Daniel McCarthy writes: The national-security bureaucracy and its sweeping powers are not much different from the domestic regulatory state, in that the former, like the latter, tends to grow and assume more power over time in an organic fashion. A bureaucracy is created to address some crisis, but once that crisis has ended, the bureaucracy remains and finds new work for itself. Containing a bureaucracy is always hard, even where no secrecy is involved.

Here’s the picture to keep in mind when considering today’s national-security apparatus. First, most of it was built during the Cold War for the purposes of winning that conflict. The National Security Agency’s prowess with intercepting electronic communications of all kinds had a particular purpose. Every foreign government and non-state entity was fair game, though neither foreign nationals nor their signals were necessarily geographically restricted. There was always incidental pickup of U.S. citizen communications.

Second—and this is a point brought out in Barton Gellman’s invaluable book Angler—the national-security reforms of the Watergate era branded the brains of Republicans like Dick Cheney. They saw two presidents, Nixon and Ford, crippled in their ability to wage the Cold War by legislative meddling. Cheney, for one, believed that the presidency and the agencies serving it had to be restored to the level of power they had wielded before Nixon’s disgrace.

Third, prosecutors and investigators at all levels have a professional interest in wider surveillance, and long before 9/11 they were fishing for pretexts that might reward them with Patriot Act-like powers. Threats of turn-of-the-millennium terrorism looked like a magic lamp that might grant every wish, but it turned out to take a real act of terrorism on 9/11 to fulfill long-thwarted professional fantasies. After 9/11, who was going to say no? Who would dare even question the expansion of domestic surveillance and police powers?

Before 9/11, there was political will (from the likes of Cheney), technical means (the Cold War intelligence infrastructure), and professional interest (on the part of domestic law enforcement and regulators) for weakening the distinctions between foreign surveillance and domestic intelligence gathering. Until 9/11, there was also resistance—but immediately after 9/11, all that dissolved. [Continue reading…]

Jay Rosen writes:

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.” — Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian

That’s the government telling the editor of a national newspaper: Time’s up, no more of that journalism stuff! We’ll decide when there’s been enough debate. Stop now or we’ll make you stop. Rusbridger’s response: We will continue our careful reporting of the Snowden material. “We just won’t do it from London.” (The Guardian has a U.S. operation based in New York.) From Reuters:

The Guardian’s decision to publicize the government threat – and the newspaper’s assertion that it can continue reporting on the Snowden revelations from outside of Britain – appears to be the latest step in an escalating battle between the news media and governments over reporting of secret surveillance programs.

This battle is global. Just as the surveillance state is an international actor — not one government, but many working together — and just as the surveillance net stretches worldwide because the communications network does too, the struggle to report on the secret system’s overreach is global, as well. It’s the collect-it-all coalition against an expanded Fourth Estate, worldwide. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The National Security Agency—which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens—has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say.

The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.

The NSA’s filtering, carried out with telecom companies, is designed to look for communications that either originate or end abroad, or are entirely foreign but happen to be passing through the U.S. But officials say the system’s broad reach makes it more likely that purely domestic communications will be incidentally intercepted and collected in the hunt for foreign ones.

The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Blarney, for instance, was established with AT&T Inc., T +0.24% former officials say. AT&T declined to comment.

This filtering takes place at more than a dozen locations at major Internet junctions in the U.S., officials say. Previously, any NSA filtering of this kind was largely believed to be happening near points where undersea or other foreign cables enter the country.

Details of these surveillance programs were gathered from interviews with current and former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or operate the systems, or provide data. Most have direct knowledge of the work.

The NSA defends its practices as legal and respectful of Americans’ privacy. According to NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, if American communications are “incidentally collected during NSA’s lawful signals intelligence activities,” the agency follows “minimization procedures that are approved by the U.S. attorney general and designed to protect the privacy of United States persons.”

As another U.S. official puts it, the NSA is “not wallowing willy-nilly” through Americans’ idle online chatter. “We want high-grade ore.”

To achieve that, the programs use complex algorithms that, in effect, operate like filters placed over a stream with holes designed to let certain pieces of information flow through. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, NSA widened the holes to capture more information when the government broadened its definition of what constitutes “reasonable” collection, according to a former top intelligence official.

The NSA’s U.S. programs have been described in narrower terms in the documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. One, for instance, acquires Americans’ phone records; another, called Prism, makes requests for stored data to Internet companies. By contrast, this set of programs shows the NSA has the capability to track almost anything that happens online, so long as it is covered by a broad court order.

The NSA programs are approved and overseen by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. NSA is required to destroy information on Americans that doesn’t fall under exceptions to the rule, including information that is relevant to foreign intelligence, encrypted, or evidence of a crime.

The NSA is focused on collecting foreign intelligence, but the streams of data it monitors include both foreign and domestic communications. Inevitably, officials say, some U.S. Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both “metadata” about communications, such as the “to” and “from” lines in an email, and the contents of the communications themselves.

Much, but not all, of the data is discarded, meaning some communications between Americans are stored in the NSA’s databases, officials say. Some lawmakers and civil libertarians say that, given the volumes of data NSA is examining, privacy protections are insufficient.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, in 2012 sought but failed to prohibit the agency from searching its databases for information on Americans without a warrant. He has also pushed intelligence agencies to detail how many Americans’ communications have been collected and to explain whether purely domestic communications are retained in NSA’s databanks. They have declined.

“Technology is moving us swiftly into a world where the only barriers to this kind of dragnet surveillance are the protections enshrined into law,” Mr. Wyden says.

This month President Barack Obama proposed changes to NSA surveillance to improve oversight. Those proposed changes wouldn’t alter the systems in the U.S. that NSA relies upon for some of its most sensitive surveillance.

The systems operate like this: The NSA asks telecom companies to send it various streams of Internet traffic it believes most likely to contain foreign intelligence. This is the first cut of the data.

These requests don’t ask for all Internet traffic. Rather, they focus on certain areas of interest, according to a person familiar with the legal process. “It’s still a large amount of data, but not everything in the world,” this person says.

The second cut is done by NSA. It briefly copies the traffic and decides which communications to keep based on what it calls “strong selectors”—say, an email address, or a large block of computer addresses that correspond to an organization it is interested in. In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data.

One U.S. official says the agency doesn’t itself “access” all the traffic within the surveillance system. The agency defines access as “things we actually touch,” this person says, pointing out that the telecom companies do the first stage of filtering.

The surveillance system is built on relationships with telecommunications carriers that together cover about 75% of U.S. Internet communications. They must hand over what the NSA asks for under orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The firms search Internet traffic based on the NSA’s criteria, current and former officials say.

Verizon Communications Inc., for example, has placed intercepts in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, according to one person familiar with the technology. It isn’t clear how much information these intercepts send to the NSA. A Verizon spokesman declined to comment. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: David Cameron has been drawn into the controversy over the treatment of David Miranda after Downing Street confirmed that the prime minister was given advanced notice that police planned to detain the partner of Glenn Greenwald at Heathrow airport.

As the Home Office launched an aggressive offensive to justify the detention of Miranda, No 10 said the prime minister was informed of the planned police action.

A Downing Street source said: “We were kept abreast in the usual way. We do not direct police investigations.”

The confirmation from Downing Street, which follows a statement from the White House that it was given a “heads-up” about the detention of Miranda, came shortly after the Home Office suggested that Greenwald’s partner possessed “highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism”.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The government and the police have a duty to protect the public and our national security. If the police believe that an individual is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism, then they should act and the law provides them with a framework to do that. Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning. This is an ongoing police inquiry so will not comment on the specifics.”

In the duplicitous manner that seems to have become second-nature to government officials in this era, we are being told in a roundabout way that opposing Miranda’s detention is somehow supporting terrorism — think about what you are condoning, the British official ominously suggests.

It is the official himself who needs to think about what we are condoning.

To support Edward Snowden and those who have helped disseminate the information which he leaked, is to support an idea that rests at the foundation of representational democracy: that the preeminent responsibility of public officials is to represent the interests of the public. When the interests of the state conflict with those of the people, real democrats stand up for the people.

Nick Cohen writes: The detention of David Miranda at Heathrow is a clarifying moment that reveals how far Britain has changed for the worse. Nearly everyone suspects the Met [Metropolitan police] held Miranda on trumped up charges because the police, at the behest of the Americans, wanted to intimidate Miranda’s partner Glenn Greenwald, the conduit of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and find out whether more embarrassing information is on Greenwald’s laptop.

The Brazilian government has gone wild. (Greenwald lives in Brazil and his partner is Brazilian.) All kinds of people are saying, quite properly, that although they disagree with Greenwald’s politics they defend the right of citizens to hold governments to account.

You might have thought the Met would have been anxious to reply to its critics. You might have thought – expected indeed – that it would angrily rebut the charges, and provide irrefutable evidence that its officers are not like the goons of a dictatorship but remain the conscientious public servants of a democracy.

The Terrorism Act of 2000, which the Met used against Miranda, says that terrorism involves ‘serious violence against a person’ or ‘serious damage to property’. The police can also detain the alleged terrorist because he or she ‘endangers a person’s life’, ‘poses a serious risk to the health and safety of the public’ or threatens to interfere with ‘an electronic system’.

I wanted to ask the Met: Which of these above offences did your officers suspect that Miranda might have been about to commit? What reasonable grounds did they have for thinking he could endanger lives or property? And, more to the point, which terrorist movement did you believe Miranda was associated with: al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Continuity IRA, ETA, Shiv Sena, the provisional wing of the Unabomber Appreciation Society?

Greenwald may not thank me for saying this but in one respect America is an admirable country. In the US, the police reply to reporters’ questions. They may lie, but at least they reply. In the UK, they say nothing.

Politico reports: The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls.

The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people.

In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws from big wars abroad.

Some analysts say the panel would have been an obvious choice to dig into the profound questions and concerns contractor Edward Snowden raised by leaking details about the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata and internet traffic.

But the board’s thin ranks at present — and the remaining members’ close ties to Obama — may have fueled the decision the president announced last week to turn instead to a brand new and still unnamed body of outside experts to delve into the privacy issues raised by surveillance in the “Big Data” age.

Two PIAB members confirmed to POLITICO this week that they were asked to leave the longstanding panel as part of a broader reshuffle.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, writes: A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

Simon Jenkins writes: The detention at Heathrow on Sunday of the Brazilian David Miranda is the sort of treatment western politicians love to deplore in Putin’s Russia or Ahmadinejad’s Iran. His “offence” under the 2000 Terrorism Act was apparently to be the partner of a journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who had reported for the Guardian on material released by the American whistleblower, Edward Snowden. We must assume the Americans asked the British government to nab him, shake him down and take his personal effects.

Miranda’s phone and laptop were confiscated and he was held incommunicado, without access to friends or lawyer, for the maximum nine hours allowed under law. It is the airport equivalent of smashing into someone’s flat, rifling through their drawers and stealing papers and documents. It is simple harassment and intimidation.

Greenwald himself is not known to have committed any offence, unless journalism is now a “terrorist” occupation in the eyes of British and American politicians. As for Miranda, his only offence seems to have been to be part of his family. Harassing the family of those who have upset authority is the most obscene form of state terrorism. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: U.S. officials did not ask the British government to question the partner of the journalist who first reported secrets leaked by fugitive U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden, the White House said on Monday.

British authorities did, however, give their U.S. counterparts a “heads up” before detaining the partner of American journalist Glenn Greenwald, Brazilian David Miranda, the White House said.

“This was a decision that they made on their own, and not at the request of the United States,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a briefing. “This is something that they did independent of our direction,” he added.

Who needs direction when all it takes is a nod and a wink? The White House knew exactly what was happening and it had absolutely no objections.

TechDirt: As we’ve noted, one of the key claims by NSA surveillance defenders was that the program had strong oversight from Congress. However, with the revelations last week about thousands of abuses, it’s become quite clear that this isn’t true. Late on Friday, Rep. Jim Himes, who is on the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that he was unaware of those violations, was told that there were “no abuses” and that these kinds of abuses are unacceptable:

Possibility of 1000s of NSA violations unacceptable. Many intel comm members unaware of this report. In fact, we have been told no abuses.

— Jim Himes (@jahimes) August 16, 2013

Remember, this isn’t just a Congressional Rep, but a member of the Intelligence Committee, who is in charge of overseeing the NSA surveillance program. Hell, he’s even on the oversight subcommittee, and no one told him about any abuses, despite thousands happening per year. That’s astounding, and highlights how the claims of Congressional oversight are clearly bogus. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The journalist who first published secrets leaked by fugitive former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden vowed on Monday to publish more documents and said Britain will be “sorry” for detaining his partner for nine hours.

British authorities used anti-terrorism laws on Sunday to detain David Miranda, partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, as he passed through London’s Heathrow airport.

Miranda, 28, a Brazilian citizen, said he was questioned for nine hours before being released without charge, minus his laptop, cellphone and memory sticks, which were seized.

Greenwald, a columnist for Britain’s the Guardian newspaper who is based in Rio de Janeiro, said the detention was an attempt to intimidate him for publishing documents leaked by Snowden disclosing U.S. surveillance of global internet communications.

Snowden, who has been granted asylum by Russia, gave Greenwald from 15,000 to 20,000 documents with details of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

“I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did,” Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio’s airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

“They wanted to intimidate our journalism, to show that they have power and will not remain passive but will attack us more intensely if we continue publishing their secrets,” he said.

Miranda told reporters that six British agents questioned him continuously about all aspects of his life during his detention in a room at Heathrow airport. He said he was freed and returned his passport only when he started shouting in the airport lounge.

Brazil’s government complained about Miranda’s detention in a statement on Sunday that said the use of the British anti-terrorism law was unjustified.

Many Brazilians are still upset with Britain’s anti-terrorism policies because of the death of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was mistaken for a suspect in a bombing attempt in 2005. Menezes was shot seven times in the head by police on board an underground train at a London station.

Reuters also reports: British authorities came under pressure on Monday to explain why anti-terrorism powers were used to detain for nine hours the partner of a journalist who has written articles about U.S. and British surveillance programmes based on leaks from Edward Snowden.

Brazilian David Miranda, the partner of American journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained on Sunday at London’s Heathrow Airport where he was in transit on his way from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro. He was released without charge.

“The detention of David Miranda is a disgrace and reinforces the undoubted complicity of the UK in U.S. indiscriminate surveillance of law-abiding citizens,” Michael Mansfield, one of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers, told Reuters.

“The fact that Snowden, and now anyone remotely associated with him, are being harassed as potential spies and terrorists is sheer unadulterated state oppression,” he wrote in an email.

Glenn Greenwald writes: At 6:30 am this morning my time – 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US – I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a “security official at Heathrow airport.” He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been “detained” at the London airport “under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000.”

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the “security official” called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official – who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 – said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.

Despite all that, five more hours went by and neither the Guardian’s lawyers nor Brazilian officials, including the Ambassador to the UK in London, were able to obtain any information about David. We spent most of that time contemplating the charges he would likely face once the 9-hour period elapsed.

According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, “fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders” (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, “most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour.” An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used “to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop “the terrorists”, and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name. [Continue reading…]

NPR reports: In the digital world, almost everything you do to communicate leaves a trace. Often, emails are stored on servers even after they’re deleted. Phone calls create logs detailing which numbers connected, when and for how long. Your mobile phone can create a record of where you are.

If you’re a journalist trying to protect a confidential source, this is a very difficult world to work in.

“I have been running around in my newsroom, screaming about this … for years,” says Julia Angwin, who covers computer security and privacy at The Wall Street Journal. “There’s so much evidence now that journalists are being targeted, that our communications are vulnerable and, mostly, that our sources are being put in jail.”

It’s in this context that The New York Times decided to outsource its email to Google. This summer, the paper moved all of its reporters onto corporate Gmail accounts. Before the switch, Times emails were stored on servers it owned; now those messages are in Google’s digital filing cabinet.

Unlike the free Gmail used by millions of consumers, corporate Gmail accounts cost money and offer greater privacy protections. But that protection is not complete, and the move could leave Times reporters and their sources with fewer legal protections if they are the subject of a government investigation.

Angwin says one of the reasons that so many journalists have been unable to protect their sources is that records about whom they are talking to are collected by third parties. Last year, when the Department of Justice was investigating a leak about a foiled terrorism plot in Yemen, it didn’t subpoena reporters at the Associated Press. Instead, it went to Verizon and asked for the records of calls going into and out of the AP’s bureaus. [Continue reading…]

James Staten at Forrester writes: Earlier this month The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a prediction that the U.S. cloud computing industry stands to lose up to $35 billion by 2016 thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM project, leaked to the media in June. We think this estimate is too low and could be as high as $180 billion or a 25% hit to overall IT service provider revenues in that same timeframe. That is, if you believe the assumption that government spying is more a concern than the business benefits of going cloud.

Having read through the thoughtful analysis by Daniel Castro at ITIF, we commend him and this think tank on their reasoning and cost estimates. However the analysis really limited the impact to the actions of non-US corporations. The high-end figure, assumes US-based cloud computing providers would lose 20% of the potential revenues available from the foreign market. However we believe there are two additional impacts that would further be felt from this revelation:

1. US customers would also bypass US cloud providers for their international and overseas business – costing these cloud providers up to 20% of this business as well.

2. Non-US cloud providers will lose as much as 20% of their available overseas and domestic opportunities due to other governments taking similar actions. [Continue reading…]

Jay Rosen writes: As things stand today, the Fourth Estate is a state of mind. Some in the press have it, some do not. Some who have it are part of the institutional press. Some, like Ladar Levison and Edward Snowden, are not.

“I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore.”

Those are the poignant words of Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, a secure email service that he voluntarily shut down when faced with some sort of demand from the U.S. government to reveal user information. The precise nature of that demand he cannot talk about for fear of being thrown in jail, perhaps the best example we now have for how the surveillance state undoes the First Amendment. But we know that Lavabit was used by Edward Snowden to communicate with the outside world when he was stuck in the Moscow airport. So use your imagination!

If the public knew what the government was doing, the government wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore… is a perfect description of a “Fourth Estate situation.” That’s when we need a journalist to put hidden facts to light and bring public opinion into play, which then changes the equation for people in power operating behind the veil. If it doesn’t happen, an illegitimate state action will persist. “My hope is that, you know, the media can uncover what’s going on, without my assistance,” Levison said. He’s like a whistleblower who will go to jail if he actually uses his whistle. All he can do is give truncated interviews that stop short of describing the pressure he is under.

At least one thing is clear: Snowden’s determination “to embolden others to step forward,” which I wrote about in my last post, is starting to work. Ladar Levison is proof. [Continue reading…]

Patrick McGuire reports: Barrett Brown has been sitting in prison, without trial, for almost a year. In case you haven’t followed his case, the 31-year-old journalist is facing a century of prison time for sharing a link that contained—within an archive of 5 million emails—credit-card information stolen from a hack of a security company called Stratfor (Jeremy Hammond, the actual hacker, is going to prison for ten years), threatening the family of an FBI officer who raided his mother’s home, and trying to hide his laptops from the Feds.

The flood of NSA leaks from Edward Snowden has placed extra attention on Barrett, who focused on investigating a partnership that many people are incredibly uncomfortable with—the connections between private security, surveillance, intelligence firms, and the US government.

Barrett’s website, ProjectPM, used a small team of researchers to pore over leaked emails, news articles, and public corporate information to figure out what this industry does exactly, and how they serve the White House. It’s partly because of Barrett that we know about things like persona management, a technology used by the US government and its contractors to disseminate information online using fake personas, also known as sock puppets.

He also helped the world learn about TrapWire, a surveillance program that’s built into security cameras all over the world and “more accurate than facial recognition technology.” When it was made public in the pre-Snowden era, most media outlets played it off as not being a big deal. We still don’t know exactly how powerful TrapWire is, but, because of the Strafor hack and Barrett’s research, at least we know it exists.

Anyone interested in getting involved with ProjectPM is invited with this call to action: “If you care that the surveillance state is expanding in capabilities and intent without being effectively opposed by the population of the West, you can assist in making this an actionable resource for journalists, activists, and other interested parties,” which sums up the quest for information that is, in and of itself, on trial in Barrett’s case. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in the Guardian regarding the prosecution of Barrett Brown, “here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Two US senators on the intelligence committee said on Friday that thousands of annual violations by the National Security Agency on its own restrictions were “the tip of the iceberg.”

“The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans’ have been violated thousands of times each year,” said senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, two leading critics of bulk surveillance, who responded Friday to a Washington Post story based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg.”

On July 31, Wyden, backed by Udall, vaguely warned other senators in a floor speech that the NSA and the director of national intelligence were substantively misleading legislators by describing improperly collected data as a matter of innocent and anodyne human or technical errors. [Continue reading…]

Electronic Frontier Foundation: With each recent revelation about the NSA’s spying programs government officials have tried to reassure the American people that all three branches of government—the Executive branch, the Judiciary branch, and the Congress—knowingly approved these programs and exercised rigorous oversight over them. President Obama recited this talking point just last week, saying: “as President, I’ve taken steps to make sure they have strong oversight by all three branches of government and clear safeguards to prevent abuse and protect the rights of the American people.” With these three pillars of oversight in place, the argument goes, how could the activities possibly be illegal or invasive of our privacy?

Today, the Washington Post confirmed that two of those oversight pillars—the Executive branch and the court overseeing the spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court)—don’t really exist. The third pillar came down slowly over the last few weeks, with Congressional revelations about the limitations on its oversight, including what Representative Sensennbrenner called “rope a dope” classified briefings. With this, the house of government trust has fallen, and it’s time to act. Join the over 500,000 people demanding an end to the unconstitutional NSA spying. [Continue reading…]