Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

unskewedewd · Sep 8, 2013

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011
By Ellen Nakashima, Published: September 7

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agencys use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban at the governments request on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSAs authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administrations assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term target that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the governments approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans privacy later.

The government says, Were not targeting U.S. persons, said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. But then they never say, We turn around and deliberately search for Americans records in what we took from the wire. That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.

The court decision allowed the NSA to query the vast majority of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Batess opinion.

The queries must be reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information. And the results are subject to the NSAs privacy rules.

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the governments request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities, he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, we did ask the court to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. We wanted to be able to do it, he said, referring to the searching of Americans communications without a warrant.

Joel gave hypothetical examples of why the authority was needed, such as when the NSA learns of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects that a U.S. person may be a conspirator. Searching for communications to, from or about that person can help assess that persons involvement and whether he is in touch with terrorists who are surveillance targets, he said. Officials would not say how many searches have been conducted.

The courts expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a back-door search loophole that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the courts authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.

The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners, Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.

Senior administration officials disagree. If were validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we dont have to close our eyes to that, Litt said. Im not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information weve already collected.

The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner reasonably believed to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year.

But and this was the nub of the criticism a warrant for each target would no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or foreign powers.

That is why it is important to require a warrant before searching for Americans data, Udall said. Our founders laid out a roadmap where Americans privacy rights are protected before their communications are seized or searched not after the fact, he said in a statement to The Post.

Another change approved by Bates allows the agency to keep the e-mails of or concerning Americans for up to six years, with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Because the retention period begins from the expiration date of the one-year surveillance period, the court effectively added up to one year of shelf life for the e-mails collected at the beginning of the period.

Joel said that the change was intended to standardize retention periods across the agencies and that the more generous standard was already in use by another agency.

The NSA intercepts more than 250 million Internet communications each year under Section 702. Ninety-one percent are from U.S. Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. The rest come from upstream companies that route Internet traffic to, from and within the United States. The expanded search authority applies only to the downstream collection.
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The FISA court should be disbanded and the Supreme Court should strike section 702 and rule that all data previously collected in second or third hop links to actual suspects should be deleted.

unskewedewd · Sep 8, 2013

NSA Defends Encryption Backdoors By Promising It's Only Used To Spy On All Of Us

from the choice-of-words... dept
The Director of National Intelligence has now responded to the unveiling of the fact that the NSA inserted backdoors in various forms of encryption and recruited internal spies at telco companies with one of his typically ridiculous statements using carefully parsed words. It sounds like the NSA rushed out that statement, because the attempt to assure the public that it's just being used on bad people leaves open a pretty large loophole. See if you can spot it:

Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.

Highlighting added by me. Here's a tip: when trying to reassure the public that you're not abusing your powers, and that you're breaking basic encryption used widely across the internet for their own good by narrowly targeting whom it's used against, maybe (just maybe) don't include a hedge word that includes every human being on earth.

As Ken White noted, we are all "others" here. We've already noted that previous leaks, concerning "minimization" have shown that the NSA people believe that if your data is encrypted then they can keep it, because you might be evil, and that comes through here as well. They keep trying to focus on how this is just about stopping terrorists, but it always leaves that massive loophole for "others."

So, once again, the NSA's attempt to insist that what it's doing is narrow and targeted and just after "the bad guys," yet again only breeds further reasons to trust the NSA even less. As White notes, this whole situation is particularly disturbing because so much can be classified under "others" that should be seen as reasonable and normal activity of a person who questions whether the government is really acting as a representative of the people.

I am the other because I do not trust my government in general, or the people working for its security apparatus in particular.

I am the other because I believe the Security State and its representatives habitually lie, both directly and by misleading language, about the scope of their spying on us. I believe they feel entitled to do so.

I am the other because I believe the Security State and its representatives habitually violate such modest restrictions as a complacent and compliant legislature puts on their spying again, because they feel entitled to do so.

I am the other because I don't believe the Security State and its representatives when they say that government spying is reserved for foreign terrorists. In fact, the NSA's "minimization" techniques touted as methods for restricting spying to foreign terrorists instead of U.S. citizens are often transparently and insultingly ridiculous.

I am the other because I don't believe my government when it tries to convince us that enhanced spying techniques are used to protect us from terrorists. I believe, instead, that the increased powers acquired by my government since 9/11 have been habitually brought to bear for domestic purposes, including such things as the ruinous and amoral War on Drugs.

Ken goes on from there and it's well worth reading the entire statement. The NSA sees the American public as the adversary and believes it can track pretty much anyone as an "other." And for those who believe you "have nothing to fear because you've done nothing wrong," it's time to recognize that you too, are the "other."
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trucker · Sep 8, 2013

wow they have a lot of authority, who keeps them in check?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

Data mining
Protesters against NSA data mining in Berlin wearing Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden masks.
Main articles: PRISM (surveillance program), Data mining, analytics, information extraction, and data analysis

NSA is reported to use its computing capability to analyze "transactional" data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities.
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trucker · Sep 8, 2013

check this out have they broken there own rules? goal #5
http://www.nsa.gov/about/strategic_plan/index.shtml

GOAL 5: Manifesting Principled Performance - Accomplishing our missions with a commitment to a principled and steadfast approach to performance through compliance, lawfulness, and protection of public trust must be paramount.
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unskewedewd · Sep 8, 2013

trucker said: ↑

wow they have a lot of authority, who keeps them in check?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
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I believe that this quote

NSA is reported to use its computing capability to analyze "transactional" data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities.
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Is saying the other organizations are collecting data "under their own jurisdictional authorities," meaning "don't blame the NSA!"

Hmmm... I wonder if the world's most powerful computers and brightest engineers, programmers, and crypto-analysts employed by the world's only superpower are capable of editing their own wikipedia entry in order to reduce the validity of the continually breaking scandals that are undercutting the perceived need of its continued existence? That would be a technological miracle, wouldn't it?

trucker · Sep 8, 2013

unskewedewd said: ↑

I believe that this quote

Is saying the other organizations are collecting data "under their own jurisdictional authorities," meaning "don't blame the NSA!"

Hmmm... I wonder if the world's most powerful computers and brightest engineers, programmers, and crypto-analysts employed by the world's only superpower are capable of editing their own wikipedia entry in order to reduce the validity of the continually breaking scandals that are undercutting the perceived need of its continued existence? That would be a technological miracle, wouldn't it?
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yeah have you seen how big there getting.. holy cow this place keeps growing like a weed out of control can you imagine the true cost to the tax payers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

NSA held a groundbreaking ceremony at Ft. Meade in May 2013 for its High Performance Computing Center 2, expected to open in 2016.[49] Called Site M, the center has a 150 megawatt power substation, 14 administrative buildings and 10 parking garages.[37] It cost $3.2 billion and covers 227 acres (92 ha; 0.355 sq mi).[37] The center is 1,800,000 square feet (17 ha; 0.065 sq mi)[37] and initially uses 60 megawatts of electricity.[50]

Increments II and III are expected to be completed by 2030, and would quadruple the space, covering 5,800,000 square feet (54 ha; 0.21 sq mi) with 60 buildings and 40 parking garages.[37] Defense contractors are also establishing or expanding cybersecurity facilities near the NSA and around the Washington metropolitan area.[37]
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unskewedewd · Sep 9, 2013

trucker said: ↑

yeah have you seen how big there getting.. holy cow this place keeps growing like a weed out of control can you imagine the true cost to the tax payers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm well aware. I've been following the NSA & CYBERCOM's expansion and illegal activity since at latest 2008. I'm a big fan of the "Antifacist calling..." blog, and have been reading both Wired, and Glen Greenwald for years.

As the NSA is overseen (supposedly) by the DoD, yet has another foot in the intelligence world, even with the revelation of the classified intelligence budget, we're only getting a shadow of how much it's actually costing us (in a strictly monetary sense,) considering the DoD has its own black budget.

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Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

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Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

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