We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Is Ugly.

A high-profile inspector general report has served as fodder for arguments about President Trump. But its findings about surveillance are important beyond partisan politics.

NY TIMES

THE UNITED STATES OF SECRETS: THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS

Threats Test Obama’s Balancing Act on Surveillance

N.Y. TIMES

President Obama on Friday sought to take control of the roiling debate over the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, releasing a more detailed legal justification for domestic spying and calling for more openness and scrutiny of the N.S.A.’s programs to reassure a skeptical public that its privacy is not being violated.

“It’s right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “It’s not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well.”

But at a time when leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden have exposed the agency’s expansive spying both inside the United States and abroad to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny, Mr. Obama showed no inclination to curtail secret surveillance efforts. Rather, he conceded only a need for greater openness and safeguards to make the public “comfortable” with them.

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An aerial surveillance drone. Photograph: John Giles/PA

 

N.Y. TIMES SCOTT SHANE & MARK MAZZETTI

 

President Obama...said he wants eventually to scale back drone strikes and steer the country away from a single-minded focus on counterterrorism.

 

But in response to a vague yet ominous terror warning in recent days, his administration shut down nearly two dozen American embassies and consulates and waged an intense drone campaign in Yemen.

 

American officials speak of the need for vigorous debate about controversial National Security Agency programs revealed by Edward J. Snowden, and Mr. Obama on Friday promised greater accountability to keep the surveillance state in check. Yet his underlying message was clear: the expansive monitoring of telephone and electronic communications would continue because the safety of the country depended on it.

America’s war on terrorism may one day end, as Mr. Obama said in a speech in May, but until that happens the president has given every indication that it will be fought in much the same way it has for nearly 12 years. Even Mr. Obama’s promise of more transparency appeared to fail an instant test during his Friday news conference. Asked about the flurry of American drone strikes in Yemen, which have been reported by every news outlet, Mr. Obama demurred.

“I will not have a discussion about operational issues,” he said.

Mr. Obama, who ran for office in 2008 against what he described as the excesses of counterterrorism under President George W. Bush, has occasionally expressed ambivalence about drone strikes and aggressive surveillance. But with Republicans ever ready to pounce with accusations that he has made the country less safe, he has declined to abandon any of the tools used by his predecessor, with the sole exception of the brutal interrogation methods once used by the C.I.A.

The government’s striking response to the reported terror threat in recent days has coincided with a wave of unprecedented skepticism about the N.S.A.’s sweeping surveillance programs since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

When Mr. Snowden began releasing secret documents two months ago, Mr. Obama said he welcomed a debate on the trade-offs of N.S.A. surveillance and privacy. But the debate has grown far larger than administration officials anticipated, with lawmakers of both parties in Congress and half of Americans in polls calling for curbs on the agency.

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Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a continuing, even escalating impact as journalists have continued to pore over them. On Thursday, for instance, The New York Times wrote that the N.S.A. was examining all e-mail messages in and out of the country and searching them for clues associated with terrorism or foreign intelligence.

On Friday, The Guardian, the British newspaper that has published many of Mr. Snowden’s revelations, wrote about a clause in N.S.A. rules that permits the agency to search for Americans’ names and identifying information in data about foreign targets gathered from large Internet companies.

In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Obama said he was satisfied that the N.S.A. programs were both necessary and respectful of Americans’ privacy.

 

 

 

MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

Predictably, everyone is unimpressed by the measures Barack Obama has announced to bring a little ray of transparency to America’s surveillance programs. The New York Times editorialized that the president’s proposed changes “only tinker around the edges” of our “abusive” surveillance programs. I wouldn’t argue that the proposals will fundamentally remake the surveillance state. But nevertheless, I think it’s pretty remarkable that a president, any president, announced, without absolutely being forced to, a series of steps that relinquish some degree of executive power. Of course he’ll get no credit for that, because civil libertarians tend to be absolutists and other liberals tend to be afraid or even terrified of their wrath. Why this is so tells us some important things about contemporary liberalism.

First, what Obama said. Don’t get me wrong. I’m hardly jumping up and down that the National Security Agency is going to have a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer. But two of Obama’s other recommendations might have some bite. Reforming Section 215 of the Patriot Act, depending on the definition of the word “reform” that Congress settles on—frightening, as we know—is potentially a big deal. Section 215, which vastly expanded the FBI’s ability to spy on American citizens in a number of ways, has long been the section of the act, or at least one of the sections, of greatest concern to the civil-liberties lobby. It’s under 215 that the government is collecting all those telephone records. Obama wasn’t terribly specific in his remarks on Friday; he just said he’ll work with Congress “to put in place greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints on the use of this authority.” Even so, it would be the first narrowing of the Patriot Act since its passage.

The idea for having an adversarial presence at Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hearings is potentially even a bigger deal. A special court system set up in the United States of America in which the judge hears only the government’s side of the story, FISC has always been a case where a bright line was crossed. It’s. There’s just no way that’s acceptable, and correcting it would end a blatantly (to me) unconstitutional practice.

As I was listening to these remarks, I kept thinking to myself about this paradox. No, they were not “bold and sweeping” proposals. At the same time, it sure seemed to me like this was the first time in my adult life I’d ever heard a sitting president propose checks on his administration that he didn’t have to offer. And Obama didn’t have to offer these. He was facing some political pressure, but polls have been pretty consistent in showing that a solid majority of the American public comes down on the side of what we might call controlled surveillance.

There was no mortal threat to his presidency here. Yet even so, he took a couple steps away from the imperial presidency. I think that’s the first time since the presidency became imperial—after World War II, more or less—such a thing has happened. And Obama was, as he claimed Friday, headed down this course before the Snowden leaks. Those began on June 5. But on May 23, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he foreshadowed the moves he just announced. Combine all this with John Kerry’s recent announcement that we have a plan for ending drone strikes in Pakistan, and you might have thought liberals would be cheering.

I suppose some liberals are. I am. But not civil libertarians. With them, it’s all or nothing. If you’re not signed on to the whole program, you might as well be Joe McCarthy. Environmentalists and tax reformers and campaigners for the poor and those fighting for greater consumer protections and even civil rights advocates understand that the political process is about compromise and getting what you can, and they acknowledge that there are such things in this world as competing compelling interests. But you are well advised not to try to mention such things to a civil libertarian.

The reason for their intransigence is that we (liberals) are trained to think of these liberties as being absolute and utterly nonnegotiable. But our history and our civic life shows that they are negotiated all the time. For all the “when one person loses his civil liberties, we all lose them” rhetoric, historically that’s simply not the case. As with anything, there are degrees.....
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Obama has public opinion to think about. And of course he has keeping the country safe to worry about, and no one at the ACLU is sitting in on those intel briefings and learning the things the president is learning every day about threats to the nation, and no one at the ACLU will be responsible if our wall of security is breached. Obama is responsible, and I think mere willingness of the man in that position to have this conversation, let alone take some concrete steps, does him enormous credit.

 

Poll: Obama's Approval Rating and Trustworthiness Drops 8% in Polls

USA TODAY/ CNN

President Obama's support may be eroding amid reports of surveillance programs and Internal Revenue Service abuses.
A new CNN/ORC International poll gives Obama an approval rating of 45%, a drop of 8 percentage points over the past month.
Possible reasons: Reports of massive National Security Agency surveillance programs that gather phone numbers and Internet activity, the IRS targeting of conservative groups,...[and the reports of ultra-aggressive, press invasive investigations of leakers.--Esco]

"The drop in Obama's support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition," says CNN polling director Keating Holland.

"The poll indicates that for the first time in Obama's presidency, half of the public says they don't believe he is honest and trustworthy.
"And Americans are split on the controversial National Security Agency anti-terrorism program to record metadata on U.S. phone calls, but they support the NSA program that targets records of Internet usage by people in other countries.

"That doesn't mean they necessarily like what is going on: Just over six in 10 believe that government is so large and powerful that it threatens the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans."
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This segues perfectly to George Packer's concerns and remedies:


BIG BROTHER IN SILICON VALLEY

Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

GEORGE PACKER NEW YORKER

The word “HACK” is painted across the main square of Facebook’s campus in letters so large that they can be seen from space. The term has lost its negative connotation in Silicon Valley; freewheeling coding sessions and virtual breaking and entering have become the same thing. The culture of hacking is rebellious, idealistic, and militantly anti-bureaucratic—fitting for an age that glorifies entrepreneurship—and it marks a stark shift from the recent history of scientists in American life. During the heyday of the space program, rocket scientists and computer engineers worked closely with NASA officials. The bureaucrat and the geek were not polar opposites but complementary types who often seemed indistinguishable—straight arrows with an occasional streak of repressed weirdness. But, with the counterculture and the advent of the personal computer as a tool for individual liberation, John Glenn gave way to Steve Jobs, “Apollo 13” to “The Social Network.”

Now the National Security Agency’s data-mining story has fundamentally changed the public’s picture of Silicon Valley and its relation to the state. As I wrote in the magazine last month (now available online to non-subscribers), the Valley has, historically, kept as far away from Washington as possible. A strong, though not particularly ideological, strain of libertarianism appears to be coded into the DNA of computer engineers—a desire to be left alone to create beautiful systems that can be messed up only by the uncomprehending interference of mediocrities from the government. Partly as a result, information technology has been one of the country’s most lightly regulated industries....

But the opposition between tech and government has been breaking down recently, and in ways not limited to the N.S.A. program. Silicon Valley was always aware of the downsides to a relationship with Washington, but now it knows more about potential positives, not just in the growing influence of tech money in political campaigns and tech endorsements of individual candidates but in industry-led advocacy efforts on issues like immigration reform, and in the idea of technology as a solution for chronic social problems. Now, it turns out, the biggest companies in the computer business—Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple, among others—have been giving vast amounts of user data to the government’s chief surveillance agency, in some cases for years. (The Washington Post obtained an N.S.A. document claiming that the government has access to the companies’ servers. The companies, using nearly identical legal language, deny it. Perhaps we’ll know more in the coming days.)

Is it really surprising that the brotherhood of hackers turns out to be more like central intelligence? It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to go from gathering every last move you make online, and sharing it with marketers and advertisers, to divulging it to spies. Google, Apple, and Facebook have long since stopped being mere instruments of individual empowerment through collecting and processing information. Benignly democratic terms like “open source” and “transparency”—still in ubiquitous use around Silicon Valley—have become outmoded distractions from the source of the tech giants’ phenomenal growth, which is data-mining and its monetization.

Yes, it’s voluntary—no one forces you to enter credit-card information on Home Depot’s Web site, or to let Facebook track every purchase you make on Amazon—whereas Prism, the N.S.A.’s top-secret program for mining e-mails, videos, chats, and other online communications, is not. Markets involve choice; laws do not. Being a consumer is discretionary; being a citizen isn’t. But Prism, for all its breathtaking reach and intrusiveness, is less creepy to me than all the trillions of bits of information that commercial companies have stored up on all of us, gathered through a sophisticated mix of temptations, deceptions, default settings, carelessness, and sheer market power. It’s sinister when Big Brother is watching you, but it’s even more sinister when Big Brother is you, sharing. Prism is designed to prevent terror attacks on Americans. Advertising algorithms are designed to increase Google’s and Facebook’s profits. Which involves more of a public benefit? Between career officials at the N.S.A. and marketing managers at social-media companies, I trust the former more than the latter to maintain my privacy and use the information they have on me with maximum restraint. (Private contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton are a different story—the outsourcing of national security is one of the worst post-9/11 trends.)

I’m sympathetic to the dilemma of technology companies that are faced with government requests for access to information. There is an interest in protecting their users’ privacy (or whatever is left of it), and there is an interest in protecting Americans from attack. The government hasn’t proved that the full breadth of the N.S.A.’s program is necessary to uncover, track, and stop terror plots. Its critics haven’t proved that the program has been abused, that the collection of so much abstract data has led to unwarranted specific intrusions. What the whole debate obviously needs is much more clarity—for the government to allow more daylight into the nature of its surveillance programs (its fanatical level of secrecy is at least partly self-serving and designed to thwart critics as much as terrorists), and for the companies to be allowed to stop lying about their involvement. If we are going to have an N.S.A. with such broad powers of surveillance, and a technology industry with such extensive involvement in that surveillance, both have to be monitored and regulated (a hated word in the Valley) much more heavily than they are. Members of the congressional intelligence committees need to be able to discuss what they know without resorting to elaborate circumlocutions, and White House officials need to try persuasion instead of mere assertion. Courts need to be able to reach decisions that are accountable to parties other than just the government itself. Reporters need to be able to dig up important stories—as long as they don’t put lives at risk—without fear of the Justice Department. Technology executives need to be able to describe their industry’s participation in language that’s at least translucent, if not transparent. And the public needs to be able to understand, and then judge, this latest manifestation of the ancient trade-off between liberty and security.....

Who Loves Surveillance? It Depends Who’s in the White House.

In this April 21, 2009, file photo, U.S. Army Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, speaks at a security convention in San Francisco. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

When news broke in late 2005 that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants — surveillance that was authorized by President George W. Bush — Democrats were not happy campers. More than six in 10 (61 percent) Democrats said the practice was “unacceptable” in a Washington Post-ABC News poll shortly after the story broke.
But Democrats have changed their tune in the wake of new disclosures that the NSA is tracking millions of phone records under President Obama. According to a new Post-Pew Research Center poll, fully 64 percent say the agency’s latest program to access phone records is “acceptable,” which is 27 percentage points higher than their tolerance for the NSA’s probes when polled in 2006.

Republicans have shifted as well, but in a predictably different direction: 75 percent were OK with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2006, but a bare 52 percent majority says the NSA’s current phone tracking program is acceptable.
By an 8-point gap, Democrats are now slightly more supportive than Republicans of allowing government surveillance of “everyone’s e-mail and other online activities” if officials say it will curb terrorist attacks. It was Republicans who were 12 points more supportive of such broad provisions in a Pew Research survey asking the same question less than a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Partisans have even traded places on basic principles. In 2006, Republicans were roughly 30 points more apt than Democrats to prioritize investigating terrorist threats, “even if it intrudes on personal privacy.” That disparity has been erased; 69 percent of Democrats in the new Post-Pew poll prioritize investigating terrorists, as do 62 percent of Republicans.
So why have partisans shifted so much? Changing presidents goes a long way to understanding the shifts. Supporting a program to mine telephone records requires a belief that the program won’t be used abusively, entailing some level of trust. Democrats’ deep distrust of Bush — and Republicans’ of Obama — helps explain why support for a mass surveillance program would gyrate so much with a change in president.
The way forward may be a more partisan one as well. Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who are following the issue “very closely” are 30 percentage points less likely to say the NSA’s tracking of phone records is acceptable than Republicans who are paying less attention.....

MAUREEN DOWD, N.Y. TIMES

THE acid that corroded George W. Bush’s presidency was fear — spreading it and succumbing to it.

You could see the fear in his eyes, the fear that froze him in place, after Andy Card whispered to W. in that Florida classroom that a second plane had crashed into the twin towers.

The blood-dimmed tragedy of 9/11 was chilling. But instead of rising above the fear, W. let it overwhelm his better instincts. He and Dick Cheney crumpled the Constitution, manipulated intelligence to go to war against a country that hadn’t attacked us, and implemented warrantless eavesdropping — all in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists.

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Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth be far behind?

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.” “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.”

It was quaint to think we had any privacy left, once Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram braided themselves into our days and nights.

As Gene Hackman, playing a disillusioned N.S.A. analyst in the 1998 movie “Enemy of the State” put it, the agency has been in bed with the telecommunications industry for decades, and “they can suck a salt grain off a beach.”

Still, it was a bit of a shock to find out that No Such Agency, as the N.S.A. is nicknamed, has been collecting information for seven years on every phone call, domestic and international, that Americans make. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who first reported the collection of data from Verizon, called the N.S.A. “the crown jewel in government secrecy.”

The Washington Post and then Greenwald swiftly revealed another secret program started under Bush, code-named Prism, that lets the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. tap Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, lifting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails and documents in an effort to track foreign targets.

The Post reported that the career intelligence officer who leaked the information was appalled and considered the program a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

President Obama defended his classified programs even as Greenwald spilled one more bequeathed from W.: identifying targets overseas for potential cyberattacks. So much technological overreach, yet counterterrorism officials still couldn’t do basic police work and catch the Boston bombers before the marathon by following up on warnings from the Russians.

Don’t count on Congress to fix the assault on privacy. In a rare bit of bipartisanship, driven by a craven fear of being seen as soft on terrorists, both parties have lined up behind the indiscriminate surveillance sweeps, except for a few outliers on either end of the spectrum.

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The president insists that his trellis of surveillance programs is “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government.” That is not particularly comforting given that the federal government so rarely does anything properly.

Obama says agents are not actually listening to calls, but as the former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau told The New Yorker, the government can learn an immense amount by tracking “who you call, and who they call.”

When James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked during a Congressional hearing in March whether the N.S.A. was collecting any information on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Clapper replied “No, sir,” adding, “not wittingly.” ...

 

The president calls the vast eavesdropping apparatus “modest encroachments on privacy.”

Back in 2007, Obama said he would not want to run an administration that was “Bush-Cheney lite.” He doesn’t have to worry. With prisoners denied due process at Gitmo starving themselves, with the C.I.A. not always aware who it’s killing with drones, with an overzealous approach to leaks, and with the government’s secret domestic spy business swelling, there’s nothing lite about it.

GEORGE W. OBAMA

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.

 

N.Y. TIMES

 

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.”

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.... 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.

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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.” ...