Wired: Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years. [Continue reading…]

Whenever we think about America’s seemingly super-powerful intelligence community, we should be less in awe of its capabilities and much more alert to its incompetence.

Farhad Manjoo makes an excellent argument: Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!

According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high-school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high-school equivalency degree — courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: The CIA gave him a job in IT security. He was given diplomatic cover in Geneva. He was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contractor, which paid him $200,000 a year to work on the NSA’s computer systems.

Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator. He isn’t a State Department analyst. He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.

Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that. If Snowden had sent his résumé to any of the tech companies that are providing data to the NSA’s PRISM program, I doubt he’d have even gotten an interview. Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway — many well-known techies dropped out of school. But he was given access way beyond what even a supergeek should have gotten. As he tells the Guardian, the NSA let him see “everything.” He was accorded the NSA’s top security clearance, which allowed him to see and to download the agency’s most sensitive documents. But he didn’t just know about the NSA’s surveillance systems—he says he had the ability to use them. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities [sic] to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email,” he says in a video interview with the paper.

Because Snowden is now in Hong Kong, it’s unclear what the United States can do to him. But watch for officials to tar Snowden — he’ll be called unpatriotic, unprofessional, treasonous, a liar, grandiose, and worse. As in the Bradley Manning case, though, the more badly Snowden is depicted, the more rickety the government’s case for surveillance becomes. After all, they hired him. They gave him unrestricted access to their systems, from court orders to PowerPoint presentations depicting the crown jewels of their surveillance infrastructure. [Continue reading…]

NSA 'Transition 2001', December 2000

An NSA memo written in December 2000 expressed ambivalence about the impact of the Fourth Amendment on the agency’s ability to gather electronic signals intelligence. While paying lip service to the protection of the Constitution, the agency underlined that it would need a “powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans” — the implication being that the NSA’s “presence” (read: surveillance) on the network would inevitably expose U.S. citizens’ communications to government scrutiny. In other words, the global nature of the network would mean that the NSA would no longer be able to draw any sharp differentiation between domestic and foreign communications.

The Guardian reports: The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The [National Security] agency’s ability to efficiently mine metadata, data about who is calling or e-mailing, has made wiretapping and eavesdropping on communications far less vital, according to data experts. That access to data from companies that Americans depend on daily raises troubling questions about privacy and civil liberties that officials in Washington, insistent on near-total secrecy, have yet to address.

“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”

In the 1960s, when the N.S.A. successfully intercepted the primitive car phones used by Soviet leaders driving around Moscow in their Zil limousines, there was no chance the agency would accidentally pick up Americans. Today, if it is scanning for a foreign politician’s Gmail account or hunting for the cellphone number of someone suspected of being a terrorist, the possibilities for what N.S.A. calls “incidental” collection of Americans are far greater.

United States laws restrict wiretapping and eavesdropping on the actual content of the communications of American citizens but offer very little protection to the digital data thrown off by the telephone when a call is made. And they offer virtually no protection to other forms of non-telephone-related data like credit card transactions.

Because of smartphones, tablets, social media sites, e-mail and other forms of digital communications, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily, according to I.B.M.

The company estimates that 90 percent of the data that now exists in the world has been created in just the last two years. From now until 2020, the digital universe is expected to double every two years, according to a study by the International Data Corporation.

Accompanying that explosive growth has been rapid progress in the ability to sift through the information.

When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases — matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use — intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations. Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call, a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time.

“We can find all sorts of correlations and patterns,” said one government computer scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “There have been tremendous advances.”

Here’s a fantasy portrayal of how harvesting metadata can save lives. The storyteller is Palantir Technologies whose database integration system is reported to have become “an indispensable tool employed by the U.S. intelligence community in the war on terrorism.”

In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth. He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas.

None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. Lots of people rent trucks or have relations in Syria, and no doubt there are harmless eccentrics out there fascinated by amusement park infrastructure. Taken together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something. And yet, until about four years ago, his pre-attack prep work would have gone unnoticed. A CIA analyst might have flagged the plane ticket purchase; an FBI agent might have seen the bank transfers. But there was nothing to connect the two. Lucky for counterterror agents, not to mention tourists in Orlando, the government now has software made by Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that’s become the darling of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA’s Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri’s name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government’s disposal. There’s fingerprint and DNA evidence for Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck’s license plate at a tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across the globe. All this information is then displayed on a clearly designed graphical interface that looks like something Tom Cruise would use in a Mission: Impossible movie.

As the CIA analyst starts poking around on Fikri’s file inside of Palantir, a story emerges. A mouse click shows that Fikri has wired money to the people he had been calling in Syria. Another click brings up CIA field reports on the Syrians and reveals they have been under investigation for suspicious behavior and meeting together every day over the past two weeks. Click: The Syrians bought plane tickets to Miami one day after receiving the money from Fikri. To aid even the dullest analyst, the software brings up a map that has a pulsing red light tracing the flow of money from Cairo and Syria to Fikri’s Miami condo. That provides local cops with the last piece of information they need to move in on their prey before he strikes.

Now let’s make a tiny tweak to this story: Fikri, mindful that it’s probably not wise to draw the attention of law enforcement, carefully observes all traffic regulations. He doesn’t get a speeding ticket and the CIA’s Palantir system is not triggered into action.

Shane Harris writes: To date, there have been practically no examples of a terrorist plot being pre-emptively thwarted by data mining these huge electronic caches. (Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said that the metadatabase has helped thwart a terrorist attack “in the last few years,” but the details have not been disclosed.)

When I was writing my book, The Watchers, about the rise of these big surveillance systems, I met analyst after analyst who said that data mining tends to produce big, unwieldy masses of potential bad actors and threats, but rarely does it produce a solid lead on a terrorist plot.

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists’ laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it’s exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

What the proponents of mass surveillance need to explain is how, given the existing scope of data gathering, the NSA did not intercept Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before they planted their bombs in Boston. Neither was Faisal Shahzad prevented from attempting to bomb Times Square.

What mass data collection is extremely effective in doing, is identifying trends — such as the emergence of a political movement. As a tool for suppressing political dissent, nothing could be more effective.

The Obama administration might not be in the business of large-scale political oppression, but what it is doing is putting in place and expanding the infrastructure of oppression.

Americans may never face a dramatic moment in which freedoms are suddenly stripped away, if instead we willingly abandon liberty, bit by bit, in favor of an illusory security.

Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman: “The source believes that exposure is inevitable and was prepared to face that consequence –”

“The source believes that he or she will be exposed?”

“Yes. The source does not believe that it’s possible to stay masked forever, and I don’t even think wants to stay masked forever. I think the source believes himself to be a — because I said in the story it’s “he” — he believes himself to be a whistleblower, that he’s operating out of conscience. He thinks that what the NSA is doing exceeds all reasonable boundaries of privacy or necessity. And I think he wants to stand up and say that. But in order to even be in a position to get word out, he had to be stealthy for a while or he simply would have been preempted. He would have been arrested and preempted and that would have been the end of that.”

Reuters reports: A U.S. intelligence agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, a spokesman for the intelligence chief’s office said.

Confirmation that the NSA filed a “crimes report” came a few hours after the nation’s spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an aggressive defense of a secret government data collection program.

Jonathan Schanzer writes: Sensational reports in the Guardian and Washington Post recently blew the lid off of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic surveillance efforts, which have harvested everything from phone calls to Facebook posts for intelligence purposes.

Curiously, Twitter still appears outside the grasp of the NSA’s PRISM program, which gathers information from major U.S. Internet companies. But a group of lawmakers are concerned that the popular microblogging service has become too hospitable an environment for terrorist groups. The platform hosts a number of official feeds for terrorist groups, including Somalia’s al-Shabab, the North African al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusra, the Taliban, and Hamas.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), who currently serves as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, is looking to curtail terrorist activity on Twitter. Poe is mindful of free speech concerns, but believes terrorist organizations are not entitled to the same free speech protections. As he argued last year, after watching Hamas use the platform for propaganda purposes during its November war with Israel, “Twitter must recognize sooner rather than later that social media is a tool for the terrorists.”

First Amendment activists will almost certainly cry foul. But they will not be alone: This would be one of their rare moments of harmony with the U.S. intelligence community, which has used Twitter feeds of extremists to monitor their messaging for strategies, tactics, and policies. America’s spies also monitor the feeds of extremist personalities and groups to see who follows them and who sympathizes with them, with the goal of identifying potential security threats at home or abroad. In fact, Twitter has made it possible for official bodies to interact with a banned group — even if those interactions haven’t been pleasant. [Continue reading…]

Twitter’s non-participation in PRISM might have provided the company with a small PR coup — in defense of civil liberties and all that — but it probably has just as much to do with the fact that the intelligence community is already perfectly happy with how the platform operates. The front door is wide open. Who needs a back door? Why should we not simply assume that the NSA is already merrily harvesting every single tweet?

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure.” [Continue reading…]

“In the interests of aiding the debate over how Prism works, the Guardian is publishing an additional slide from the 41-slide presentation which details Prism and its operation. We have redacted some program names.”

And in the interests of boosting its U.S. operations, does The Guardian plan on dragging this story out for another 36 days, one slide a day perhaps being the maximum amount the paper has determined its readers can digest without being overwhelmed? Give me a break.

As “ImpartiallyApathetic” comments: “Perhaps some brave soul at the Guardian will leak the leak?” Or does The Guardian guard its secrets even more carefully than the NSA?

The New York Times reports: When government officials came to Silicon Valley to demand easier ways for the world’s largest Internet companies to turn over user data as part of a secret surveillance program, the companies bristled. In the end, though, many cooperated at least a bit.

Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so.

The negotiations shed a light on how Internet companies, increasingly at the center of people’s personal lives, interact with the spy agencies that look to their vast trove of information — e-mails, videos, online chats, photos and search queries — for intelligence. They illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions.

The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence.

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

The negotiations have continued in recent months, as Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives including those at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel. Though the official purpose of those meetings was to discuss the future of the Internet, the conversations also touched on how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts, said a person who attended.

Twitter, Google and other companies have typically fought aggressively against requests they believe reach too far. Google, Microsoft and Twitter publish transparency reports detailing government requests for information, but these reports do not include FISA requests because they are not allowed to acknowledge them.

Yet since tech companies’ cooperation with the government was revealed Thursday, tech executives have been performing a familiar dance, expressing outrage at the extent of the government’s power to access personal data and calling for more transparency, while at the same time heaping praise upon the president as he visited Silicon Valley.

Even as the White House scrambled to defend its online surveillance, President Obama was mingling with donors at the Silicon Valley home of Mike McCue, Flipboard’s chief, eating dinner at the opulent home of Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, and cracking jokes about Mr. Khosla’s big, shaggy dogs.

The Guardian reports: At the end of the first day of the his summit with the Chinese premier Xi Jinping in California, the president described disclosures about the National Security Agency’s access to telephone and internet data as “a very limited issue”.

However in comments that appeared more emollient than his remarks earlier in the day, when he criticised “leaks” and “hype” in the media, Obama tried to deflect criticism, saying internet privacy posed “broad implications for our society”. He said privacy concerns also related to private corporations, which he said collect more data than the federal government.

The Washington Post reports: As a junior senator with presidential aspirations, Barack Obama built his persona in large part around opposition to Bush administration counterterrorism policies, and he sponsored a bill in 2005 that would have sharply limited the government’s ability to spy on U.S. citizens.

That younger Obama bears little resemblance to the commander in chief who stood on a stage here Friday, justifying broad programs targeting phone records and Internet activities as vital tools to prevent terrorist attacks and protect innocent Americans.

The former constitutional law professor — who rose to prominence in part by attacking what he called the government’s post-Sept. 11 encroachment on civil liberties — has undergone a philosophical evolution, arriving at what he now considers the right balance between national security prerogatives and personal privacy.

“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Obama said in San Jose on Friday. “My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of safeguards. But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

“On net,” the president added, “it was worth us doing.”

As Obama strived to reassure the American people following startling revelations this week about top-secret federal data-mining and surveillance programs, he said that he, too, has long been torn on the issue and that there is no easy answer.

“You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

But are Americans in large numbers or any numbers calling for or expecting 100 percent security? An expectation of perfect security is no more realistic than the expectation that citizens will have perfect trust in their government and the absence of a basis for such perfect trust is exactly why the powers of government must always be constrained.

In its original report on a PowerPoint presentation revealing the existence of the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program, the Washington Post noted:

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.

The Post yesterday reported:

[I]f the NSA asked for data from a company, it is likely only a few officials would know of the request — and those employees would be barred from disclosing that information.

Other technology experts said the government could be scooping up the data after it leaves a company’s servers and travels across Internet networks.

When traveling across those pipes, the data is often encrypted, and a company could fulfill a government request by handing over the encryption keys to that data, said Peter Eckersley, the technology projects director at the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“The companies’ denials are all deniable denials because each one of them contains loopholes of various cleverness that don’t address how they might have a transform mechanism for large amounts of user data to the NSA,” he said.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall write: In our capacity as members of the Senate select committee on intelligence, we have spent years examining the intelligence collection operations that have been secretly authorized under the USA Patriot Act. Based on this experience, we respectfully but firmly disagree with the way that this program has been described by senior administration officials.

After years of review, we believe statements that this very broad Patriot Act collection has been “a critical tool in protecting the nation” do not appear to hold up under close scrutiny. We remain unconvinced that the secret Patriot Act collection has actually provided any uniquely valuable intelligence. As far as we can see, all of the useful information that it has provided appears to have also been available through other collection methods that do not violate the privacy of law-abiding Americans in the way that the Patriot Act collection does. We hope that President Obama will probe the basis for these assertions, as we have.

We also disagree with the statement that the broad Patriot Act collection strikes the “right balance” between protecting American security and protecting Americans’ privacy. In our view, it does not. When Americans call their friends and family, whom they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information. We believe the large-scale collection of this information by the government has a very significant impact on Americans’ privacy, whether senior government officials recognize that fact or not.

Finally, we have long been concerned about the degree to which this collection has relied on “secret law”. Senior administration officials have stated on multiple occasions that the Patriot Act’s “business records” authority is “analogous to a grand jury subpoena”. And multiple senior officials have stated that US intelligence agencies do not collect information or dossiers on “millions of Americans”.

We appreciate the recent statement from the director of national intelligence, which declassified certain facts about this collection, including its breadth. Now that the fact of bulk collection has been declassified, we believe that more information about the scale of the collection, and specifically whether it involves the records of “millions of Americans” should be declassified as well.

The American people must be given the opportunity to evaluate the facts about this program and its broad scope for themselves, so that this debate can begin in earnest.

If a technology company creates a platform that allows data integration from disparate databases and a component in its software is called Prism, is that sufficient reason to speculate that it might have some connection with the much-reported NSA PRISM surveillance program?

It seems like it was good enough reason for Talking Points Memo and Gawker.

Gawker‘s Sam Biddle says: “No one knows what Palantir — named after a magical rock in Lord of The Rings that granted remote vision — exactly does.” But it turns out the “secretive data-mining company” provides a lot of information about what it does both through its website and its YouTube channel with 261 videos.

Josh Marshall’s post at TPM was initially based on an email from an anonymous reader who, for what it’s worth (not much), knows a guy who works for Palo Alto-based Palantir (which has over 800 employees). “I want to stress this is a reader email, not TPM reporting,” Marshall wrote before later adding multiple updates but neglecting to include a statement from the company, relayed on Twitter by the Financial Times tech correspondent, Tim Bradshaw: “Palantir’s Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name.”

Why should the company’s denial be taken at face value?

Here’s a good reason.

In the widely seen PowerPoint slide which depicts dates when PRISM collection began for providers beginning with Microsoft, the first date is September 11, 2007. Yahoo came on board in March 2008.

In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp describing their platform said: “We didn’t know it would actually work, until 2008, and we didn’t know anyone would buy it until mid-2008, so third quarter 2008.”

Whatever the NSA was using for data collection from Microsoft and Yahoo in late 2007 and early 2008, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t Palantir software.

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration is invoking an obscure legal privilege to avoid judicial scrutiny of its secret collection of the communications of potentially millions of Americans.

Civil liberties lawyers trying to hold the administration to account through the courts for its surveillance of phone calls and emails of American citizens have been repeatedly stymied by the government’s recourse to the “military and state secrets privilege”. The precedent, rarely used but devastating in its legal impact, allows the government to claim that it cannot be submitted to judicial oversight because to do so it would have to compromise national security.

The government has cited the privilege in two active lawsuits being heard by a federal court in the northern district of California – Virginia v Barack Obama et al, and Carolyn Jewel v the National Security Agency. In both cases, the Obama administration has called for the cases to be dismissed on the grounds that the government’s secret activities must remain secret.

The claim comes amid a billowing furore over US surveillance on the mass communications of Americans following disclosures by the Guardian of a massive NSA monitoring programme of Verizon phone records and internet communications.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has written in court filings that “after careful and actual personal consideration of the matter, based upon my own knowledge and information obtained in the course of my official duties, I have determined that the disclosure of certain information would cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States. Thus, as to this information, I formally assert the state secrets privilege.”

The use of the privilege has been personally approved by President Obama and several of the administration’s most senior officials: in addition to Clapper, they include the director of the NSA Keith Alexander and Eric Holder, the attorney general. “The attorney general has personally reviewed and approved the government’s privilege assertion in these cases,” legal documents state.

In comments on Friday about the surveillance controversy, Obama insisted that the secret programmes were subjected “not only to congressional oversight but judicial oversight”. He said federal judges were “looking over our shoulders”.

But civil liberties lawyers say that the use of the privilege to shut down legal challenges was making a mockery of such “judicial oversight”. Though classified information was shown to judges in camera, the citing of the precedent in the name of national security cowed judges into submission. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The US has admitted using a secret system to mine the systems of the biggest technology companies to spy on millions of people’s online activity, overshadowing attempts by Barack Obama to force China to abandon its cyber-espionage program.

As concern mounted over the sweeping nature of US surveillance, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confirmed revelations by the Guardian that the National Security Agency uses companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to obtain information that includes the content of emails and online files.

Coupled with the acknowledgement that authorities had undertaken a seven-year program to monitor the telephone calls of potentially millions of people in the US, it has become clear that the Obama administration has embraced and expanded the surveillance regime began under President Bush.

Clapper insisted that the internet surveillance program, known as Prism and disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post on Thursday, only covered communications with foreigners and did not target US citizens. “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,” Clapper said.

He acknowledged that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was being used to “facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information”. [Continue reading…]

Politico: The New York Times editorial board has quietly changed the language in the most widely cited line from Thursday’s scathing editorial about the Obama administration’s surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The line — “The administration has now lost all credibility” — was changed Thursday night to read, “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” No correction or explanatory note was appended.

“The change was for clarity’s sake,” Andrew Rosenthal, the Times editorial page editor, told POLITICO on Friday morning. “It was clear from the context of the editorial that the issue of credibility related to this subject and the final edit of the piece strengthened that point.”

It’s hardly surprising. The New York Times’s displays of courage are generally short-lived.

Did they get an angry phone call from the White House threatening to no longer feed officially-approved leaks to the paper’s reporters?