Salon.com > verizon

Report: NSA tracked U.S. emails for a decade

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 16:03:00 +0000

In another major scoop, the Guardian has revealed that the National Security Agency is tracking even more of Americans' email and Internet usage than we already thought they were. According to "top-secret" documents:

under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by theNSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

ACLU sues over NSA phone surveillance

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:21:00 +0000

The ACLU is suing Obama Administration and intelligence officials over the NSA's phone surveillance program, arguing that the widespread collection of data violates the group's rights to privacy and free speech.

In an unusual move, the ACLU is suing on behalf of itself as customers of Verizon, arguing that the program " infringes upon the ACLU's First Amendment rights, including the twin liberties of free expression and free association," according to a statement on the website. The suit also argues that the program constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as Section 215 of the Patriot Act:

The statute requires that records seized under its authority be "relevant" to an authorized foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. But while that language imposes a real limitation on when the government can use Section 215, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] order covering all [Verizon Business Network Services] customers demonstrates that this "relevance" restraint is shockingly inadequate. Similarly, the FISC order shows that the government—with the FISC's secret approval—is acquiring future records of telephone subscribers based on the same "relevance" requirement, even though the statute uses words that clearly show it was only meant to cover "tangible things" already in existence.

Larry Klayman files first NSA phone surveillance lawsuit

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:35:00 +0000

Judicial Watch founder and sometimes birther Larry Klayman has filed the first lawsuit against the Obama administration, Verizon and intelligence officials over the NSA's domestic phone surveillance program.

David Kravets of Wired reports:

The suit names Larry Klayman, the former chairman of Judicial Watch, and two others who say the government has illegally spied on their Verizon accounts. The spy program, Klayman’s suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia claims, “violates the U.S. Constitution and also federal laws, including, but not limited to, the outrageous breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the due process rights of American citizens.”

The suit names President Obama, Eric Holder, the Department of Justice, the NSA, Verizon and other officials as defendants in the case.

Meet the contractors analyzing your private data

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:15:00 +0000

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who’s actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

Well, on Sunday we got part of the answer: Booz Allen Hamilton. In a stunning development in the NSA saga, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed that the source for his blockbuster stories on the NSA is Edward Snowden, “a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.” Snowden, it turns out, has been working at NSA for the last four years as a contract employee, including stints for Booz and the computer-services firm Dell.

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector -- a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon – contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

Rand Paul vows to take NSA spying to SCOTUS

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:18:00 +0000

On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY., his libertarian tendencies in top gear, vowed to to challenge the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance powers in the Supreme Court through a class-action lawsuit.

"I’m going to be asking all of the Internet providers, all of the phone companies, to ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe things will change in Washington,” Paul said.

Here's where Paul's free market libertarianism falls short, though: Although Internet giants like Facebook and Google have denied their participation in the top secret PRISM program, these firms have an established history of acquiescing to government demands for user data. Paul's idea that tech corporations will join en masse misses the cemented practice of communications corporations working in cahoots with government efforts to render every individual trackable. Perhaps, however, Paul's gambit will pay off if Internet providers and phone companies believe the public relations benefits of fighting the NSA outweigh the burden of public outrage at the government's sprawling dragnet.

Via Fox News Sunday:

Judge behind Verizon order tied to free trip from libertarian think tank

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:12:00 +0000

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expense-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers.

Vinson, whose term on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began in 2006 and expired last month, was the only member of the special court to attend the August 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, according to disclosure records filed by the federal judge.

The Center for Public Integrity collected the disclosure records as part of aninvestigative report that revealed how large corporations and conservative foundations routinely sponsor ideologically driven educational conferences for state and federal judges.

Welcome to the age of Bush-Obama

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:37:00 +0000

BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — The sensational disclosure that the US government’s National Security Agency has been scooping up phone and internet records of millions of Americans might have surprised ordinary citizens in Topeka or Milwaukee, but it did little to excite politicians in Washington, DC.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, said of the news about Verizon telephone and mobile log monitoring.

In an uncommon show of bipartisanship, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss supported Feinstein, his colleague on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As senator, Obama wanted to curb data collection he now defends

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:00:00 +0000

As a senator in 2005, Barack Obama sponsored a bill that would have drastically limited the mass collection of phone records by the government -- the same kind of thing his administration is now defending as necessary to fighting terrorists.

The SAFE Act, introduced by former Republican Sen. Larry Craig, would have amended the Patriot Act to require government agents to show they have "specific and articulable facts" that a targeted person is an "agent of a foreign power" before accessing their phone records, the Hill's Brendan Sasso reports.

When they too were in the Senate, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel were both among the 15 co-sponsors as well. Experts told Sasso that the bill would have outlawed the kind of data collection that came to light this week.

Fox News is spoon-fed a scandal — and blows it

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Just when scandal-mania seemed to be dying down comes troubling news, via former Salon writer Glenn Greenwald, that a secret FISA court made Verizon turn over records of every call made on its service in the U.S. to the National Security Agency. This is a big deal, but as Alex Pareene noted, it will only become a real scandal if Republicans make it so -- just as Democrats did when NSA abuses were uncovered under Bush.

They already failed that test once when they put up little to no opposition to the reauthorization of the controversial FISA Amendment Act in December. And while Democrats wanted to attach to that bill some modest safeguards against government overreach, Senate Republicans pushed for approving the bill with no debate and no changes.

“Now we are all persons of interest”

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:59:00 +0000

For Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency employee who blew the whistle on the agency's expansive post-9/11 surveillance programs in 2006, the latest revelation of blanket surveillance is simply "déjà vu."

Drake, who was indicted under the Espionage Act and faced life in prison before federal charges against him were eventually dropped, told Salon Thursday that news that the NSA had a top secret order to retain millions of Americans' phone records daily came as "no surprise."

"Since 9/11, with the help of a series of enabling legislation, this sort of surveillance has become routine and institutionalized," he said. "That order is extraordinary in showing how routine this is," noted Drake -- referring to the top secret government order obtained by the Guardian, in which telecom giant Verizon is commanded "on a daily basis" to provide the NSA with "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad, or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls."

Obama administration defends collecting phone records

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:20:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration on Thursday defended the National Security Agency's need to collect telephone records of U.S. citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats."

While defending the practice, a senior administration official did not confirm a newspaper report that the NSA has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order.

The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained,shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The government has all your info

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:23:00 +0000

The CIA does the sexy evil stuff -- assassination attempts, regime change, torture, air strikes against crowds of people totally unknown to us -- but the scariest domestic intelligence agency for your average American, at little risk of dying in a drone strike or being deposed in by a military junta, has always been the National Security Agency. Last night, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman reported that the NSA ordered Verizon to provide it with information on every call made in the United States for a three-month period ending in July. Yes, every call.

The NSA got a FISA judge to order Verizon to turn over "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls." The records include "metadata," meaning the records show the phone numbers, call length and possibly location the calls were made, among lots of other helpful identifying information.

Government collects millions of phone records daily

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:07:00 +0000

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake once described the Obama administration's attitude on surveillance to me as a "hoarding complex." Revelations reported Wednesday by our friend Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian bear out Drake's point to a chilling degree. The NSA is daily hoarding the phone records of millions of Americans.

As the CIA’s chief technical officer, Gus Hunt, said in a speech earlier this year “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time... Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” This, it seems, is exactly the attitude underpinning NSA practices.

A top secret NSA order obtained by the Guardian revealed that the agency is currently collecting the phone records of millions of U.S. customers of telecomm giant Verizon. Greenwald noted that "the unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual." Via the Guardian:

ESPN’s plan to kill net neutrality

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:56:00 +0000

If you are someone who likes to watch live sports events on your mobile phone, then it is probably welcome news that ESPN may be in negotiations with a big telecom company to exempt its streaming video services from caps that limit how much data mobile users can download. Watching the NBA playoffs on your iPhone, without any free Wi-Fi to rely on, is an excellent way to chew speedily through your allotted bandwidth for the month. ESPN, reports the Wall Street Journal, wants to ensure that viewers get to eat as much cake as they want (and, of course, therefore be exposed to as many ESPN-delivered advertisements as possible).

But if you're not an ESPN addict, you might do well to look askance at the news. That's the take of Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest Washington-based public advocacy organization that quickly decried the possible ESPN deal as an obvious violation of the principle of "net neutrality."

5 job-destroying CEOs trying to “fix” the debt

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:58:00 +0000

In poll after poll, the American people say they are far more concerned about the jobs crisis than the “debt crisis.” A powerful coalition of CEOs says they have an answer for both problems.

Give us more tax breaks, they say, and we’ll use the money to invest and create jobs. The national economic pie will expand and Uncle Sam will get plenty of the frothy meringue without having to raise tax rates.

That’s the line of the Fix the Debt campaign. Led by more than 90 CEOs, this turbo-charged PR/lobbying machine is blasting the message that such “pro-growth tax reform” should be a pillar of any deficit deal (along with cuts to benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare).

And it might be a good line — if not for some pesky real-world facts. You see the same corporations peddling this line have already been paying next to nothing in taxes. And instead of creating jobs, they’ve been destroying them. Here are five examples of job-cutting, tax-dodging CEOs who are leading Fix the Debt.

Internet providers to bring in six-strike plan

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Major U.S. Internet service providers, including Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable and Verizon are implementing a plan to punish illicit file sharing. Wired reports that "providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the 'Copyright Alert System' initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate Internet access for online copyright scofflaws."

The plan works by implementing "mitigation measures" on a user's IP address after offenses of file sharing are detected; the measures might include reducing Internet speeds and redirecting a user's service to a webpage about copyright infringement.

According to the group behind the initiative, the Center for Copyright Information, the aim of the program is to be more educational than simply punitive.

Wired detailed step-by-step how the new plan will work: