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Paul Merrell

Reassured by NSA's Internal Procedures? Don't Be. They Still Don't Tell the Whole Story... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...nd-unconstitutional-fisa-court

surveillance state NSA lies FISA Court constitutional law

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, the Guardian released two previously-classified documents describing the internal "minimization" and "targeting" procedures used by the NSA to conduct surveillance under Section 702. These procedures are approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on an annual basis and are supposed to serve as the bulwark between the NSA's vast surveillance capabilities and the private communications of Americans. As we noted earlier today, the procedures, themselves, aren't reassuring: far too much discretion is retained by NSA analysts, the procedures frequently resolve doubt in favor of collection, and information is obtained that could otherwise never be obtained without a warrant. Which would be bad enough, if it were the end of the story. But it's not.
  • Unless the government substantially changed the procedures between August 2010 and October 2011, these are the very procedures that the FISC eventually found resulted in illegal and unconstitutional surveillance. In October 2011, the FISC issued an 86-page opinion finding that collection carried out under the NSA's classified minimization procedures was unconstitutional. The opinion remains secret, but it is very likely that yesterday's leaked NSA documents show the very minimization procedures the Director of National Intelligence admitted the FISC had found resulted in surveillance that was “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment" and "circumvented the spirit of the law." And for good reason: the procedures are unconstitutional. They allow for the government to obtain and keep huge amounts of information it could never Constitutionally get without a warrant based on probable cause. As we explained, the procedures are designed such that the NSA will routinely fail to exclude or remove United States persons' communications, and the removal of those communications are wholly entrusted to the "reasonable discretion" of an analyst.  
  • Yesterday, the Guardian released two previously-classified documents describing the internal "minimization" and "targeting" procedures used by the NSA to conduct surveillance under Section 702. These procedures are approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on an annual basis and are supposed to serve as the bulwark between the NSA's vast surveillance capabilities and the private communications of Americans. As we noted earlier today, the procedures, themselves, aren't reassuring: far too much discretion is retained by NSA analysts, the procedures frequently resolve doubt in favor of collection, and information is obtained that could otherwise never be obtained without a warrant. Which would be bad enough, if it were the end of the story. But it's not. The targeting and minimization documents released yesterday are dated a few months after the first publicly known scandal over the new FAA procedures: In April 2009, the New York Times reported that Section 702 surveillance had “intercepted the private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans . . . on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress." In June 2009, the Times reported that members of Congress were saying NSA's "recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." Rep. Rush Holt described the problems as "so flagrant that they can't be accidental."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Presumably, following these "flagrant" abuses (and likely in response to the Congressional criticism of the original procedures), the government refined the procedures. The documents released yesterday are the "improved" targeting and minimization procedures, which appear to have been reused the following year, in 2010, in the FISC's annual certification. But these amended procedures still didn't stop illegal spying under Section 702. Unless the government substantially changed the procedures between August 2010 and October 2011, these are the mimization rules that the FISC eventually found to result in illegal and unconstitutional surveillance. In October 2011, the FISC issued an 86-page opinion finding that collection carried out under the NSA's minimization procedures was unconstitutional. The opinion remains secret, but it is likely that yesterday's leaked NSA documents show the very procedures the Director of National Intelligence admitted had been found to result in surveillance that was “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment" and "circumvented the spirit of the law." And for good reason: the procedures are unconstitutional.
  • EFF has been litigating to uncover this critical FISC opinion through the Freedom of Information Act and to uncover the "secret law" the government has been hiding from the American public. And EFF isn't alone in fighting for the release of these documents. A bipartisan coalition of Senators just announced legislation that would require the Attorney General to declassify significant FISC opinions, a move they say would help put an end to precisely this kind of "secret law."
Paul Merrell

Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant | World ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant

surveillance state digital-privacy NSA NSA Procedures must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's surveillance of Americans' communication• Document one: procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons• Document two: procedures used by NSA to minimise data collected from US persons
  • Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.
  • The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 13
     
    Lots of gruesome detail in the article and even more in the documents. Another major leaked disclosure from the Big Brother secret arm of U.S. government. A cautionary warning: these are merely documents. They are not regulations as that term is understood under the Administrative Procedures Act. There may or may not be one or more secret Executive Orders requiring Agency personnel to adhere to what the documents say.  Even with agencies that are far more open to public scrutiny, it is common for agency staff to ignore regulations and statutes. Every time someone wins a lawsuit pursuant to the combination of the Administrative Procedures Act and some other federal law or regulation, one of the most common types of lawsuits against federal agencies, it is because agency staff violated the law or the regulation. It's a common situation even with agencies that have to operate in the sunlight. An agency allowed to operate without any right of the public to challenge its actions has even less incentive to adhere to its formal procedures.   So particularly with an agency permitted to operate in secret, the existence of these documents does not mean that they get more than an occasional wink and a nod by agency staff. That said, this is pretty gruesome reading for a civil libertarian and is also rife with vagueness, ambiguity, and loopholes. Not surprisingly though for an experienced lawyer; those who deliberately trample on others' rights rarely write written confessions.
Paul Merrell

The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans' Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...s-hold-encrypted-data-familiar

surveillance state NSA IAA-2015 Sect-309 legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines. NSA’s retention of encrypted communications deserves further consideration today, now that these retention guidelines have been written into law. It has become increasingly clear over the last year that surveillance reform will be driven by technological change—specifically by the growing use of encryption technologies. Therefore, any legislation touching on encryption should receive close scrutiny.
  • Section 309 of the intel authorization bill describes “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communications.” It establishes retention guidelines for surveillance programs that are “reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of [telephone or electronic communications] to or from a United States person.” Communications to or from a United States person are ‘incidentally’ collected because the U.S. person is not the actual target of the collection. Section 309 states that these incidentally collected communications must be deleted after five years unless they meet a number of exceptions. One of these exceptions is that “the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning.” This exception appears to be directly lifted from NSA’s minimization procedures for data collected under Section 702 of FISA, which were declassified in 2013. 
  • While Section 309 specifically applies to collection taking place under E.O. 12333, not FISA, several of the exceptions described in Section 309 closely match exceptions in the FISA minimization procedures. That includes the exception for “enciphered” communications. Those minimization procedures almost certainly served as a model for these retention guidelines and will likely shape how this new language is interpreted by the Executive Branch. Section 309 also asks the heads of each relevant member of the intelligence community to develop procedures to ensure compliance with new retention requirements. I expect those procedures to look a lot like the FISA minimization guidelines.
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  • This language is broad, circular, and technically incoherent, so it takes some effort to parse appropriately. When the minimization procedures were disclosed in 2013, this language was interpreted by outside commentators to mean that NSA may keep all encrypted data that has been incidentally collected under Section 702 for at least as long as is necessary to decrypt that data. Is this the correct interpretation? I think so. It is important to realize that the language above isn’t just broad. It seems purposefully broad. The part regarding relevance seems to mirror the rationale NSA has used to justify its bulk phone records collection program. Under that program, all phone records were relevant because some of those records could be valuable to terrorism investigations and (allegedly) it isn’t possible to collect only those valuable records. This is the “to find a needle a haystack, you first have to have the haystack” argument. The same argument could be applied to encrypted data and might be at play here.
  • This exception doesn’t just apply to encrypted data that might be relevant to a current foreign intelligence investigation. It also applies to cases in which the encrypted data is likely to become relevant to a future intelligence requirement. This is some remarkably generous language. It seems one could justify keeping any type of encrypted data under this exception. Upon close reading, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these procedures were written carefully to allow NSA to collect and keep a broad category of encrypted data under the rationale that this data might contain the communications of NSA targets and that it might be decrypted in the future. If NSA isn’t doing this today, then whoever wrote these minimization procedures wanted to at least ensure that NSA has the authority to do this tomorrow.
  • There are a few additional observations that are worth making regarding these nominally new retention guidelines and Section 702 collection. First, the concept of incidental collection as it has typically been used makes very little sense when applied to encrypted data. The way that NSA’s Section 702 upstream “about” collection is understood to work is that technology installed on the network does some sort of pattern match on Internet traffic; say that an NSA target uses example@gmail.com to communicate. NSA would then search content of emails for references to example@gmail.com. This could notionally result in a lot of incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications whenever the email that references example@gmail.com is somehow mixed together with emails that have nothing to do with the target. This type of incidental collection isn’t possible when the data is encrypted because it won’t be possible to search and find example@gmail.com in the body of an email. Instead, example@gmail.com will have been turned into some alternative, indecipherable string of bits on the network. Incidental collection shouldn’t occur because the pattern match can’t occur in the first place. This demonstrates that, when communications are encrypted, it will be much harder for NSA to search Internet traffic for a unique ID associated with a specific target.
  • This lends further credence to the conclusion above: rather than doing targeted collection against specific individuals, NSA is collecting, or plans to collect, a broad class of data that is encrypted. For example, NSA might collect all PGP encrypted emails or all Tor traffic. In those cases, NSA could search Internet traffic for patterns associated with specific types of communications, rather than specific individuals’ communications. This would technically meet the definition of incidental collection because such activity would result in the collection of communications of U.S. persons who aren’t the actual targets of surveillance. Collection of all Tor traffic would entail a lot of this “incidental” collection because the communications of NSA targets would be mixed with the communications of a large number of non-target U.S. persons. However, this “incidental” collection is inconsistent with how the term is typically used, which is to refer to over-collection resulting from targeted surveillance programs. If NSA were collecting all Tor traffic, that activity wouldn’t actually be targeted, and so any resulting over-collection wouldn’t actually be incidental. Moreover, greater use of encryption by the general public would result in an ever-growing amount of this type of incidental collection.
  • This type of collection would also be inconsistent with representations of Section 702 upstream collection that have been made to the public and to Congress. Intelligence officials have repeatedly suggested that search terms used as part of this program have a high degree of specificity. They have also argued that the program is an example of targeted rather than bulk collection. ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt, in a March 2014 meeting before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, stated that “there is either a misconception or a mischaracterization commonly repeated that Section 702 is a form of bulk collection. It is not bulk collection. It is targeted collection based on selectors such as telephone numbers or email addresses where there’s reason to believe that the selector is relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose.” The collection of Internet traffic based on patterns associated with types of communications would be bulk collection; more akin to NSA’s collection of phone records en mass than it is to targeted collection focused on specific individuals. Moreover, this type of collection would certainly fall within the definition of bulk collection provided just last week by the National Academy of Sciences: “collection in which a significant portion of the retained data pertains to identifiers that are not targets at the time of collection.”
  • The Section 702 minimization procedures, which will serve as a template for any new retention guidelines established for E.O. 12333 collection, create a large loophole for encrypted communications. With everything from email to Internet browsing to real-time communications moving to encrypted formats, an ever-growing amount of Internet traffic will fall within this loophole.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15
     
    Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."       
Paul Merrell

How William Hague Deceived the House of Commons on Ukraine | David Morrison - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/...-willliam-hague_b_4933177.html

war & peace Ukraine coup-legitimacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • In a statement on 4 March 2014, Foreign Minister William Hague deceived the House of Commons about the legitimacy of the new regime in Ukraine. He led the House to believe that the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had removed President Yanukovich from power on 22 February in accordance with the Ukrainian constitution. "It is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities", he said. It is simply untrue that the Rada followed the procedure laid down in the Ukrainian constitution to impeach and remove a president from power. Article 108 of the constitution specifies four circumstances in which a president may cease to exercise power before the end of his term. Those are: resignation; inability to exercise his or her powers for reasons of health; removal from office by the procedure of impeachment; death.
  • The procedure for removal from office by impeachment is laid down in Article 111. It is not unlike that required for the impeachment and removal from power of a US president, which could take months. Thus, Article 111 obliges the Rada to establish a special investigatory commission to formulate charges against the president, seek evidence to justify the charges and come to conclusions about the president's guilt for the Rada to consider. To find the president guilty, at least two-thirds of Rada members must assent. Prior to a final vote to remove the president from power, the procedure requires the Constitutional Court of Ukraine to review the case and certify that the constitutional procedure of investigation and consideration has been followed, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine to certify that the acts of which the President is accused are worthy of impeachment. To remove the president from power, at least three-quarters of Rada members must assent. The Rada didn't follow this procedure at all. No investigatory commission was established and the Courts were not involved. On 22 February, the Rada simply passed a bill removing President Yanukovych from office.
  • Furthermore, the bill wasn't even supported by three-quarters of Rada members as required by Article 111 - it was supported by 328 members, when it required 338 (since the Rada has 450 members). Nevertheless, justifying UK support for the new regime in Kiev in the House of Commons on 4 March, William Hague said: "Former President Yanukovych left his post and then left the country, and the decisions on replacing him with an acting President were made by the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, by the very large majorities required under the constitution, including with the support of members of former President Yanukovych's party, the Party of Regions, so it is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities." That gives the impression that the procedure prescribed in the Ukrainian constitution for the removal of a president from office had been followed, when in fact it hadn't and therefore the new authorities in Kiev are illegitimate. President Putin questioned the legitimacy of the authorities in Kiev at his press conference on 4 March, just before William Hague spoke in the House of Commons:
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  • "Are the current authorities legitimate? The Parliament is partially, but all the others are not. The current Acting President is definitely not legitimate. There is only one legitimate President, from a legal standpoint. Clearly, he has no power. However, as I have already said, and will repeat: Yanukovych is the only undoubtedly legitimate President. "There are three ways of removing a President under Ukrainian law: one is his death, the other is when he personally steps down, and the third is impeachment. The latter is a well-deliberated constitutional norm. It has to involve the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the Rada. This is a complicated and lengthy procedure. It was not carried out. Therefore, from a legal perspective this is an undisputed fact." There is a fourth way - ill health - but, aside from that, Putin is undoubtedly correct.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 May 14
     
    Although directed at comments made by the UK Foreign Minister, similar statements were issued by the Obama Administration. What happened in the Ukraine was a coup, not a legitimate impeachment of its President.  Notice that the article's link to the Ukraine Constitution is now dead. Among the coup leader's other unlawful actions, post-coup the Ukraine Rada repealed the former constitution by simple majority and reinstated the Constitution of 2004. But the enacting legislation was never signed by Ukraine's President, who had fled into exile. Moreover, the 2004 constitution had already been declared void by Ukraine's Constitutional Court because of procedural violations, repeated in its re-enactment. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ukraine#2004_and_2010_amendments_and_alleged_2014_return_to_2004_amendments  It definitely was a coup, not a legitimate transfer of power.   
Paul Merrell

No Fly List: Govt Offers New Redress Procedures - 0 views

fas.org/...no-fly-redress

war & peace no-fly-list Due-Process

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The government will no longer refuse to confirm or deny that persons who are prevented from boarding commercial aircraft have been placed on the “No Fly List,” and such persons will have new opportunities to challenge the denial of boarding, the Department of Justice announced yesterday in a court filing. Until now, the Government refused to acknowledge whether or not an individual traveler had been placed on the No Fly List and, if so, what the basis for such a designation was. That is no longer the case, the new court filing said: “Under the previous redress procedures, individuals who had submitted inquiries to DHS TRIP [the Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program] generally received a letter responding to their inquiry that neither confirmed nor denied their No Fly status.” “Under the newly revised procedures, a U.S. person who purchases a ticket, is denied boarding at the airport, subsequently applies for redress through DHS TRIP about the denial of boarding, and is on the No Fly List after a redress review, will now receive a letter providing his or her status on the No Fly List and the option to receive and/or submit additional information.”
  • If the individual traveler chooses to pursue the matter, DHS “will provide a second, more detailed response. This second letter will identify the specific criterion under which the individual has been placed on the No Fly List and will include an unclassified summary of information supporting the individual’s No Fly List status, to the extent feasible, consistent with the national security and law enforcement interests at stake.” The new redress procedures were developed in response to legal challenges to the No Fly List procedures, which argued that the procedures were constitutionally deficient or otherwise improper. The notice of the new procedures was filed yesterday in the pending lawsuit Gulet Mohamed v. Eric H. Holder, Jr., which is one of the ongoing lawsuits over the No Fly List.
  • The CRS report, which predates the newly announced procedures, reviewed many of the legal issues involved. See The No Fly List: Procedural Due Process and Hurdles to Litigation, April 2, 2015.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 15
     
    Still not good enough. There should be no no-fly list. And if we are to have one anyway, people should be notified before or at the time they are placed on the list Finding out only when you arrive at the airport and are denied boarding is B.S.  Say I decide I want to work in Thailand for a few years teach English as a second language. I arrange for a job there, make the initial payment for rental of housing, get rid of most of my possessions, sell my house, and make other arrangements for a long-term absence from the U.S. Then I get to the airport and learn I'm not allowed to leave the U.S. This is bureaucracy gone nuts, Kafkaeque.   
Paul Merrell

NSA can eavesdrop on Americans' phone calls, documents show | Politics and Law - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...ans-phone-calls-documents-show

surveillance state NSA Clapper lies must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency has been secretly granted legal authority to operate a massive domestic eavesdropping system that vacuums up Americans' phone calls and Internet communications, newly leaked documents show. A pair of classified government documents (No. 1 and No. 2) signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and posted by the Guardian on Thursday show that NSA analysts are able to listen to Americans' intercepted phone calls without asking a judge for a warrant first. That appears to be at odds with what President Obama said earlier this week in defense of the NSA's surveillance efforts. "I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails," Obama said. The new documents indicate, however, that NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts are granted broad access to data vacuumed up by the world's most powerful intelligence agency -- but are supposed to follow certain "targeting" and "minimization" procedures to limit the number of Americans who become individual targets of warrantless surveillance.
  • Analysts are expected to exercise "reasonable judgment" in determining which data to use, according to the documents, and "inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years." The documents also refer to "content repositories" that contain records of devices' "previous Internet activity," and say the NSA keeps records of Americans' "electronic communications accounts/addresses/identifiers" in an apparent effort to avoid targeting them in future eavesdropping efforts. The Holder procedures were blessed in advance by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Guardian reported, meaning that the judges would have issued a general order that authorizes the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance as long as it's primarily aimed at foreign targets, subject to some limited judicial oversight. Today's disclosure jibes with what Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked top-secret documents, alleged in an online chat earlier this week. Snowden said, referring to the contents of e-mail and phone calls, that "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."
  • On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a carefully-worded statement in response to a CNET article and other reports questioning when intelligence analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. Clapper said: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper's statement was viewed as a denial, but it wasn't. Today's disclosures reveal why: Because the Justice Department granted intelligence analysts "proper legal authorization" in advance through the Holder regulations. "The DNI has a history of playing games with wording, using terms with carefully obscured meanings to leave an impression different from the truth," Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated domestic surveillance cases, told CNET earlier this week.
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  • Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union's deputy legal director, said in a statement today that: After Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, we worried that the NSA would use the new authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans' telephone calls and emails. These documents confirm many of our worst fears. The "targeting" procedures indicate that the NSA is engaged in broad surveillance of Americans' international communications. The "minimization" procedures that supposedly protect Americans' constitutional rights turn out to be far weaker than we imagined they could be. For example, the NSA claims the authority to collect and disseminate attorney-client communications -- and even, in some circumstances, to turn them over to Justice Department prosecutors. The government also claims the authority to retain Americans' purely domestic communications in certain situations.
  • The documents suggest there are some significant loopholes in domestic surveillance: if an NSA analyst reviews an intercepted communication and finds "evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed," it can be forwarded to the FBI or other federal law enforcement agencies. Another loophole is "a serious harm to life or property" -- which could sweep in intellectual property -- and "enciphered" data. Communications that contain "enciphered" data, which would likely include PGP but also could mean encrypted Web connections using SSL, may be kept indefinitely. Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
  • Section 702 of the FAA says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.
Paul Merrell

How the NSA's Surveillance Procedures Threaten Americans' Privacy | American Civil Libe... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...res-threaten-americans-privacy

surveillance state NSA surveillance-criteria

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Newly released documents confirm what critics have long suspected—that the National Security Agency, a component of the Defense Department, is engaged in unconstitutional surveillance of Americans' communications, including their telephone calls and emails. The documents show that the NSA is conducting sweeping surveillance of Americans' international communications, that it is acquiring many purely domestic communications as well, and that the rules that supposedly protect Americans' privacy are weak and riddled with exceptions.
  • 3. The Procedures permit the government to conduct surveillance that has no real connection to the government's foreign intelligence interests. One of the fundamental problems with the Act is that it permits the government to conduct surveillance without probable cause or individualized suspicion. It permits the government to monitor people who aren't even thought to be doing anything wrong, and to do so without particularized warrants or meaningful review by impartial judges. Government officials have placed heavy emphasis on the fact that the Act allows the government to conduct surveillance only if one of its purposes is to gather "foreign intelligence information." That term, though, is defined very broadly to include not only information about terrorism but also information about intelligence activities, the national defense, and even "the foreign affairs of the United States." The Procedures weaken the limitation further. Among the things the NSA examines to determine whether a particular email address or phone number will be used to exchange foreign intelligence information is whether it has been used in the past to communicate with foreigners. Another is whether it is listed in a foreigner's address book. In other words, the NSA seems to equate a propensity to communicate with foreigners with a propensity to communicate foreign intelligence information. The effect is to bring virtually every international communication within the reach of the NSA's surveillance.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    "Among the things the NSA examines to determine whether a particular email address or phone number will be used to exchange foreign intelligence information is *whether it has been used in the past to communicate with foreigners."* Let that sink into your mind, please. Have you ever communicated with a foreigner? Have any of your communications ever been routed through servers in a foreign country? (The way the Internet works, it is an everyday event for just about anyone.) Does that constitute communication with a foreigner?  One of the many giant loopholes in the NSA's leaked procedures document for "minimizing" the collection of data on U.S. citizens.  
Paul Merrell

Senate goes for 'nuclear option' - Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim - POLITICO.com - 0 views

www.politico.com/...eid-nuclear-option-100199.html

U.S. Senate rules filibuster appointments

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The Senate approved a historic rules change on Thursday by eliminating the use of the filibuster on all presidential nominees except those to the U.S. Supreme Court.Invoking the long-threatened “nuclear option” means that most of President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees no longer need to clear a 60-vote threshold to reach the Senate floor and get an up-or-down vote.
  • Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48. Three Democrats voted against changing the rules — Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. “It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete,” Reid said in a lengthy floor speech on Thursday morning. A furious Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who tried to recess the Senate for the day before the rules change could get a vote, said after the minority’s power was limited by Democrats: “I don’t think this is a time to be talking about reprisal. I think it’s a time to be sad about what has been done to the United States Senate.”
  • The debate over the filibuster — and specifically its use on D.C. Circuit nominees — has been raging for nearly a decade, stretching back to when George W. Bush was president and Democrats were in the minority. But changing the Senate rules has always been avoided through a piecemeal deal, a gentleman’s agreement or a specific solution, not a historic change to the very fabric of the Senate.
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  • But since Obama’s nomination, the “nuclear option” has reared its head three times in less than a year — each time getting closer to the edge. Many in the Senate privately expected that this go-round would be yet another example of saber rattling, but Reid said pressure was increasing within his own party to change the rules. The blockade of three consecutive nominees to a powerful appellate court was too much for Democrats to handle — and Reid felt compelled to pull the trigger, explaining that “this is the way it has to be.”
  • Senate Democrats were quick to use their newfound powers, voting in the early afternoon to end the filibuster on Patricia Millett’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The vote was 55-43, with two senators voting present. Before the change earlier Thursday, Millett would have needed 60 votes to clear the procedural hurdle and move on to a confirmation vote. But now, she needed just 51 to advance.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13
     
    The Senate's filibuster rule, particularly since abandonment of the requirement that the filibustering Senator must keep talking so long as the filibuster continues, has seemed more and more an anachronism to me as I age. Its use to indefinitely block an up or down vote on a legislative measure -- in essence granting each Senator veto power over proposed measures seems fundamentally at odds with democratic principles to me. Certainly during my lifetime, the filibuster rule has been abused by both major parties, transforming a mere rule of procedure into an individual veto power nowhere set forth in the Constitution, in effect requiring a 60 per cent super-majority to pass a controversial measure. The Constitution is not silent on the subject of super-majorities in the Senate, specifying a super-majority to override a presidential veto and to remove a federal official from office by impeachment. Therefore, one might argue that the Founders knew how to write a super-majority requirement but did not see fit to require a supermajority to close debate and bring a measure to a vote. In other words, I favor abolishing the filibuster rule entirely and making "the nuclear option" standard procedure except where the Constitution establishes a super-majority requirement. To me it is not important that this limitation of the filibuster rule occurred when the Democrats had the majority in the Senate; whenever it were to happen, some party would be in the minority. And I do not believe that the People of this nation will be disadvantaged by up or down votes on Senate measures.  Now can we please get rid of the filibuster rule entirely?
Gary Edwards

United States Constitution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...United_States_Constitution

Alexis-de-Tocqueville freedom-liberty The-Constitution Globalist-Elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 13
     
    "The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America.[1] Check out that footnote!!! excerpt: The Constitution originally consisted of seven Articles. The first three Articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, whereby the federal government is divided into three branches: the legislature, consisting of the bicameral Congress; the executive, consisting of the President; and the judiciary, consisting of the Supreme Court and other federal courts. The fourth and sixth Articles frame the doctrine of federalism, describing the relationship between State and State, and between the several States and the federal government. The fifth Article provides the procedure for amending the Constitution. The seventh Article provides the procedure for ratifying the Constitution. The Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and ratified by conventions in eleven States. It went into effect on March 4, 1789.[2] Since the Constitution was adopted, it has been amended twenty-seven times. The first ten amendments (along with two others that were not ratified at the time) were proposed by Congress on September 25, 1789, and were ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the States on December 15, 1791.[3] These first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is interpreted, supplemented, and implemented by a large body of constitutional law. The Constitution of the United States was the first constitution of its kind, and has influenced the constitutions of many other nations."
Paul Merrell

We will no longer be fig leaf for occupation, says B'Tselem | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...g-leaf-occupation-says-btselem

war & peace Israel Palestine B'Tselem military-investigations

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • For as long as Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented human rights violations by Israel in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has also referred complaints to the Israeli military’s internal investigative unit. But this week, the nearly three-decade old human rights organization announced it will end its cooperation with Israel’s military law enforcement system. “As of today,” executive director Hagai El-Ad wrote in an emailed statement on 25 May, “we will no longer refer complaints to this system, and we will call on the Palestinian public not to do so either.” “We will no longer aid a system that whitewashes investigations and serves as a fig leaf for the occupation.” B’Tselem’s cooperation with the military’s investigations was not confined to filing complaints with the office of the Military Advocate General. The organization also assisted investigators to speak to Palestinians and Palestinian victims and obtain documents and medical records.
  • The decision to cease such work was announced alongside the publication of “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism.” The report examines the paucity of the army’s investigative efforts, that by design only probe the conduct of low-ranking soldiers. Orders are never placed under investigation, B’Tselem explains, only alleged breaches of orders. “B’Tselem’s cooperation with the military investigation and enforcement systems has not achieved justice, instead lending legitimacy to the occupation regime and aiding to whitewash it,” the report states. The decision has been percolating for some time. B’Tselem first broke with its usual practice in 2014, when it refused to provide information to the military unit investigating “irregular” incidents during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that summer. Since the second intifada, B’Tselem has demanded investigations into 739 cases in which Palestinians were killed, injured, used as human shields or subjected to other abuses.
  • Only 25 led to charges against soldiers. Of the rest, in nearly 75 percent of cases, investigations were either never opened or closed without further action. The outbreak of the second intifada in late 2000 marked a change in how Israel viewed the legality of soldiers killing Palestinians. Whereas before Israel would investigate every case in which a soldier killed a Palestinian, until 2011 Israel “permitted the use of force – even lethal force – against those identified as being involved in the fighting or in terror activity in certain circumstances,” as former Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit wrote in 2010.
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  • B’Tselem says that years of working within the system have given the organization an intimate familiarity and understanding of why it fails. Their report reveals an internal process whose default is to absolve military actions, and which is further legitimized by a civilian system that keeps the military insulated from any intervention. Israel has established multiple commissions to make recommendations for improving the investigative system. But even these, B’Tselem writes, just end up shielding the army from accountability. “Report after report, committee after committee, the discourse in itself creates the illusion of movement toward changing and improving the system,” the report states. “This illusory movement allows officials both inside and outside the system to make statements about the importance of the stated goal of enforcing the law on soldiers, while the substantive failures remain as they were and most cases continue to be closed with no measures taken.” This is the fig leaf which B’Tselem is now stripping away. At home and abroad, Israeli officials have pointed to their military law enforcement system as evidence of their military’s higher ethics and values.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 May 16
     
    I've read the report, which is devastating. Not mentioned in the article was that the NGO's decision was largely driven by the fact that witnesses repeatedly suffered retaliation, leading to the decision that the few successes were outweighed by the harm to witnesses.  Make no mistake: the NGO's decision to boycott the Israel military's established procedures for reporting and investigating crimes committed by Israeli mlliitary personnel against Palestinians will pack a wallop internationally. B-Tselem had lent an air of legitimacy to the IDF's procedures for investigating crimes against Palestinians committed by IDF forces. That fig leaf has now been removed. 
Paul Merrell

Fisa court documents reveal extent of NSA disregard for privacy restrictions | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cuments-nsa-violations-privacy

surveillance state NSA FISA Court lies NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy. The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism. While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations. “NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted.
  • “Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.” In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well.
  • The court had required the NSA to comply with a longstanding internal procedure for protecting Americans’ sensitive information prior to sharing the data internally within NSA, known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) and also declassified on Monday night; and additionally required a senior NSA official to determine that any material shared outside the powerful surveillance agency was related to counter-terrorism. Yet in a separate Fisa court document, the current presiding judge, Reggie Walton, blasted the government’s secret declaration that it followed USSID 18 “rather than specifically requiring that the narrower dissemination provision set forth in the Court’s orders in this matter be strictly adhered to”. Walton wrote: “The court understands this to mean that the NSA likely has disseminated US person information derived from the [email and internet bulk] metadata outside NSA without a prior determination from the NSA official designated in the court’s orders that the information is related to counter-terrorism information and is necessary to understand the counter-terrorism information or assess its importance.”
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  • In an opinion apparently written in June 2009, Walton said the court was “gravely concerned” that “NSA analysts, cleared and otherwise, have generally not adhered to the dissemination restrictions proposed by the government, repeatedly relied on by the court in authorizing the [email and internet bulk] metadata, and incorporated into the court’s orders in this matter [redacted] as binding on NSA.” Walton said the NSA’s legal team had failed to satisfy the training requirements that NSA frequently points to in congressional testimony as demonstrating its scrupulousness. Walton added that he was “seriously concerned” by the placement of Americans’ email and internet metadata into “databases accessible by outside agencies, which, as the government has acknowledged, violates not only the court’s orders, but also NSA’s minimization and dissemination procedures as set forth in USSID 18.”
  • In 2011, Bates wrote that the “volume and nature” of the NSA’s bulk collection on foreign internet content was “fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”. Yet the documents disclosed Monday night, thanks to a transparency lawsuit, show that Bates and Walton permitted the surveillance of Americans’ bulk email and internet metadata to continue under additional restrictions, out of concern for the ongoing terrorism threat.
  • Elizabeth Goitien of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that the declassified opinions raise disturbing questions about the NSA’s truthfulness. “Either the NSA is really trying to comply with the court’s orders and is absolutely incapable of doing so, in which case it’s terrifying that they’re performing this surveillance, or they’re not really trying to comply,” Goitien said. “Neither of those explanations is particularly comforting.”
Paul Merrell

James Clapper Confirms VADM Mike Rogers Needlessly Obfuscated in Confirmation Hearing |... - 0 views

www.emptywheel.net/...scated-in-confirmation-hearing

surveillance state NSA lies Clapper Mike-Rogers

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • On Friday, James Clapper finally provided Ron Wyden an unclassified response to a question he posed on January 29, admitting that the NSA conducts back door searches. (via Charlie Savage) As reflected in the August 2013 Semiannual Assessment of Compliance with Procedures and Guidelines Issued Pursuant to Section 702, which we declassified and released on August 21, 2013, there have been queries, using U.S. person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence by targeting non U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. pursuant to Section 702 of FISA. It has taken just 9 months for Clapper to admit that, contrary to months of denials, the NSA (and FBI, which he doesn’t confirm but which the Report makes clear, as well as the CIA) can get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant. But Clapper’s admission that this fact was declassified in August should disqualify Vice Admiral Mike Rogers from confirmation as CyberComm head (I believe he started serving as DIRNSA head, which doesn’t require confirmation, yesterday). Because it means Rogers refused to answer a question the response to which was already declassified.
  • Udall: If I might, in looking ahead, I want to turn to the 702 program and ask a policy question about the authorities under Section 702 that’s written into the FISA Amendments Act. The Committee asked your understanding of the legal rationale for NASA [sic] to search through data acquired under Section 702 using US person identifiers without probable cause. You replied the NASA–the NSA’s court approved procedures only permit searches of this lawfully acquired data using US person identifiers for valid foreign intelligence purposes and under the oversight of the Justice Department and the DNI. The statute’s written to anticipate the incidental collection of Americans’ communications in the course of collecting the communications of foreigners reasonably believed to be located overseas. But the focus of that collection is clearly intended to be foreigners’ communications, not Americans. But declassified court documents show that in 2011 the NSA sought and obtained the authority to go through communications collected under Section 702 and conduct warrantless searches for the communications of specific Americans. Now, my question is simple. Have any of those searches been conducted?
  • Rogers: I apologize Sir, I’m not in a position to answer that as the nominee. Udall: You–yes. Rogers: But if you would like me to come back to you in the future if confirmed to be able to specifically address that question I will be glad to do so, Sir. Udall: Let me follow up on that. You may recall that Director Clapper was asked this question in a hearing earlier this year and he didn’t believe that an open forum was the appropriate setting in which to discuss these issues. The problem that I have, Senator Wyden’s had, and others is that we’ve tried in various ways to get an unclassified answer — simple answer, yes or no — to the question. We want to have an answer because it relates — the answer does — to Americans’ privacy. Can you commit to answering the question before the Committee votes on your nomination?
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  • Rogers: Sir, I believe that one of my challenges as the Director, if confirmed, is how do we engage the American people — and by extension their representatives — in a dialogue in which they have a level of comfort as to what we are doing and why. That is no insignificant challenge for those of us with an intelligence background, to be honest. But I believe that one of the takeaways from the situation over the last few months has been as an intelligence professional, as a senior intelligence leader, I have to be capable of communicating in a way that we are doing and why to the greatest extent possible. That perhaps the compromise is, if it comes to the how we do things, and the specifics, those are perhaps best addressed in classified sessions, but that one of my challenges is I have to be able to speak in broad terms in a way that most people can understand. And I look forward to that challenge. Udall: I’m going to continue asking that question and I look forward to working with you to rebuild the confidence. [my emphasis]
  • I assume that now that Clapper has given him the okay to discuss unclassified topics with Congress, Rogers will now provide a forthright answer, all the while claiming he was ignorant about the answer at the time (fine! then make me DIRNSA because I know more about it!). But Rogers’ response went far beyond such an answer. He refused — not just in the hearing but even after it — to commit to answering a question with a completely unclassified answer. And as I pointed out in this post, his written answers were even more obfuscatory. I don’t get a vote. But I think this should disqualify him as a nominee.
  • Update: Here’s the exchange in Rogers’ questions for the record on back door searches. What is your understanding of the legal rationale for NSA to search through data acquired under section 702 using U.S. Persons identifiers without probable cause? Information acquired by NSA under Section 702 of FI SA must be handled in strict accordance with minimization procedures adopted by the Attorney General and approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. As required by the statute and certifications approving Section 702 acquisitions, such activities must be limite d to targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States . NSA’s Court-approved procedures only permit searches of this lawfully acquired data using U.S. person identifiers for valid foreign intelligence purposes and under the oversight of the Department of Justice and Office of Director of National Intelligence.
Paul Merrell

Prison Dispatches from the War on Terror: Gitmo Detainee's Life an "Endless Horror Movi... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...inee-life-endless-horror-movie

war & peace civil-liberties Gitmo-detainees al-Alwi IACHR-petition

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, a Yemeni national who has been detained at the American prison facility at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, weighs only 98 pounds. Never charged with a crime, al-Alwi, now 35 years old, is one of many detainees at the camp who have gone on a prolonged hunger strike. As described in a recent petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) by his lawyers, al-Alwi’s mental and physical state is seriously deteriorating after two years on hunger strike, and subsequent force-feeding.  Since commencing his strike in February 2013, al-Alwi alleges that he has been subjected to escalating physical and psychological abuse from guards, as well as increasingly brutal force-feeding procedures administered by medical personnel at the camp. Human rights organizations have described the force-feeding procedure employed at Guantánamo as torture, and the U.S. government has fought to keep video footage of the force-feeding of al-Alwi and other hunger-striking detainees from public view.
  • Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, a Yemeni national who has been detained at the American prison facility at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, weighs only 98 pounds. Never charged with a crime, al-Alwi, now 35 years old, is one of many detainees at the camp who have gone on a prolonged hunger strike. As described in a recent petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) by his lawyers, al-Alwi’s mental and physical state is seriously deteriorating after two years on hunger strike, and subsequent force-feeding.  Since commencing his strike in February 2013, al-Alwi alleges that he has been subjected to escalating physical and psychological abuse from guards, as well as increasingly brutal force-feeding procedures administered by medical personnel at the camp. Human rights organizations have described the force-feeding procedure employed at Guantánamo as torture, and the U.S. government has fought to keep video footage of the force-feeding of al-Alwi and other hunger-striking detainees from public view
  • Al-Alwi, who has described his strike as “a form of peaceful protest against injustice,” has said that he will not resume eating until there is some sort of legal resolution to his case. Prison officials have responded to his hunger strike by placing him in solitary confinement, denying him access to prescribed medical items and subjecting him to extreme temperatures in his cell. 
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  • According to the petition, al-Alwi’s nostril passages have now swelled shut due to the extra large tubes prison authorities have repeatedly forced down his nasal cavity during this feeding process. He also maintains that the force-feeding sessions have led to heavy vomiting and daily blood loss. Shackled to a chair for hours each day during the force-feeding sessions, al-Alwi now suffers severe back pain and other debilitating physical injuries. In his petition, al-Alwi describes his life in Guantánamo as “an endless horror story.” In April 2013, a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted a visit to Guantánamo to meet with detainees and assess conditions there. On the day immediately following their departure, armed guards raided a cellblock housing al-Alwi and several other hunger-striking detainees while they prepared for communal prayers.
  • The complaint further alleges that prisoners were physically assaulted by guards during this raid, some of whom fired rubber-coated steel bullets at them. Al-Alwi was among those wounded, with bullets hitting him in his thigh, elbow and back as he tried to flee from guards firing at him; those shots were allegedly fired from the other side of a chain-link fence. Al-Alwi says that he has never received adequate medical treatment for these wounds; he was handcuffed and left to bleed for 20 minutes by guards before a doctor arrived. A few of his wounds were rubbed with anti-infection cream while the remainder have remained wholly untreated to this day. As a result, al-Alwi says that he suffers chronic and debilitating pain and swelling from these injuries.
  • The circumstances leading to al-Alwi’s detention at Guantánamo are obscure. One of hundreds of young Arab men who were captured by Pakistani bounty hunters following the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Alwi was not a known or wanted terrorist, but was nonetheless turned over to U.S. troops by locals in Pakistan for a cash reward later that year. On Jan. 16, 2002, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay where he has remained ever since. A 2006 report by Amnesty International found that cash bounties offered for turning over “terrorists” to U.S. forces had effectively created a lucrative cash market for capturing young Arab men in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fliers distributed by the U.S. government in the region offered “millions of dollars” in exchange for turning over purported Al-Qaeda and Taliban members, promising those who were able to render suspects to American custody “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”
  • Al-Alwi says that American interrogators tortured him until he made false confessions about his involvement in terrorism. Despite having now spent over a decade in custody, with no foreseeable prospect of release, he has not been charged with any crime. Describing his brutal treatment by riot guards who come to restrain him for force-feedings, al-Alwi told his lawyers in the petition:  “I weigh less than 100 pounds. I wear braces on both ankles, and both wrists, and one around my lower back. I am five foot five … and they claim that I am ‘resisting’ … How can I possibly resist anyone, let alone these men?”
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Mar 15
     
    "... in the land of the free and the home of the brave" forget about the right to a speedy trial.
Paul Merrell

In Hearing on Internet Surveillance, Nobody Knows How Many Americans Impacted in Data C... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...w-many-americans-impacted-data

surveillance state NSA 702 FISA legislation backdoor-serches stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • The Senate Judiciary Committee held an open hearing today on the FISA Amendments Act, the law that ostensibly authorizes the digital surveillance of hundreds of millions of people both in the United States and around the world. Section 702 of the law, scheduled to expire next year, is designed to allow U.S. intelligence services to collect signals intelligence on foreign targets related to our national security interests. However—thanks to the leaks of many whistleblowers including Edward Snowden, the work of investigative journalists, and statements by public officials—we now know that the FISA Amendments Act has been used to sweep up data on hundreds of millions of people who have no connection to a terrorist investigation, including countless Americans. What do we mean by “countless”? As became increasingly clear in the hearing today, the exact number of Americans impacted by this surveillance is unknown. Senator Franken asked the panel of witnesses, “Is it possible for the government to provide an exact count of how many United States persons have been swept up in Section 702 surveillance? And if not the exact count, then what about an estimate?”
  • Elizabeth Goitein, the Brennan Center director whose articulate and thought-provoking testimony was the highlight of the hearing, noted that at this time an exact number would be difficult to provide. However, she asserted that an estimate should be possible for most if not all of the government’s surveillance programs. None of the other panel participants—which included David Medine and Rachel Brand of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as well as Matthew Olsen of IronNet Cybersecurity and attorney Kenneth Wainstein—offered an estimate. Today’s hearing reaffirmed that it is not only the American people who are left in the dark about how many people or accounts are impacted by the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of the Internet. Even vital oversight committees in Congress like the Senate Judiciary Committee are left to speculate about just how far-reaching this surveillance is. It's part of the reason why we urged the House Judiciary Committee to demand that the Intelligence Community provide the public with a number. 
  • The lack of information makes rigorous oversight of the programs all but impossible. As Senator Franken put it in the hearing today, “When the public lacks even a rough sense of the scope of the government’s surveillance program, they have no way of knowing if the government is striking the right balance, whether we are safeguarding our national security without trampling on our citizens’ fundamental privacy rights. But the public can’t know if we succeed in striking that balance if they don’t even have the most basic information about our major surveillance programs."  Senator Patrick Leahy also questioned the panel about the “minimization procedures” associated with this type of surveillance, the privacy safeguard that is intended to ensure that irrelevant data and data on American citizens is swiftly deleted. Senator Leahy asked the panel: “Do you believe the current minimization procedures ensure that data about innocent Americans is deleted? Is that enough?”  David Medine, who recently announced his pending retirement from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, answered unequivocally:
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  • Senator Leahy, they don’t. The minimization procedures call for the deletion of innocent Americans’ information upon discovery to determine whether it has any foreign intelligence value. But what the board’s report found is that in fact information is never deleted. It sits in the databases for 5 years, or sometimes longer. And so the minimization doesn’t really address the privacy concerns of incidentally collected communications—again, where there’s been no warrant at all in the process… In the United States, we simply can’t read people’s emails and listen to their phone calls without court approval, and the same should be true when the government shifts its attention to Americans under this program. One of the most startling exchanges from the hearing today came toward the end of the session, when Senator Dianne Feinstein—who also sits on the Intelligence Committee—seemed taken aback by Ms. Goitein’s mention of “backdoor searches.” 
  • Feinstein: Wow, wow. What do you call it? What’s a backdoor search? Goitein: Backdoor search is when the FBI or any other agency targets a U.S. person for a search of data that was collected under Section 702, which is supposed to be targeted against foreigners overseas. Feinstein: Regardless of the minimization that was properly carried out. Goitein: Well the data is searched in its unminimized form. So the FBI gets raw data, the NSA, the CIA get raw data. And they search that raw data using U.S. person identifiers. That’s what I’m referring to as backdoor searches. It’s deeply concerning that any member of Congress, much less a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, might not be aware of the problem surrounding backdoor searches. In April 2014, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the searches of this data, which Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall termed “the ‘back-door search’ loophole in section 702.” The public was so incensed that the House of Representatives passed an amendment to that year's defense appropriations bill effectively banning the warrantless backdoor searches. Nonetheless, in the hearing today it seemed like Senator Feinstein might not recognize or appreciate the serious implications of allowing U.S. law enforcement agencies to query the raw data collected through these Internet surveillance programs. Hopefully today’s testimony helped convince the Senator that there is more to this topic than what she’s hearing in jargon-filled classified security briefings.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 May 16
     
    The 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and *particularly describing the place to be searched, and the* persons or *things to be seized."* So much for the particularized description of the place to be searched and the thngs to be seized.  Fah! Who needs a Constitution, anyway .... 
Paul Merrell

Latif v. Holder :: Ninth Circuit :: US Courts of Appeals Cases :: US Federal Case Law :... - 0 views

law.justia.com/...11-35407-2012-07-26.html

freedom to travel constitutional law no-fly list

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Plaintiffs were United States citizens or legal permanent residents who had good reason to believe they were on the Terrorist Screening Center's (TSC) no-fly list (List). They initially submitted grievances through the redress program run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), but the government refused to confirm or deny their inclusion on the List. Rather than continuing to pursue their administrative grievances with the TSA, Plaintiffs filed this action against the directors of the TSC and FBI and the attorney general, challenging the TSA's grievance procedures. The district court dismissed the case, holding that TSA was a necessary party to the litigation but that TSA could not feasibly be joined in the district court due to 49 U.S.C. 46110, which grants federal courts of appeals exclusive jurisdiction to review TSA's final orders. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding (1) section 46110 does not strip the district court of federal question jurisdiction over substantive challenges to the inclusion of one's name on the List; and (2) the district court's determination that TSA was a necessary party was not an abuse of discretion, but the court erred in holding that joinder of TSA was infeasible in light of section 46110.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Jul 12
     
    The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down a lower court ruling that in effect would have prevented people from challenging their placement on the Terrorist Screening Center's "no-fly list." The Court of Appeals cleared the way for the plaintiffs to sue the heads of three federal agencies for failure to provide a meaningful Due Process procedure for them to respond to the evidence that landed them on the list. A big blow for freedom from arbitrary government  action.   
Paul Merrell

Has the NSA Wiretapping Violated Attorney-Client Privilege? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...ated-attorney-client-privilege

surveillance state NSA-targets attorney-client-privilege must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The first time Adis Medunjanin tried to call Robert C. Gottlieb in mid-2009, Gottlieb was out of the office. Medunjanin was agitated. He had to speak to an attorney. Gottlieb’s assistant told him Gottlieb would be back soon. When Medunjanin spoke to the lawyer a little later, he was told he might need legal representation. He thought he might be under investigation. Over the next six months and in forty-two phone calls, Medunjanin sought legal advice from Gottlieb. When he was arrested in January 2010 on charges that he tried to bomb the New York subway, it was Gottlieb who defended him, receiving security clearance to review government documents pertinent to the case in the process. Gottlieb was preparing Medunjanin’s defense when a federal officer in charge of information distribution e-mailed him that there was new classified information he needed to review at the US Eastern District Court in Brooklyn. “I went over to the Brooklyn Federal courthouse, went up to the secured room, gained entry with the secret security codes, opened the file cabinet that is also secure and in the second drawer was a CD,” Gottlieb told me. On that CD were recordings of every single one of his forty-two phone calls with Medunjanin before he was taken into custody and indicted on January 7, 2010.
  • Such calls are normally sacrosanct under the principle of attorney-client privilege, the ability to speak confidentially with your lawyer. But a leak to The Guardian last summer of National Security Agency (NSA) procedures that are supposed to protect privileged calls showed that some attorney-client privileged calls are not subject to internal rules that detail the instances when a wiretap should be turned off. A later version of the procedures declassified by the NSA last August contains the same language. These “minimization” procedures, as they are known, are the rules and regulations for wiretaps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). They tell NSA agents when they can listen, and when they have to turn the tap off, when they can record and when they should not be recording. There are rules for which kinds of communications can be monitored—for example, domestic communications are off limits, although communications from agents of foreign powers and suspected terrorists don’t count as domestic—and there is a section that provides for the protection of attorney-client calls.
  • Section four of the declassified 2011 guidelines is the part of that document that governs wiretapping attorney-client calls. At first glance, it seems quite clear: when the agent realizes that he or she is monitoring an attorney-client communication, “monitoring of that communication will cease and the communication will be identified as an attorney-client communication in a log maintained for that purpose.” But given a second reading, section four doesn’t apply to all attorney-client calls. It provides only for the minimization (and protection) of the calls of “a person who is known to be under criminal indictment in the United States”—someone who has already been charged under US law. This is because indicted persons have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel. People who aren’t indicted don’t have this right, and so their calls are not minimized. When I asked an NSA press officer, Vanee’ M. Vines, how attorney-client privilege was protected, she referred me to the Department of Justice. I left several messages, but the DOJ never contacted me back.
Paul Merrell

Victory! Federal Court Recognizes Constitutional Rights of Americans on the No-Fly List... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...ctory-federal-court-recognizes

war on terror™ no-fly-list Due Process litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • A federal court took a critically important step late yesterday towards placing a check on the government's secretive No-Fly List. In a 38-page ruling in Latif v. Holder, the ACLU's challenge to the No-Fly List, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown recognized that the Constitution applies when the government bans Americans from the skies. She also asked for more information about the current process for getting off the list, to inform her decision on whether that procedure violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process. We represent 13 Americans, including four military veterans, who are blacklisted from flying. At oral argument in June on motions for partial summary judgment, we asked the court to find that the government violated our clients' Fifth Amendment right to due process by barring them from flying over U.S. airspace – and smearing them as suspected terrorists – without giving them any after-the-fact explanation or a hearing at which to clear their names. The court's opinion recognizes – for the first time – that inclusion on the No-Fly List is a draconian sanction that severely impacts peoples' constitutionally-protected liberties. It rejected the government's argument that No-Fly list placement was merely a restriction on the most "convenient" means of international travel.
  • Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation. According to the court, placement on the No-Fly List is like the revocation of a passport because both actions severely burden the right to international travel and give rise to a constitutional right to procedural due process: Here it is undisputed that inclusion on the No-Fly List completely bans listed persons from boarding commercial flights to or from the United States or over United States air space.  Thus, Plaintiffs have shown their placement on the No-Fly List has in the past and will in the future severely restrict Plaintiffs' ability to travel internationally. Moreover, the realistic implications of being on the No-Fly List are potentially far-reaching. For example, TSC [the Terrorist Screening Center] shares watchlist information with 22 foreign governments and United States Customs and Boarder [sic] Protection makes recommendations to ship captains as to whether a passenger poses a risk to transportation security, which can result in further interference with an individual's ability to travel as evidenced by some Plaintiffs' experiences as they attempted to travel abroad by boat and land and were either turned away or completed their journey only after an extraordinary amount of time, expense, and difficulty. Accordingly, the Court concludes on this record that Plaintiffs have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the list. The court also found that the government's inclusion of our clients on the No-Fly List smeared them as suspected terrorists and altered their ability to lawfully board planes, resulting in injury to another constitutionally-protected right: freedom from reputational harm.
  • The importance of these rulings is clear. Because inclusion on the No-Fly List harms our clients' liberty interests in travel and reputation, due process requires the government to provide them an explanation and a hearing to correct the mistakes that led to their inclusion. But under the government's "Glomar" policy, it refuses to provide any information confirming or denying that our clients are on the list, let alone an after-the-fact explanation and hearing. The court has asked the ACLU and the government for more information about the No-Fly List redress procedure to help it decide the ultimate question of whether that system violates the Fifth Amendment right to due process. We are confident the court will recognize that the government's "Glomar" policy of refusing even to confirm or deny our clients' No-Fly List status (much less actually providing the reasons for their inclusion in the list) is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13
     
    A case decision in August that I had missed, right here in Oregon. One of our Oregon federal judges gets it right after being reversed the first time by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I've read the opinion. Looks quite solid. Plaintiffs were carefully chosen for this test case, 13 citizens placed on the no-fly list, all with compelling stories of winding up stranded, some overseas. Several are U.S. military veterans. All were told by government officials that the reason they could not board was because they were on the TSA no-fly list. At issue is whether they have a right to be informed of the information that resulted in them being placed on the no-fly list and a right to a hearing to seek correction of the information. Their constitutional interest in their reputations is also in play, since they have been classified by their government as too dangerous to allow to travel by commercial airline.   The district court case is not done; the judge has ordered further briefing on some issues. But the government is trying to defend a process in which no one is ever formally notified that they are on the no-fly list and is never advised of the reasons they are on the no-fly list. The number of Americans on the no-fly list is now over 700,000. But the judge has recognized that there is a constitutional right to travel and that it extends to international travel. From the opinion: "Plaintiffs contend the government has deprived them of their protected liberty interest in travel. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held "[t]he right to travel is part of the 'liberty' of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment."  Id. at 125. As noted by the Ninth Circuit, "the [Supreme] Court has consistently treated the right to international travel as a liberty interest that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment." DeNieva v. Reyes, 966 F.2d 480, 485 (9th Cir. 1992)(emp
Paul Merrell

White House refuses to hand over top-secret documents to Senate committee | World news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...re-top-secret-documents-senate

war & peace torture Senate-Intelligence-Committee Obama withholding

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The White House is refusing to hand over top-secret documents to a Senate investigation into CIA torture and rendition of terrorism suspects, claiming it needs to ensure that “executive branch confidentiality” is respected.In the latest development in the spiralling clash between Congress and the administration over oversight of the intelligence agencies, Barack Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that certain material from the George W Bush presidency was being withheld for fear of weakening Oval Office privacy.“This is about precedent, and the need, institutionally, to protect some of the prerogatives of the executive branch – and the office of the presidency,” said Carney.“All of these documents pertain to and come from a previous administration, but these are matters that need to be reviewed in light of long-recognised executive prerogatives and confidentiality interests.”
  • A report published by McClatchy newspapers on Wednesday night said that Senate investigators were trying to obtain an estimated 9,400 such documents relating to CIA detention and interrogation after 9/11.
  • In public, the White House has tried to stay out of a growing constitutional clash between Congress and the CIA over alleged interference in the investigation. Reuters reported that the White House chief lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, had tried to mediate in private between both sides in an attempt to “de-escalate” the tension.But the admission that the White House is withholding key documents is likely to renew criticism that the Obama administration is failing to live up to promises to fully investigate a dark chapter in CIA history.
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  • Udall said he had lifted a procedural obstacle he had placed on the CIA’s nominee for its next general counsel, Caroline Krass. That sets up the departure of its acting senior attorney, Robert Eatinger, who is at the centre of this week’s extraordinary battle between the Senate intelligence committee and the CIA.Krass had already cleared the Senate committee, but Udall put her on hold to gain leverage for the committee in its struggle for access to CIA documents relevant to its extensive study of the agency’s post-9/11 interrogation, rendition and detention program, which involved torture.The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Krass, sending her to Langley at a time when relations between the CIA and the Senate have reached a nadir. While Eatinger was never going to be the agency’s permanent general counsel, he is now the first explicit casualty in the row between the CIA and its Senate overseers.Eatinger, a longtime agency lawyer with counterterrorism experience, was cited on Monday by the panel’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, in her seminal speech lashing out at the CIA. Without naming him, Feinstein indicated he was instrumental in the agency’s now-abandoned torture practices, and had been cited over 1,600 times in the classified Senate torture investigation.
  • Feinstein said Eatinger, whom senators have taken care not to name, had alerted the Justice Department to her staff’s removal of a CIA document from a classified facility – which both Feinstein and Udall cite as a conflict of interest.Ahead of Krass’s arrival at the CIA, Udall called on Eatinger to immediately recuse himself from any internal matters related to either the torture inquiry or the Senate panel generally. “We need to correct the record on the CIA’s coercive detention and interrogation program and declassify the Senate intelligence committee’s exhaustive study of it. I released my hold on Caroline Krass’s nomination today and voted for her to help change the direction of the agency,” Udall said in a statement on Thursday.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14
     
    6 million documents. Which means that the Administration chose the time-proven tactic of emptying wastebaskets to have *something* to talk about in defense of withholding the truly damning documents. The Senate committee asked for Swiss Cheese; the administration provided only the cheese's holes. 6,400 documents is far more than the Administration will hold back if this issue winds up in court because of the truly staggering paperwork burden placed on the Administration by procedures for subpoena cases. The White House will have the burdens of proof and persuasion, with a strong presumption favoring production of the records.  For a good quick overview of the governing law and its constitutional history, see the D.C. Circuit's opinion In re sealed Case, 121 F. 3d 729 (1997),  http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7608826439463067791
Paul Merrell

NSA 'secret backdoor' paved way to U.S. phone, e-mail snooping | Politics and Law - CNE... - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...y-to-u.s-phone-e-mail-snooping

surveillance state NSA Obama lies must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A report in the Guardian on Friday quoted Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as saying the secret rule offers a loophole allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans." That appears to confirm what Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in June after receiving a classified briefing from administration officials a few days earlier on the extent of the NSA's domestic surveillance operations. If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he had been told during the briefing. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary Committee.
  • FBI Director Robert Mueller responded by assuring Nadler, according to a transcript of the hearing, that to "listen to the phone," the government would need "a particularized order" from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- a claim that is contradicted by today's Guardian report and other documents. Mueller has been succeeded by James Comey, who was confirmed last month by the Senate. In response to a CNET article at the time, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement saying: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper never elaborated, however, on what "proper" authorization would be. Today's top-secret document leaked by Snowden reveals that "procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data."
  • FAA 702 is a reference to section 702 of a 2008 law that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those amendments created a warrantless surveillance process that could be employed by NSA analysts, but Congress never intended it to be used domestically against American citizens: A congressional report accompanying the law claimed it allows electronic surveillance only of "persons located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information." In reality, though, the Obama Justice Department has devised secret interpretations of FAA 702 carving out loopholes in what were intended to be strict privacy safeguards. One loophole revealed in June shows that NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts are granted broad access to data vacuumed up by the world's most powerful intelligence agency -- but are supposed to follow certain "targeting" and "minimization" procedures to limit the number of Americans who become individual targets of warrantless surveillance.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Today's disclosures appear to be at odds with what President Obama has said over the last two months in defense of NSA surveillance. "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails," Obama has said. Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
  • AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which Congress renewed in 2012. It says that any civil lawsuit "against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community...shall be promptly dismissed." Section 702 of the law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- in practice, this means analysts at the NSA and other agencies with intelligence functions -- as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed. It's unclear whether the court has approved the "secret backdoor" allowing Americans' e-mail and phone messages to be targeted for domestic surveillance.
Paul Merrell

Lack of Due Diligence: The NSA's "the Analyst Didn't Give a Fuck" Violation | emptywheel - 0 views

www.emptywheel.net/...st-didnt-give-a-fuck-violation

surveillance state NSA privacy-violations stats lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The NSA claims there have been no willful violations the law relating to the NSA databases. For example, NSA’s Director of Compliance John DeLong just said ”NSA has a zero tolerance policy for willful misconduct. None of the incidents were willful.” House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers just said the documents show “no intentional or willful violations.” Which is why I want to look more closely at the user error categories included in the May 3, 2012 audit. The report doesn’t actually break down the root cause of errors across all violations. But it does for 3 different types of overlapping incident types (the 195 FISA authority incidents, the 115 database query ones, and the 772 S2 Directorate violations).
  • What I’m interested in are the three main types of operator error: human error, resources, and lack of due diligence.
  • But then there’s a third category: lack of due diligence. The report defines lack of due diligence as “a failure to follow standard operating procedures.” But some failure to follow standard operating procedure is accounted for in other categories, like training, the misapplied query techniques, and the apparent inadequate research violations. This category appears to be something different than the “honest mistake” errors categorized under human error. In fact, by the very exclusion of these violations from the “human error” category, NSA seems to be admitting these violations aren’t errors. These violations of standard operating procedures, it seems, are intentional. Not errors. Willful violations. At the very least, this category seems to count the violations on behalf of analysts who just don’t give a fuck what he rules are, they’re going to ignore the rules. This category, what consider the “Analyst didn’t give a fuck” category, accounts for 9% to 20% of all the violations broken out by root cause.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In aggregate, these violations may not amount to all that many given the thousands of queries run every year — they make up just 68 of the violations in S2, for example. Those 68 due diligence violations make up almost 8% of the violations in the quarter, not counting due diligence violations that may have happened in other Directorates. John DeLong, who is in charge of compliance at NSA, says the Agency has zero tolerance for willful misconduct. But the NSA appears to have a good deal more tolerance for a lack of due diligence.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13
     
    Marcy at EmptyWheel digs into the leaked NSA audit reports and exposes what appears to be another Obama Administration lie: that none of the violations of surveillance law by NSA staff were willful. NSA appears to be hiding the willful violations under the misleadingly titled "lack of due diligence" category. Who says numbers can't lie, if they're miscategorized?   
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