The New York Times reports: In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. government had a problem: Spying in the digital age required access to the fiber-optic cables traversing the world’s oceans, carrying torrents of data at the speed of light. And one of the biggest operators of those cables was being sold to an Asian firm, potentially complicating American surveillance efforts.

Enter “Team Telecom.”

In months of private talks, the team of lawyers from the FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security demanded that the company maintain what amounted to an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances. Among their jobs, documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.

This “Network Security Agreement,” signed in September 2003 by Global Crossing, became a model for other deals over the past decade as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The publicly available agreements offer a window into efforts by U.S. officials to safeguard their ability to conduct surveillance through the fiber-optic networks that carry a huge majority of the world’s voice and Internet traffic.

The agreements, whose main purpose is to secure the U.S. telecommunications networks against foreign spying and other actions that could harm national security, do not authorize surveillance. But they ensure that when U.S. government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely, say people familiar with the deals.

Negotiating leverage has come from a seemingly mundane government power: the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to approve cable licenses. In deals involving a foreign company, say people familiar with the process, the FCC has held up approval for many months while the squadron of lawyers dubbed Team Telecom developed security agreements that went beyond what’s required by the laws governing electronic eavesdropping.

The security agreement for Global Crossing, whose fiber-optic network connected 27 nations and four continents, required the company to have a “Network Operations Center” on U.S. soil that could be visited by government officials with 30 minutes of warning. Surveillance requests, meanwhile, had to be handled by U.S. citizens screened by the government and sworn to secrecy — in many cases prohibiting information from being shared even with the company’s executives and directors. [Continue reading…]

Glenn Greenwald writes: I’ve written an article on NSA surveillance for the front page of the Sunday edition of O Globo, the large Brazilian newspaper based in Rio de Janeiro. The article is headlined (translated) “US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians”, and I co-wrote it with Globo reporters Roberto Kaz and Jose Casado. The rough translation of the article into English is here. The main page of Globo’s website lists related NSA stories: here.

As the headline suggests, the crux of the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians. The story follows an article in Der Spiegel last week, written by Laura Poitras and reporters from that paper, detailing the NSA’s mass and indiscriminate collection of the electronic communications of millions of Germans. There are many more populations of non-adversarial countries which have been subjected to the same type of mass surveillance net by the NSA: indeed, the list of those which haven’t been are shorter than those which have. The claim that any other nation is engaging in anything remotely approaching indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of this sort is baseless.

As those two articles detail, all of this bulk, indiscriminate surveillance aimed at populations of friendly foreign nations is part of the NSA’s “FAIRVIEW” program. Under that program, the NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company, the identity of which is currently unknown, and that US company then partners with telecoms in the foreign countries. Those partnerships allow the US company access to those countries’ telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA’s repositories. Both articles are based on top secret documents provided by Edward Snowden; O Globo published several of them. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Venezuela’s offer of asylum for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden got a thumbs up from key members of the Russian parliament Saturday, even as the Kremlin and Foreign Ministry kept a studious silence.

“Sanctuary for Snowden in Venezuela would be the best decision,” Alexei Pushkov, head of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament, wrote in a tweet Saturday.

Puskhkov, who reliably reflects the government’s position on international issues, voiced what appears to be a growing official desire to see Snowden leave after 13 days holed up in transit limbo at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. He wrote of Snowden, “He can’t live at Sheremetyevo.”

Another parliamentary deputy and member of Pushkov’s committee, Alexander Babakov, told the Russian News Service on Saturday that he thinks the offer of asylum Friday from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was Snowden’s best recourse.

“Given that Snowden’s U.S. passport was revoked and that he has no particular alternative, the proposal, especially coming from the mouth of the head of state, is sure to be accepted,” he said.

Pushkov also argued that asylum would not cost Venezuela, because the country is already in an acute conflict with the United States. “It can’t get worse,” he wrote.

The central question, though, is how Snowden might get to Venezuela. Until now, Russia has been saying he cannot fly out without proper documents, following the revocation of his U.S. passport. On Saturday, a lieutenant colonel in the FSB reserve, Anatoly Yermolin, told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that Russia could grant Snowden status as a “stateless person,” and that would allow him to leave without further complications.

But a more difficult question is: by what route? Direct commercial flights from Moscow to Havana cross European airspace, and after the refusal of France, Italy and Spain to allow an overflight Tuesday by Bolivian President Evo Morales, that route would seem to be problematic for Snowden. He might have to rely on a private plane, following a roundabout course, if he were to reach Caracas. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports that on Saturday, Bolivia joined Venezuela and Nicaragua in offering asylum to Snowden.

Shamai Leibowitz, one of the first victims in Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers, writes: The Snowden saga is a great teaching moment for the Obama administration. It is now reaping the fruit of its vindictive behavior.

Even in a democracy certain information needs to remain secret, and those with access to that information must honor their obligation to safeguard it. But Snowden and other whistleblowers have not leaked secrets for their own benefit or enrichment; rather, they sacrificed the comfort of their lives to expose lies, fraud, human rights abuses, and unconstitutionality.

As Martin Luther King pointed out, we should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal”. Of course, the abuses revealed by Snowden are a far cry from the atrocities of the Nazis, but the principle, nevertheless, is the same: obedience to the law should not be absolute. Technically, we whistleblowers broke the law, but we felt, as many have felt before, that the obligation to our consciences and basic human rights is stronger than our obligation to obey the law.

The New York Times reports: President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela said Friday that he would offer asylum to the fugitive intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden, who has been stranded in a Moscow airport searching for a safe haven.

“I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young American Edward Snowden,” Mr. Maduro said during a televised appearance at a military parade marking Venezuela’s independence day.

Mr. Maduro said he had decided to act “to protect this young man from the persecution unleashed by the world’s most powerful empire.”

It was not immediately clear, however, how Mr. Snowden could reach Venezuela or if Mr. Maduro was willing to help transport him.

Also on Friday, Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, said he was open to taking in Mr. Snowden. “It is clear that if the circumstances permit we will take in Mr. Snowden with pleasure and give him asylum in Nicaragua,” Mr. Ortega said in Managua.

Spencer Ackerman writes: According to US legislators and journalists, the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden actively aided America’s enemies. They are just missing one essential element for the meme to take flight: evidence.

An op-ed by Representative Mike Pompeo (Republican, Kansas) proclaiming Snowden, who provided disclosed widespread surveillance on phone records and internet communications by the National Security Agency, “not a whistleblower” is indicative of the emerging narrative. Writing in the Wichita Eagle on 30 June Pompeo, a member of the House intelligence committee, wrote that Snowden “has provided intelligence to America’s adversaries“.

Pompeo correctly notes in his op-ed that “facts are important”. Yet when asked for the evidence justifying the claim that Snowden gave intelligence to American adversaries, his spokesman, JP Freire, cited Snowden’s leak of NSA documents. Those documents, however, were provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, not al-Qaeda or North Korea.

It’s true that information published in the press can be read by anyone, including people who mean America harm. But to conflate that with actively handing information to foreign adversaries is to foreclose on the crucial distinction between a whistleblower and a spy, and makes journalists the handmaidens of enemies of the state.

Yet powerful legislators are eager to make that conflation about Snowden. [Continue reading…]

The NSA came to recruit at a language program at the University of Wisconsin:

Madiha R. Tahir: This is not just a word game [defining who counts as an “adversary” of the United States] and you understand that as well as I do. So, it’s very strange that you’re selling yourself here in one particular fashion when it’s absolutely not true.

NSA female recruiter: I don’t think we’re selling ourselves in an untrue fashion.

Tahir: Well, this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren’t true. We also know that the NSA took down brochures and fact sheets after the Snowden revelations because those brochures also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them. So, how are we supposed to believe what you’re saying?

[pause]

Student A (female): I have a lifestyle question that you seem to be selling. It sounds more like a brochure smallercolonial expedition. You know the “globe is our playground” is the words you used, the phrasing that you used and you seem to be saying that you can do your work. You can analyze said documents for your so-called customers but then you can go and get drunk and dress up and have fun without thinking of the repercussions of the info you’re analyzing has on the rest of the world. I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job. And I think the Edward Snowdens and the Bradley Mannings and Julian Assanges of the world will prevail ultimately.

Listen to the whole exchange — an exchange between a thoughtful and intelligent group of students and two robotic servants of the U.S. government:

The Economist says that following revelations about the NSA spying on America’s so-called allies, the “noun ‘Der Shitstorm’ made a timely entrance to the official German lexicon this week.”

As the Shitstorm mounts, Germany is sending a delegation to Washington (some think it should be the other way round). Politicians are struggling to explain what they knew and when they knew it. Federal prosecutors are opening inquiries. Sigmar Gabriel, an opposition leader, says they should interview Mr Snowden and if necessary offer him “witness protection” in Germany. The head of the domestic security agency says he knew nothing of the NSA’s schemes, but his service may have benefited from the results.

The fear in Europe is that, once so many data are in American hands, who is to say that they will not be misunderstood, leaked or misused? The information may help catch terrorists and gangsters today, but become part of American power politics (or commercial advantage) tomorrow. European policymakers took a lot of persuading before they agreed to share data on financial transactions and airline passenger lists with America. Now European Parliament members are threatening to suspend the deals. Another potential casualty is a proposed transatlantic free-trade deal, on which talks are due to start on July 8th (see article). France (never enthusiastic) and left-wing politicians in other countries want them halted, pending full clarification of the espionage programmes.

The New York Times reports: Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, the newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France.

Le Monde reported that the General Directorate for External Security does the same kind of data collection as the American National Security Agency and the British GCHQ, but does so without clear legal authority.

The system is run with “complete discretion, at the margins of legality and outside all serious control,” the newspaper said, describing it as “a-legal.”

Nonetheless, the French data is available to the various police and security agencies of France, the newspaper reported, and the data is stored for an indeterminate period. The main interest of the agency, the paper said, is to trace who is talking to whom, when and from where and for how long, rather than in listening in to random conversations. But the French also record data from large American networks like Google and Facebook, the newspaper said.

Le Monde’s report, which French officials would not comment on publicly, appeared to make some of the French outrage about the revelations of Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, about the American data-collection program appear somewhat hollow. [Continue reading…]

That France’s political leaders — like those of every other Western democracy — are hypocrites will probably not come as news to the French or anyone else. But in reporting this, the New York Times appears to be assuming its default position: always defend governmental power — the power that this newspaper and its reporters mainline like heroin.

Mass surveillance? Everyone’s doing it. Let’s move on to the next story (and get a pat on the head from the White House).

Bloomberg reports: Bolivia threatened to close the U.S. embassy as presidents from across the region met to show solidarity with President Evo Morales after the global manhunt for fugitive leaker Edward Snowden diverted his flight.

“We don’t need them, we’ve got other allies,” Morales, 53, said yesterday at an emergency summit of Latin American leaders in the highland Bolivian town of Cochabamba. “We don’t need the pretext of cooperation and diplomatic relations so that they can come and spy on us.”

Presidents from Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela met with Morales to demand Spain, France, Portugal and Italy apologize and explain why they denied the Bolivian leader’s presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace July 2. The incident led the plane to make an emergency landing in Vienna after a fuel gauge stopped working correctly, Morales said.

The group called for a new meeting of South American presidents on July 12 in Montevideo, Uruguay to discuss further retaliation against the European countries for the “flagrant violation” of international law, according to a statement read by Bolivia’s Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca at the end of the meeting yesterday. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Chile’s Sebastian Pinera, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Peru’s Ollanta Humala skipped the summit.

Following the diversion of the Bolivian president’s jet, which was forced to land in Austria on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports:

The highly unusual detour of a head of state’s flight came just days after Obama seemed to signal that the United States would avoid extraordinary measures beyond seeking Snowden’s extradition. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Obama said during a visit to Senegal last week.

It also pointed to a possible intelligence blunder. Still, former U.S. officials said that if the United States were involved, it may reflect a calculation by the Obama administration that the risk of embarrassment from an unsuccessful search was more than offset by a desire to avoid seeing Snowden arrive to a hero’s welcome in La Paz.

Before departing Moscow, Morales had suggested his country would be willing to consider granting Snowden asylum, a remark that triggered speculation that the Bolivian president might head home with the former NSA contractor in tow.

For that reason, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair said, U.S. intelligence officials would probably have been asked not whether they could be certain Snowden was on the aircraft, but whether they could assure the White House that he was not.

The efforts being made by the U.S. to prevent Snowden finding political asylum have little to do with national security. After all, he has made it clear that he has already taken measures to ensure that even if he is arrested, he has already protected access to the classified material in his possession — meaning, it will remain available for future publication even if he is behind bars.

So, the hunt in which the U.S. government is now engaged has nothing to do with preventing new leaks. It’s intended purpose is to show that anyone who has the audacity to challenge American power will lose.

The prospect of Edward Snowden receiving a hero’s welcome in Bolivia or anywhere else, evokes an iconic image of American defeat. In spite of its ability to conduct mass surveillance, twist the arms of smaller governments, wage wars anywhere on the globe, assassinate its enemies at the press of a button, and in so many other ways reinforce its claim to be the most powerful nation on earth, it now risks being outsmarted by an individual.

The American Goliath cannot tolerate the idea of losing.

A headline in the Washington Post says it all: “The Guardian: Small British paper makes big impact with NSA stories“.

Minus the put down — “small British paper” — the report is somewhat complimentary of The Guardian‘s numerous recent successes. But it’s not until paragraph six that the Post acknowledges its competitor as “one of the world’s most heavily trafficked news sites with a high of 41 million unique monthly visitors.”

A news outlet that is still clinging to paper might do well to show a bit of deference to what it perceives as an upstart — even if it happens to be “frankly liberal” and foreign.

How awful! A liberal newspaper making waves in Washington. That really is deeply offensive to America’s media establishment.

McClatchy reports: Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases.

A McClatchy review of public records, statements by Obama administration officials and interviews with cyber and telecom security experts lends credence to assertions that the capability for such surveillance exists.

— FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee on March 30, 2011, that “technological improvements” now enable the bureau “to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”

— The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records – a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data.

— Security experts, including a former AT&T engineer, say that the NSA has tapped into fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data in cities across the country. [Continue reading…]

On March 12 when Sen Ron Wyden questioned Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was testifying in the Senate under oath, the senator, like any good lawyer, knew exactly what he was asking and chose his words carefully.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Wyden asked. He didn’t ask whether the NSA is reading our emails or listening to our phone calls. He used the all-inclusive “any type of data at all” and he was questioning the chief intelligence officer of the United States — and man who is perfectly aware of the breadth and nuance that attaches to the term “data.” Clapper doesn’t need a staff member to tutor him on the meaning of metadata — that is, to explain that this too is a form of data.

In a letter to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Clapper now claims that when he denied the NSA is collecting data on million of Americans, “my answer focused on the collection of the content of communications.”

He could have said: “I gave an answer to a question I hadn’t been asked.”

He now says: “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”

To call it erroneous is to imply that he made a mistake rather than that he was intentionally deceptive. That admission would be a confession to breaking the law. At this point, Clapper seems to think he can brush aside accusations that he committed perjury.

Several senators are clearly unimpressed by Clapper’s explanation.

“It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted.

“Perjury is a serious crime … [and] Clapper should resign immediately,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that Clapper had broken the law, comparing him to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has been charged with espionage.

“Mr. Clapper lied in Congress in defiance of the law in the name of security,” Paul said on CNN last month. “Mr. Snowden told the truth in the name of privacy. So, I think there will be a judgment, because both of them broke the law, and history will have to determine.”

Wyden, who knew about the NSA programs when he pressed Clapper on them, said that Clapper was preventing Congress from conducting oversight.

“This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a statement last month.

The Associated Press reports: The saga of Edward Snowden and the NSA makes one thing clear: The United States’ central role in developing the Internet and hosting its most powerful players has made it the global leader in the surveillance game.

Other countries, from dictatorships to democracies, are also avid snoopers, tapping into the high-capacity fiber optic cables to intercept Internet traffic, scooping their citizens’ data off domestic servers, and even launching cyberattacks to win access to foreign networks.

But experts in the field say that Silicon Valley has made America a surveillance superpower, allowing its spies access to massive mountains of data being collected by the world’s leading communications, social media, and online storage companies. That’s on top of the United States’ fiber optic infrastructure — responsible for just under a third of the world’s international Internet capacity, according to telecom research firm TeleGeography — which allows it to act as a global postmaster, complete with the ability to peek at a big chunk of the world’s messages in transit.

“The sheer power of the U.S. infrastructure is that quite often data would be routed though the U.S. even if it didn’t make geographical sense,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, said in a telephone interview. “The current status quo is a huge benefit to the U.S.” [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: Bolivia has accused European countries of an “act of aggression” for refusing to allow its presidential jet into their airspace, amid suggestions US fugitive Edward Snowden was on board.

Bolivia said France, Portugal, Spain and Italy had blocked the plane from flying over their territory.

President Evo Morales was flying back to Bolivia from Moscow when the plane was diverted to Vienna.

The jet was reportedly searched for Mr Snowden, wanted for leaking US secrets.

He was apparently not on board and is still believed to be in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, from where he is seeking asylum in Bolivia and several other countries.

Bolivia’s UN envoy Sacha Llorenti told reporters in Geneva that he would complain to the UN about the European countries’ actions.

Gregor Peter Schmitz writes: Mick Jagger, 69, might be a father of seven and a grandfather of four, but he can still pull off the role of the eternally youthful rebel. The Rolling Stones recently gave a concert in Washington, just a few kilometers away from the White House. “I don’t think President Obama is here, but I’m sure he’s listening in,” the Stones frontman quipped.

The audience laughed out loud because Barack Obama — the man who carried so much hope and was long believed to be a very European US president — has become the butt of jokes. Some view him as the embodiment of the very “Big Brother” once sketched by George Orwell, the dictator who spies on, monitors and controls every citizen without any scruples.

But how much of that is a cliché, and how much truth is there to it? Given the revelations published by SPIEGEL in recent days showing evidence of a US spying program that is directed at European Union institutions, and monitoring an almost inconceivable number of communications connections — 500 million a month in Germany alone — you can’t blame a person for thinking the worst. Even if Obama has explicitly ensured that Americans needn’t fear some kind of “Big Brother,” the “3rd Party Partners,” as Germany was categorized in top secret NSA documents, are now asking if the same applies to Europeans. [Continue reading…]