Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, write: Every day, it seems, brings disturbing new revelations about the National Security Agency’s program to collect phone and email metadata, raising serious questions for our country. Reports indicate that the NSA is gathering metadata on millions of people in the United States and around the world, targeting diplomatic missions of both friends and foes.

The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.

When the Congress and the courts work in secret; when massive amounts of data are collected from Americans and enterprises; when government’s power of intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens, augmented by the awesome power of advanced technologies, is hugely expanded without public debate or discussion over seven years, then our sense of constitutional process and accountability is deeply offended.

Officials insist that the right balance has been struck between security and privacy. But how would we know, when all the decisions have been made in secret, with almost no oversight? [Continue reading…]

CNet: The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person’s password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.

“I’ve certainly seen them ask for passwords,” said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We push back.”

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies “really heavily scrutinize” these requests, the person said. “There’s a lot of ‘over my dead body.'”

Some of the government orders demand not only a user’s password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: “No, we don’t, and we can’t see a circumstance in which we would provide it.”

Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has “never” turned over a user’s encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. “We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously,” the spokesperson said.

Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users’ passwords and how they would respond to them. [Continue reading…]

Shane Harris writes: Now that the House of Representatives has voted down an amendment that would have significantly restricted what information the National Security Agency can collect about Americans, the best hope of curtailing the spy agency’s powers lies with the courts. And while NSA critics have failed to rein in the eavesdropping agency through legislative action, they may have more luck with the third branch of government — thanks to a leaked classified document, a rare bit of good fortune for a leading civil liberties group, and a sympathetic justice of the Supreme Court.

The fact that more than 200 lawmakers voted against a key NSA collection program, and one authorized by the long-controversial Patriot Act, represents a victory of sorts for surveillance critics. There has rarely been such a pronounced opposition to surveillance authorities, and the fact that the Obama administration had to mount a full court press to preserve the program, and still only eked out a narrow win, may give opponents some hope that a legislative effort could be mounted again with a different result. But there is no clear next step legislatively. No bill or amendment on the table. Yet there is a path forward on the judicial front.

Challenges to the NSA’s surveillance programs have historically failed in large part because no one has been able to prove he had his communications scooped up in the agency’s electronic dragnets. That information is an official secret. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the most stalwart opponents of the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities, failed to challenge the agency’s operations in the Supreme Court because of this Catch-22. It couldn’t prove it had been spied upon, even though the government acknowledged — generally — that such spying does occur.

But now, classified documents released by the ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leave no doubt that at least one telecommunications company, Verizon Business Network Services, has handed over bulk telephone metadata to the NSA under a court order.

The key for a new challenge by the ACLU, which it filed last month in U.S. District Court, is that it’s a customer of Verizon Business Network Services. Not just Verizon, but this particular division of Verizon. This is the closest thing the group has had to a smoking gun, and conceivably it could be sufficient to establish legal standing to bring the lawsuit. The case could end up in the Supreme Court.

But to succeed, the ACLU — or any challenger — will have to convince jurists that the long-standing legal treatment of metadata is outdated and needs to be changed. [Continue reading…]

Even if you don’t read this post, watch the video below!

A report in the Washington Post has the headline: “NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists.”

Some of that growth is described:

In 2007, ground was broken for a $1 billion facility on 120 acres at Fort Gordon, where an NSA workforce of 4,000 collects and processes signals intelligence from the Middle East, according to the agency.

In Hawaii, the NSA outgrew its Schofield Barracks Army site years ago and opened a 250,000-square-foot, $358 million work space adjacent to it last year. The Wahiawa Annex is the last place that Snowden, then a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, worked before leaving with thousands of top-secret documents. The main job of the NSA’s Hawaii facility is to process signals intelligence from around the Pacific Rim.

In Texas, the agency has added facilities to its San Antonio-based operations. Its main site, at Lackland Air Force Base, processes signals intelligence from Central and South America. In Colorado, the NSA’s expanding facilities on Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora collect and process information about weapons systems around the globe.

Overseas, the NSA’s station at RAF Menwith Hill on the moors of Yorkshire is planned to grow by one-third, to an estimated 2,500 employees, according to studies undertaken by local activists. Although hidden from the main road, up close it is hard to miss the 33 bright-white radar domes that sprout on the deep green landscape. They are thought to collect signals intelligence from parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

I imagine the editors at the Post chose the photo of sheep grazing at Menwith Hill, golf ball domes in the background, with the idea that this bucolic image gives the NSA a more benign face.

The lie that the agency and its media lackeys want to promote is that the NSA is vital to our safety — a shepherd protecting its lambs — and that without its vast reach we would become much more vulnerable to terrorism.

One might imagine that after the Cold War and before 9/11, the NSA was slowly being moth-balled, yet nothing could be further from the truth as a British documentary broadcast in 1993 makes clear.

Even though the Channel 4 report below is now twenty years old, it reveals a wealth of information that remains extremely relevant today.

• For decades the NSA has been monitoring the communications of America’s allies;
• civilian communications were being monitored globally long before 9/11;
• intelligence gathering is performed to serve U.S. commercial interests;
• the NSA’s disregard for Constitutional protections extends as far as its monitoring the communications of members of Congress;
• major defense contractors have for decades been so deeply entwined in the NSA’s operations that it is hard to tell who is serving whom.

“The Hill,” Dispatches, Channel 4, aired on October 6, 1993:

The Washington Post reports: A controversial proposal to restrict how the National Security Agency collects Americans’ telephone records failed to advance in the House by a narrow margin Wednesday, a victory for the Obama administration, which has spent weeks defending the program.

Lawmakers voted 217 to 205 to defeat the proposal from an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative members. Those lawmakers had joined forces in response to revelations by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, that the agency has collected the phone records of millions of Americans — a practice that critics say goes beyond the kind of collection that has been authorized by Congress.

The plan, sponsored by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), would have restricted the collection of the records, known as metadata, only when there was a connection to relevant ongoing investigations. It also would have required that secret opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be made available to lawmakers and that the court publish summaries of each opinion for public review.

Conyers said the proposal “would curtail the ongoing dragnet collection and storage of the personal records of innocent Americans.”

There was little indication that a similar measure would have momentum in the Senate, and the Obama administration made clear that it would veto any such proposal. But the ability of Amash and Conyers to bring the measure to the House floor as an amendment to a Defense Department appropriations bill — and their ability to get more than 200 votes in their favor — was a testament to lawmakers’ growing concerns over the NSA’s bulk collection of data.

A “controversial proposal” supported by “an unlikely coalition” — the journalists who pump out this servile crap are an embarrassment to America.

How about instead noting the fact that even in a Congress which is itself enslaved to the god of national security, there were enough dissenters, that symbolically at least, both the NSA and the White House got a kick in the balls? I know, the Washington Post would not phrase it exactly that way, but the point is not that the amendment got defeated; it is that it almost passed.

The Washington Post reports: Concerns about personal privacy are on the rise, with a big majority of Americans saying the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone and Internet data intrudes on citizens’ rights without clear improvements in U.S. security, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the NSA programs are infringing on some Americans’ privacy rights, and about half see those programs as encroaching on their own privacy. Most of those who see the programs as compromising privacy say the intrusions are unjustified.

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration has forcefully urged the defeat of a legislative measure to curb its wide-ranging collection of Americans’ phone records, setting up a showdown with the House of Representatives over domestic surveillance.

A statement from the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, late on Tuesday evening capped an extraordinary day of near-revolt on Capitol Hill concerning the secret National Security Agency surveillance programes revealed by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Guardian and Washington Post.

The White House urged House members to vote against a measure from Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, that would stop the NSA siphoning up the telephone records of millions of Americans without suspicion of a crime.

“This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process,” said the statement emailed from the White House late on Tuesday in anticipation of a House debate on the Amash measure scheduled for Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

So what does the White House do to promote an open deliberative process? Send in Gen Alexander to provide a classified briefing!

The New York Times reports: General Alexander’s hurried visit to Capitol Hill came as a leading Senate critic of the N.S.A.’s large-scale collection of data about Americans’ phone calls spoke out about expansive government surveillance. He declared that recent leaks about domestic spying by Mr. Snowden have created a “unique moment in our constitutional history” to reform what he said has become “an always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state.”

Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the leading Senate critic and a member of the Intelligence Committee, also hinted that the revelation that the government has been keeping records of every domestic phone call is not the only such extensive program. And he blasted national security officials in the Obama administration, saying they have “actively” misled the American public about domestic surveillance.

“As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority,” Mr. Wyden said. “Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.”