Edward Snowden is doing a Q&A at the Guardian right now -
The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history is answering your questions about the NSA surveillance revelations follow it live now.
Snowden’s being as evasive and convoluted in his answers as the government has been. This is not providing clarity.
(Source: antigovernmentextremist)
“The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.”
—
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants | Politics and Law - CNET News
If this is true, then it was—help me out here, is there any way to characterize it more charitably than calling it a “lie”—okay, a lie, when President Obama said, “No one is listening to your telephone conversations.” So let’s hope Nadler got it wrong, because I don’t want to believe that what he’s saying is accurate, and I don’t want to believe that the President would so directly lie to the public about an issue of this significance.
(via jeffmiller)
Talking Points Memo has this follow-up:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/think_thats_all_she_wrote.php
We now have a statement from Rep. Nadler which seems to debunk the CNET piece which Idiscussed in the earlier post.
“I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”
This is needless to say still a somewhat cryptic quote, leaving unclear who misunderstood who. But it seems to say definitively that the central claim in the CNET article is incorrect.
(via moorewr)
There is a similar statement from the DNI that ““The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress … .” This is a weird way to try to deny something. Does it mean that two analysts working together could eavesdrop without proper legal authorization? Does it mean an analyst could eavesdrop without proper authorization if his boss approves it? Why should anyone be able to eavedrop without proper authorization? I hope that the DNI’s statement was just poorly drafted, and not intentionally vague and misleading. But we don’t know, because the administration won’t have an actual debate about the facts, despite the President’s inistence that he welcomes such a debate.
(via moorewr)
“The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.”
—
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants | Politics and Law - CNET News
If this is true, then it was—help me out here, is there any way to characterize it more charitably than calling it a “lie”—okay, a lie, when President Obama said, “No one is listening to your telephone conversations.” So let’s hope Nadler got it wrong, because I don’t want to believe that what he’s saying is accurate, and I don’t want to believe that the President would so directly lie to the public about an issue of this significance.
chaptertwelve asked:
So. Given what we’ve learned in the past few days, and bearing in mind what we may learn in the days ahead, what do you imagine as our best and worst case scenarios in terms of a path forward? How do you see all of this playing out in the near and distant future?
1. Best case scenario, public outcry grows, and politicians feel pressured to put protections into the law that require probable cause for individualized warrants, and prohibit the blanket kind of surveillance that’s been used by the administration. The FISA court is changed in some way that makes it an actual check on potential abuse. Perhaps the Supreme Court is permitted to review all FISA judgments in camera in some kind of audit for abuse.
2. Worst case scenario, most of the public never cares about the surveillance. Other stories push the issue from the news, and the government continues to amass large amounts of private information concerning all citizens. The FBI starts to access this information for non-terrorist cases. Other government agencies do the same. The IRS checks your online purchases. The EPA monitors purchases of materials that might pollute. Those who express controversial opinions or visit controversial websites are watched. Rogue government employees access private data for their own person gain—selling it to interested parties, blackmailing people engaged in extramarital affairs, stealing identities. You’ll come home from work to find that your home has been ransacked by a SWAT team pursuant to a warrant issued by a secret court for unspecified reasons.
I fear that that the most likely outcome is closer to 2 than 1. Consider how crazy the drug war has become—the massive amounts of money spent to fight it, the increasingly militarized local police forces that enforce prohibition, the asset forfeiture laws that take private property from innocent citizens without any due process, and the massive incarceration of millions of people for extraordinarily long periods of time. At the beginning of the drug war, you’d be laughed at for suggesting that this would happen. But it did, because people just didn’t care, and drugs were scary. Terrorism is scarier than drugs, so you can imagine how that’s going to play out.
(reposted for reblogging)
“[For two years, President Obama has resisted being drawn deeper into the civil war in Syria. It was a miserable problem, he told aides, and not one he thought he could solve… . So when Mr. Obama agreed this week for the first time to send small arms and ammunition to Syrian rebel forces, he had to be almost dragged into the decision at a time when critics, some advisers and even Bill Clinton were pressing for more action. Coming so late into the conflict, Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement.” —
Heavy Pressure Led to Decision by Obama on Syrian Arms - NYTimes.com
The President didn’t want to intervene, and believes it won’t change the outcome … so we’re going to intervene. Change, Hope, Forward, and such.
[video]
chaptertwelve asked: So. Given what we've learned in the past few days, and bearing in mind what we may learn in the days ahead, what do you imagine as our best and worst case scenarios in terms of a path forward? How do you see all of this playing out in the near and distant future?
1. Best case scenario, public outcry grows, and politicians feel pressured to put protections into the law that require probable cause for individualized warrants, and prohibit the blanket kind of surveillance that’s been used by the administration. The FISA court is changed in some way that makes it an actual check on potential abuse. Perhaps the Supreme Court is permitted to review all FISA judgments in camera in some kind of audit for abuse.
2. Worst case scenario, most of the public never cares about the surveillance. Other stories push the issue from the news, and the government continues to amass large amounts of private information concerning all citizens. The FBI starts to access this information for non-terrorist cases. Other government agencies do the same. The IRS checks your online purchases. The EPA monitors purchases of materials that might pollute. Those who express controversial opinions or visit controversial websites are watched. Rogue government employees access private data for their own person gain—selling it to interested parties, blackmailing people engaged in extramarital affairs, stealing identities. You’ll come home from work to find that your home has been ransacked by a SWAT team pursuant to a warrant issued by a secret court for unspecified reasons.
I fear that that the most likely outcome is closer to 2 than 1. Consider how crazy the drug war has become—the massive amounts of money spent to fight it, the increasingly militarized local police forces that enforce prohibition, the asset forfeiture laws that take private property from innocent citizens without any due process, and the massive incarceration of millions of people for extraordinarily long periods of time. At the beginning of the drug war, you’d be laughed at for suggesting that this would happen. But it did, because people just didn’t care, and drugs were scary. Terrorism is scarier than drugs, so you can imagine how that’s going to play out.
hungjurist asked: Hey, great blog. I'm seeing a lot of criticism about Glenn Greenwald and the Post's claims that the NSA had/has "direct access" to servers. The Nation's Rick Perlstein, for instance, quotes web publisher Mark Jaquith that the “direct access” line is “the difference between a bombshell and a yawn of a story." Do you think there's validity to this line of thinking or is it just more attempts to minimize larger issue by blaming messenger? (Oh, and congrats on the book being published. Looks cool.)
Thanks. I guess my thoughts are as follows:
1. I think Greenwald does a great job, but he can be a sloppy. He ought to either issue a correction to things like “direct access” or Snowden’s salary, or at least offer some explanation if he believes his original reporting was accurate. It’s fine for a reporter to have a point of view as long as his facts hold up. When even little ones don’t, it hurts his cause.
2. I don’t know enough about networks to have an educated answer on “direct access.” Here’s my uneducated answer: Whether there is actually “direct access” seems pretty inconsequential to me. I can see why the companies wouldn’t want the government to have “direct access” to their servers, because this would mean that the government could possibly shut down their site, alter information on it, or install its own software on the server. However, as far as citizens are concerned, what matters is whether the government has our data. We don’t really care whether it is accesses directly from servers or has it uploaded via ftp.
If I’m wrong about this, hopefully someone will set me straight on here.
“I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive… . If it’s true that 200 million Americans’ phone calls were monitored - in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them - I don’t know, the Congress should investigative this.” — Joe Biden…..in 2006 (via soupsoup)
(via Atlantic Ocean Road is a serpentine highway that twists and turns over the treacherous Norwegian Sea)
“U.S. intelligence agents have been hacking computer networks around the world for years, apparently targeting fat data pipes that push immense amounts of data around the Internet, NSA leaker Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday.
Among some 61,000 reported targets of the National Security Agency, Snowden said, are thousands of computers in China — which U.S. officials have increasingly criticized as the source of thousands of attacks on U.S. military and commercial networks. China has denied such attacks.”
—
NSA hacks China, leaker Snowden claims - CNN.com
Snowden just jumped the shark. It’s commendable to let Americans know that they’ve been lied to by their leaders with respect to domestic surveillance. It’s something closer to treason to let a foreign power know our government has breaking into their computer systems. I suspect Snowden thinks that these revelations will help him avoid extradition—that the Chinese government will protect him in gratitude for these disclosures. But if his goal was to change American domestic policy, he’s just made that change far less likely. A good portion of the American public was with him; now they won’t be. I find this incredibly sad. And I feel bad for Snowden, because he’s made a huge miscalculation that’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
In Hacking the Future, I outlined some responses to people who invoke their innocence in an argument against privacy.
Here are three that certainly apply this week.
1. The Misinterpretation Problem
Let’s say you download Tor. The next day you buy some fertilizer. The day after that, you post a rant about the Federal Reserve inflating the money supply. Separately, these things don’t mean much, but when pieced together, a bit of liberal inference can paint an alarming picture. These are the sorts of things that a surveilling agency could be looking for if given the ability to glean information from your Facebook status updates, among other channels. Even if we assume that authority figures mean well, mistakes are made. Death row inmates are proven innocent decades into their sentences. Information is misinterpreted. The more data the government has at its disposal, the more likely they are to arrive at terrible conclusions.
When I spoke with him on the phone, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, seemed to look back at the times when he was only speaking out against government privacy intrusions as if they were the good old days. Now we have “Little Brother” in addition to Big Brother. He argues that 9/11 created a massive policy drive, a sort of “Manhattan Project” for surveillance technology, bringing my attention to powerful cameras that can zoom in on someone’s face in a crowd from the top of a building hundreds of yards away. Facebook could provide the government with a global database of faces that can be linked to security camera footage.
Having such detailed information at our fingertips sounds like it would enable us to better discern truth from fantasy, but human error is all around us, and more data can often just mean more room for mistakes—mistakes that can ruin lives.
2. The Data Theft Problem
The number of data security breaches in the private sector has increased by 58 percent year-on-year according to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office. When Microsoft talks about developing a driver’s license for the Internet, I think of South Korea, which had a similar system in place until recently, after the most damaging online security breach the country has ever seen. The real-name registration system was introduced in 2007 and required users to authenticate their posts on certain popular Web sites with their birth name and address. Hackers compromised 35 million user accounts in July 2011.
And you don’t have to be a superhacker to gather enough info to make someone’s life miserable. Just ask the innumerable women who are stalked and harassed by ex- and would-be lovers in real life through information the stalkers have gleaned from the Web.
3. The Tyranny Creep Problem
Some privacy advocates are optimistic about our future, given that citizens now have increased powers of surveillance through mobile phones, for instance, and increasingly robust communication channels, like Twitter. This vision of the future was laid down by science fiction author David Brin. In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, he suggests that within high-tech societies with less privacy, authority figures lose the powers of secrecy they use to abuse citizens. In this view, groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous will rise up to combat tyranny.
The idea is enticing, and it certainly seems like we are living in an era of great power redistribution and decentralization. But as we’ve witnessed during Occupy Wall Street and its related protests, citizens may have cameras, but the cops still have the billy clubs. The ability to countersurveil will only go so far as the rest of the fabric of democracy allows it. It’s only part of the tapestry of freedoms. I submit that we must ensure that citizen surveillance is shored up by the freedom to expose authority figures with anonymity.
Every oppressive regime, all the way back to the Holy Roman Empire’s census, has used data harvesting as a tool to accumulate greater control. You can’t control a populace you can’t see. As the Roman Empire expanded, so did its need to keep tabs on the far-flung peoples they had conquered. We see this continuing in the modern world, in East Berlin, Russia, and China. Information gathering is always the first step. Not all state-sponsored data analysis is malicious, of course. But it is problematic when a populace doesn’t know how its data is being used. According to a recent study by Stanford University’s Computer Security Laboratory, consumers are far less anonymous while browsing than they realize. The study found that registering an account with NBC shared a user’s e-mail with seven other companies, and Home Depot shared user data with thirteen other companies.
If you’ve read this far, I hope I’ve convinced you that privacy is not the same thing as secrecy. Just because you don’t want to leave your front door wide open while you sleep does not mean you have something to hide. Anonymity and freedom of speech are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable. The latter is meaningless without the safeguard of the former. Free speech isn’t very free when it can get you thrown in prison or worse.
He promised change, and this is a change.
[video]
“I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our Democracy. I think it’s a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago, we might not have been having this debate. I think it’s interesting that there are some folks on the left, but also some folks on the right who are now worried about it who weren’t very worried about it when it was a Republican president.” —
President Obama addresses the NSA uproar. (via mediaite)
Of course, despite yesterday’s warming rhetoric, the NSA’s widespread data collection was a highly and tightly kept state secret, which rather undermines the idea that this is a debate the White House welcomes.
(via shortformblog)
JM: This deserves reiteration. This President kept the extent of the surveillance secret, precisely because he didn’t want any debate over it. He will likely try to prosecute whoever leaked it, precisely because he didn’t want any debate over it. And yet he tells us he welcomes the debate?
He says that the debate is healthy for our Democracy, but he’s been keeping it a secret, which, by his newly-announced logic, was unhealthy.
And then he has the audacity to suggest that it’s a sign of maturity—impliedly attributable to the “change” he’s brought—that we’re having this debate at all … even though his side of the debate is the status quo he hasn’t changed at all. That is: even though he (and he alone) is the reason this information was kept from the public, he wants to claim credit for any good that comes of the discussion that takes place about it.
And his whole defense—this “change” candidate’s defense—is that he thinks it is hypocritical that some of those outraged by his policies were not as outraged when those same policies belonged to Bush. That is—this man who promised change is crying that his critics are hypocrites? Has there ever been a more apt pot/kettle analogy?
I’ve tried to swear off hyperbole, but this really strikes me as one of the most remarkably awful statements by a President in my lifetime.
(Source: mediaite.com, via shortformblog)