support — and to make unspecified payments to the phone companies for “collaborative partnerships.”When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous. One of them, unnamed in the report, approached the NSA with a request. Rather than volunteer the data, at a price, the “provider preferred to be compelled to do so by a court order,” the report said. Other companies followed suit. The surveillance court order that recast the meaning of business records “essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk telephony metadata from business records that it had” under Bush’s asserted authority alone.
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  • Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.At Bush’s direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.MARINA and the collection tools that feed it are probably the least known of the NSA’s domestic operations, even among experts who follow the subject closely. Yet they probably capture information about more American citizens than any other, because the volume of e-mail, chats and other Internet communications far exceeds the volume of standard telephone calls.The NSA calls Internet metadata “digital network information.” Sophisticated analysis of those records can reveal unknown associates of known terrorism suspects. Depending on the methods applied, it can also expose medical conditions, political or religious affiliations, confidential business negotiations and extramarital affairs.What permits the former and prevents the latter is a complex set of policies that the public is not permitted to see.
  • In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use “contact chaining” techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats.The legal challenge for the NSA was that its practice of collecting high volumes of data from digital links did not seem to meet even the relatively low requirements of Bush’s authorization, which allowed collection of Internet metadata “for communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” the NSA inspector general’s report said.Lawyers for the agency came up with an interpretation that said the NSA did not “acquire” the communications, a term with formal meaning in surveillance law, until analysts ran searches against it. The NSA could “obtain” metadata in bulk, they argued, without meeting the required standards for acquisition.Goldsmith and Comey did not buy that argument, and a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said the NSA does not rely on it today.As soon as surveillance data “touches us, we’ve got it, whatever verbs you choose to use,” the official said in an interview. “We’re not saying there’s a magic formula that lets us have it without having it.”
  • When Comey finally ordered a stop to the program, Bush signed an order renewing it anyway. Comey, Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most of the senior Bush appointees in the Justice Department began drafting letters of resignation.Then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden was not among them. According to the inspector general’s classified report, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and “General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General’s signature.” He decided to go along.The following morning, when Mueller told Bush that he and Comey intended to resign, the president reversed himself.Three months later, on July 15, the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court’s own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as “pen register, trap and trace,” that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13
     
    Note particularly the mention that the FISA Court decision to throw the doors open for government snooping was based on "pen register, trap and trace" law. As suspected, now we are into territory dealt with by the Supreme Court in the pre-internet days of 1979 In Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), More about that next, in a bookmark also tagged with "pen-register".
Paul Merrell

Saudi Prince Threatens 'Military Action Without American Support' Against Iran | MRCTV - 0 views

www.mrctv.org/...iran-still-table-or-without-us

war & peace Iran negotiations Saudis saber-rattling

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • In the first public criticism of the P5+Iran deal by a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told Lebanon’s Daily Star the deal would allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb and would “wreak havoc in the region." Covered in The Times of London, the prince also told Daily Star, "Saudi Arabia and the Gulf powers are prepared to take military action without American support after the Iran nuclear deal" Iran and Saudi Arabia are the two leading players in the Sunni/Shia divide and are competing for leadership of the Muslim world. The Sunni Islam Saudi Arabian monarchy fears that the Shia Islam Iranians will employ terrorists in an attempt topple the monarchy and the ruling House of Saud.  Prince Bandar was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 20 years before returning home to run the country’s intelligence service from 2005-2014. While he is no longer a part of the inner ring of Saudi decision-making, the prince is still a very connected member of the ruling family. The prince would not be conducting interviews without the permission of highest authorities; most likely he was asked to to put himself out there by his uncle King Salman.
  • The Prince also said that regional powers have lost faith in America: “People in my region now are relying on God’s will, and consolidating their local capabilities and analysis with everybody else except our oldest and most powerful ally” The prince was less polite in an op-ed he wrote for the London-based Arabic news Web site Elaph. He compared the Iran nuclear deal made by Obama to the North Korean nuclear deal Bill Clinton made.  Bandar suggested that they were both bad deals but Clinton made a bad deal with the best of intentions thinking it was a good deal. Obama on the other hand knew he was making a lousy deal and made it anyway.  Quoted in a Washington Post article which translated part of the Elaph piece: Bandar says [about the North Korean pact], "it turned out that the strategic foreign policy analysis was wrong and there was a major intelligence failure." He added that if Clinton had known the full picture, "I am absolutely confident he would not have made that decision."
  • The Saudi royal then contrasts this with the present situation with Iran, "where the strategic foreign policy analysis, the national intelligence information, and America’s allies in the region's intelligence all predict not only the same outcome of the North Korean nuclear deal but worse – with the billions of dollars that Iran will have access to." Bandar says Obama is smart enough to understand this but that he is ideologically willing to accept collateral damage because he believes he is right. (..)The Saudi prince says the new Iran deal and other developments in the region have led him to conclude that a phrase first used by Henry Kissinger – “America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more" – is correct.
Paul Merrell

The Latest US and World News - USATODAY.com - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...70808616

surveillance state DEA phone-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels' distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to "designated foreign countries." But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.
  • The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts
  • The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. "This was aimed squarely at Americans," said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's very significant from a constitutional perspective."Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden's revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA "is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers." A DEA spokesman declined to comment.
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  • The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.
  • The result "produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people," Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.
  • In 1992, in the last months of Bush's administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said
  • The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records "relevant or material to" federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge's approval. "We knew we were stretching the definition," a former official involved in the process said.Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.
  • A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that "we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas."Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA's public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging "a massive number of calls," said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.
  • At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.
Paul Merrell

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Americans email-content phone-content lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
  • What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used. Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.
  • “The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.”
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  • The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion. The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.
  • But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.
  • But — and this was the nub of the criticism — a warrant for each target would no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or “foreign powers.”That is why it is important to require a warrant before searching for Americans’ data, Udall said. “Our founders laid out a roadmap where Americans’ privacy rights are protected before their communications are seized or searched — not after the fact,” he said in a statement to The Post.
  • The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”
  • Senior administration officials disagree. “If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.” The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year.
  • The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole” that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
  • The NSA intercepts more than 250 million Internet communications each year under Section 702. Ninety-one percent are from U.S. Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. The rest come from “upstream” companies that route Internet traffic to, from and within the United States. The expanded search authority applies only to the downstream collection.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 13
     
    An important article I missed, from last September. Searching the content of American citizens' calls and emails without a search warrant. Straight-up violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments (warrantless search and deprivation of due process).  And directly contrary to what Obama, Clapper, and Alexander told the public over and over again.
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