THE GUARDIAN
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest
telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian,
requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
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Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
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The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access....While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.
Big Brother is listening to you.
HUFFINGTON POST
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.
N.Y. TIMES
.... Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of
government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even
expanded under the Obama administration.
Government officials defended the two surveillance
initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard
the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates
and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed
confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an
alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.
The Internet surveillance program collects data from
online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data,
file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified
documents obtained and posted by
The
Washington Post and then
The
Guardian on Thursday afternoon.
In confirming its existence, officials said that the
program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was
recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection
and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and
permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow
the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific
lawful requests for information.
“It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S.
citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,”
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement,
describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this
program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we
collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”
The Prism program grew out of the National Security
Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep
up with the explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with
the matter.
The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also
suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had
decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were
reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation,
almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a
disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose
government overreach.
Before the disclosure of the Internet company
surveillance program on Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders
defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect
national security.
But while the administration and lawmakers who
supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of
government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties
Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual
liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it.
“A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr.
Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for
being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for
not being true to its values.”
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On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California
and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, [above pic of them] the top Democrat and top Republican on the
Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine
reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known
about and supported.
“As far as I know, this is an exact three-month
renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said,
adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
“under the business records section of the Patriot Act.”
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The Internet company program appeared to involve
eavesdropping on the contents of communications of foreigners. The senior
administration official said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments
Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to obtain an order from a national
security court to conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without
individualized warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil.
The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is
controversial in part because Americans’ e-mails and phone calls can be swept
into the database without an individualized court order when they communicate
with people overseas....
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Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act
that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of
Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon —
have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism
before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was
being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was
classified.
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But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics,
including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to
tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the
Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of
broad, bipartisan support for the program.
“If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham,
Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.”
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Glenn Greenwald currently writes for The Guardian.
After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years
about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn
Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two
issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime
blogger,
published
an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a
top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions
of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected
to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively
pursued leakers.
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“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government
secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a
telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he
should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the
Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”
Being at the center of a debate is a comfortable place
for Mr. Greenwald, 46, who came to mainstream journalism through his own blog,
which he started in 2005. Before that he was a lawyer, including working 18
months at the high-powered New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz,
where he represented large corporate clients.
“I approach my journalism as a litigator,” he said.
“People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove
it.”
Mr. Greenwald’s writings at The Guardian — and before
that, for Salon and on his own blog — can resemble a legal brief, with a list of
points, extended arguments and detailed references and links. As Andrew
Sullivan, a frequent sparring partner and sometime ally, put it, “once you get
into a debate with him, it can be hard to get the last word.”
------
.... Because he has often argued in defense of Bradley Manning, the army private who
was
charged
as the WikiLeaks source, he said he considered publishing the story on his
own, and not for The Guardian, to assert that the protections owed a journalist
should not require the imprimatur of an established publisher.
----
Mr. Greenwald grew up in Lauderdale Lakes, Fla.,
feeling like an odd figure. “I do think political posture is driven by your
personality, your relationship with authority, how comfortable are you in your
life,” he said. “When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces
you to evaluate: ‘Is it me, or is the system bad?’ ”
By the time Mr. Greenwald was studying law at New York
University, “he was always passionate about constitutional issues and issues of
equal justice and equal treatment,” said Jennifer Bailey, now an immigration
lawyer with a nonprofit organization in Maine, who shared a tiny apartment with
Mr. Greenwald in the early 1990s.
She emphasized that his passion did not translate into partisanship. “He is not
a categorizeable guy,” Ms. Bailey said. “He was not someone who played party
politics. He was very deep into the issues and how it must come out. He was
tireless and relentless about pursuing this. Nobody worked longer hours.”
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Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert and
senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is often on the opposite ends of
issues from Mr. Greenwald, called him, “a highly professional apologist for any
kind of anti-Americanism no matter how extreme.”
Mr. Sullivan wrote in an e-mail: “I think he has
little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war. He’s a
purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work.” ...
