In response to the revelation that the NSA has been illegally spying on all Americans for more than a decade, NSA chief General Keith Alexander claimed that the spying prevented a terrorist attack on Wall Street and the New York subway.

There’s only one problem: the claim is completely false.

The Christian Science Monitor notes today:

According to officials at the House Intelligence hearing, this plan was caught when the NSA was using its Internet intercept authority to monitor the communications of a known extremist in Yemen.

This suspect, in turn, was in contact with an individual in the United States named Khalid Ouazzani. Thus warned, the FBIi nvestigated Mr. Ouazzani through traditional law enforcement methods, and discovered a burgeoning plot to bomb the NYSE.

“Ouazzani had been providing information and support to this plot,” FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce told lawmakers.

However, Mr. Ouazzani pleaded guilty to providing material support – in his case, money – to Al Qaeda, not to terror planning. His May 2010 plea agreement makes no mention of anything related to the New York Stock Exchange, or any bomb plot, notes David Kravets in Wired magazine.

Plus, Ouazzani’s defense attorney said Tuesday the stock market allegation was news to him.

“Khalid Ouazzani was not involved in any plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange,” attorney Robin Fowler told Wired.

How much did this bad guy give Al Qaeda? $23,000 total.

The other publicly-discussed disrupted terror plot – on the New York subway – was also not really due to government’s overbroad spying program.

The Associated Press reports:

Little was offered to substantiate claims that the programs have been successful in stopping acts of terrorism that would not have been caught with narrower surveillance. In the New York subway bombing case, President Barack Obama conceded the would-be bomber might have been caught with less sweeping surveillance.

The Christian Science Monitor notes of the New York subway case:

As to the New York subway plot, it was discovered not by analysis of vast amounts of Internet data of foreign users, but rather by old-fashioned police work, according to The Guardian ….

In addition, the Guardian pointed out:

Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA’s vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role ….

Indeed, top security experts say that mass surveillance does not help keep us safe.

Glenn Greenwald notes:

This is just the same playbook that U.S. government officials have been using for the last five decades whenever anything gets done that brings small amounts of transparency to the bad conduct that they do in the dark. They immediately accuse those who brought that transparency of jeopardizing national security. They try and scare the American public into believing that they’ve been placed at risk and that the only way they can stay safe is to trust the people in power to do whatever it is they want to do without any kinds of constraints, accountability or light of any kind.

Postscript: Mr. Ouazzani giving $23,000 to Al Qaeda is indeed a crime. He supported Al Qaeda, and was rightly prosecuted and convicted for that crime. But given that the American government has been providing arms, money and logistical support to Al Qaeda in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia and other countries – and related Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries – Mr. Ouazzani’s support for terrorism seems rather small in comparison.

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“Civil Libertarian” Obama’s Options On Surveillance

By Cynthia L. Cooper on Jun 18, 2013

Editor’s Note: Readers of this site will have seen discussion here about the extent to which Obama—or any president—is free to significantly deviate from a consensus on most “security policy.” For a recent example, see “Why Obama Cannot Undo the Surveillance Society—But We Can.” Nonetheless, it is reasonable to ask why, if Obama is the top decision-maker in this country and a purported civil libertarian, does he not at least try to make meaningful changes in the law to protect privacy and other rights. Cynthia Cooper addresses this question below.

Despite the damage already done in secrecy to American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights—as revealed by Glenn Greenwald in his explosive article inThe Guardian on June 5, 2013, and by others (see below)—President Obama could still do plenty to respond to Americans’ legitimate concerns about overreaching electronic surveillance.

Nothing is stopping him from creating a civilian oversight board, for example. This would offer Americans the right to see and challenge information wrongly collected about them, and could compensate them for any harm done. He could demand that Congress return to the tougher scheme of checks and balances contained in the original FISA law of 1978 before the Bush-Cheney administration cut it to shreds. He could favor some or all of the many other approaches to fixing FISA proposed by senators and others in various platforms and books (like the one I co-authored with Elizabeth Holtzman,http://amzn.to/16Gcq2F

Minimization. Discard information collected on innocent Americans, as suggested by former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. This would bolster “minimization,” a form of legal harm reduction, according to the senator.

Anonymization. As suggested in 2010 by Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington D.C. The spooks could only access identity if a connection to foreign intelligence were discovered.

Transparency. Make available to the public secret court rulings or unclassified summaries, as suggested by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR).

Disclosure. Support a report on the impact of the law on American’s privacy, or one with basic information on the NSA’s vacuuming up of wholly domestic communications, both proposed by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Background

Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law followingdisclosures of President Nixon’s secret wiretapping of journalists and political adversaries, and the FBI’s use of COINTELPRO to monitor American activists. (See Cheating Justice for details.)

The 1978 FISA law established a framework for collecting intelligence, while protecting Americans from unwarranted surveillance. The law was designed to prevent abuses by the executive branch, and provide safeguards to balance the Fourth Amendment with security needs by setting up a process of confidential applications for surveillance through the FISA court (FISC).

President Bush circumvented the process altogether and began signing executive orders authorizing surveillance on his own, illegally, starting in2001. And his administration completely dismantled and rewrote the architecture of the law with the intent of extending executive powers, eventually embedding them in a new law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).

The 2008 law allows the executive branch, on its own, to order secret electronic surveillance of foreigners for foreign intelligence needs. And it weakened the old law’s prohibitions on the collection of information on Americans.

“It’s now embodied in the FISA statute that we passed last year,” RichardCheney later crowed to ABC News about the Bush illegal surveillance activities.

President Obama inherited this law when he took office in 2009, and has done nothing since to correct, or shine light on the scheme. And so the same assaults on Fourth Amendment rights go on, but with a legal patina.

Horror stories about the government’s mass surveillance of the private communications of Americans flooded the news after Glenn Greenwald reported, in The Guardian on June 5, 2013, that the National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been granted carte blanche, under FISA, to collect information on phone calls and emails of Americans.

Within days, The Guardian and the Washington Post released more stories about an international mega-data collection project called PRISM, which apparently drew information directly from the servers of Internet companies and social networks. An employee of a NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, claimed responsibility for releasing the information.

But the element that most shook up civil libertarians was the inside view, offered for the first time, of the expansive powers the executive branch is claiming.

A Double Whammy

In order to magnify the powers of spy agencies to search and seize information on U.S. citizens, the government piggybacked two separate laws: the FAA—and the USA Patriot Act. This strategy became apparent when on June 5, 2013,The Guardian published an actual court order from the FISA Court (FISC). The order required Verizon Business Network Services to turn over records on all domestic telephone calls for a three-month period.

How does this work? The law (FAA) allows the executive branch to order secret electronic surveillance of foreigners for intelligence or counter intelligence needs. But targeted surveillance of Americans in the U.S. —as opposed to foreigners—requires an application to the secret court, although approval can be procured by merely showing relevance to foreign intelligence needs.

But what if no relevance to foreign intelligence needs can be found?

Enter the Patriot Act. Under the court order, the government combined FISA powers with the USA Patriot Act. Section 215, which allows the FBI to collect any “tangible thing” from third parties if it is relevant to an investigation of terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. This provision can be employed “even if there is no showing that the ‘thing’ pertains to suspected terrorists or terrorist activities,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Combining authority from the Patriot Act and FAA,The Verizon order sweeps in “all call detail records of ‘telephone metadata’ created by Verizon for communications … wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” In the Verizon order, the “thing” is delivered to the NSA, not the FBI.

Previously, observers assumed that Section 215 was being used to obtain singular business records of a named person. But Sen. Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who were party to the classified briefings on the matter, tried to signal otherwise in a publicly-released letter they wrote to the Attorney General on March 15, 2012: “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” They added: “Most Americans would be stunned.”

After The Guardian published the Verizon order, observers began to understand what alarmed the two senators. “It is simply different and grander in scope and scale from anything we had thought the law meant,” wrote University of Texas law school professor Robert Chesney and Benjamin Wittes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Rotten Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

How long has this surveillance been going on? When The Guardian published the previously secret information, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the order, saying it was necessary to “keep the homeland safe.” And she said, “[T]this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [FISA] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act.” According to Feinstein’s timetable, President Bush was signing illegal orders from 2001 to 2007 (unclassified report of five Inspectors General).

The press had occasionally raised questions about mass surveillance of Americans’ communications. USA Today exposed in 2006 that the NSA was secretly collecting phone call records of billions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, dating back to 2001. This operation included all domestic phone calls, from across the street or across the country. The published Verizon order is likely another instance of the same operation.

In response to the new revelations, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., sent a letter on June 7, 2013, to eight Congressional leaders, demanding oversight hearings:

“There is simply no precedent for the FISC to authorize domestic surveillance. … With the Verizon Order, the FISC went beyond its legal authority when it sanctioned a program of domestic surveillance unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence.”

Obama Grows Into a Bush

What is the difference between Obama’s views on intrusive surveillance, and Bush’s? Here’s an early indication: as a senator, Obama voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA). At the time, he explained,

“I do so with the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as president — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

He expressed concern about provisions extending blanket immunity to telecommunications companies for misuse of customers’ data.

Four months after Obama took office, Risen and Lichtblau reported in theTimes that “the NSA had been engaged in ‘over collection’ of domestic communications of Americans” and that the violations of the 2008 law were “significant and systemic.”

What did Obama do about that? On May 26, 2011, Obama signed a four-year extension of Section 215 of the USA Patriot—without addressing the many questions surrounding its use.

When the FISA law came up for review in 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper urged “reauthorization of these authorities in their current form.” And Obama complied. He didn’t lift a finger to support even modest protections for Americans from overreaching by the government, or at least some public accountability about what is going on. On December 30, 2012, he signed a five-year extension of the FISA law.

“Citizens generally assume our government is not spying on them,” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), told US News during the December debate. “If they had any inkling of how this system really works, the details of which I cannot discuss, they would be profoundly appalled.”

After The Guardian let loose those scandalous reports of massive abuse of executive power, President Obama said, lamely: “We have a system of checks and balances to make sure it’s not abused.”

Hear No Evil

All kinds of people—senators, reporters, pundits, citizens, barking dogs—warned Obama that the FAA was riddled with flaws and that the executive branch agencies were out of compliance with it.

The ACLU obtained reports to Congress on compliance with targeting and minimization procedures in November 2010, and found the same problems Risen and Lichtblau described in 2009: The law was not followed when it came to grabbing information from Americans and retaining it. According to the ACLU “every internal semiannual assessment … finds violations of the FAA’s targeting and minimizations procedures.”

None of the documents showed how many Americans had their communications intercepted, how much of the intercepted information was unrelated to terrorism or how much is covertly used for criminal investigations, said Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent.

In 2011, Kathleen Turner, Director of Legislative Affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote in a letter to Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) that “it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the FAA.” (WhistleblowerSnowden disputed this claim.)

Turner said that a joint oversight team didn’t see this as a problem because the actions to “violate or circumvent the requirements of the law” weren’t “intentional or willful,” the agency representative said. The letter also said that problems, when discovered, are remedied.

She admitted in a 2012 letter to Sen. Wyden that “on at least one occasion” the FISA court had found that minimization procedures were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” But she granted Sen. Wyden the right to say that “the government’s implementation” of the FISA law “has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”

Wyden released this information, but his fellow Democrat in the White House refused to hear it.

Former President Bush was never held accountable for his serial violations of the FISA law. The statute of limitations runs until at least 2014, possibly longer under some interpretations of the law.

By September 2013, the NSA will reportedly finish construction of a one million-square-foot eavesdropping complex in the mountains of Utah that sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. National security expertJames Bamford broke the news about this trillion-dollar electronic-data archive, innocently called the “Utah Data Center.” Its purpose, as Bamford put it:

“ . . . to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”

There are so many ways for would-be terrorists to communicate, it’s not clear how all this is supposed to keep us safe. It’s more likely to keep us broke.

Americans deserve an accounting that explains how these massive, relentless invasions of privacy are balanced by incremental advances in security. Swathed in layers of secrecy, the unchecked metastasis of the American Surveillance State seems to reflect Bush’s legacy more than his Presidential Library in Dallas. And it may reflect Obama’s legacy as well.

and.....

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-18/google-challenges-surveillance-gag-order-squares-nsa-secrecy-against-first-amendment

Google Challenges Surveillance Gag Order: Squares NSA Secrecy Against First Amendment

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/18/2013 19:31 -0400

It appears that unlike the president, whose rating is plunging in the aftermath of PRISM-gate, US corporations are not eager to double down on their privacy intrusive ways, and some are becoming increasingly concerned about what all the recent exposure may do to their bottom line. Such as Google, which earlier today became only the first company to challenge the long-standing gag order issued by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), arguing that the company has a First Amendment right to speak about information it is forced to give to the government. From Google: "Greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately." And yes, GOOG, which once upon a time pretended its motto is "don't evil" and since transformed it to "be evil, just don't get caught", still refer to "constitutional rights" - how quaint.

From WaPo:

The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.

Google, one of nine companies named in NSA documents as providing information to the top-secret PRISM program, has demanded that U.S. officials give it more leeway to describe the company’s relationship with the government. Google and the other companies involved have sought to reassure users that their privacy is being protected from unwarranted intrusions.

It is not as if Google is even requesting much: in the petition, filed with the FISA court in downtown Washington, Google is seeking permission to publish the total numbers of requests the court makes of the company and the numbers of user accounts they affect. The company long has made regular reports with regard to other data demands from the U.S. government and from other governments worldwide. Basically, this would at least put the FISA court's data demands on equal footing with all other judicial entities. But we can't have that now, can we, or else the terrorists win.

That information would not necessarily shed much light on PRISM, whose existence was first reported by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.But initiating a high-profile legal showdown may help Google’s efforts to portray itself as aggressively resisting government surveillance.

More importantly, it will now start an arms, or rather words race, between US corporations, in which the company that does not seek to emulate the "truth-telling" overtures of others, will be seen as the one most willing to handover user privacy to a secret organization without a fight. Which to internet companies means less users, less eyeballs, less clicking lifeblood. And most importantly, less top and bottom line.

All of the technology companies involved in PRISM, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, have struggled to respond to the revelations about NSA surveillance. Most have issued carefully word denials, saying that they do not permit wholesale data collection while acknowledging that they comply with legal government information requests.

So now the ball is in the administration's court which will have no choice but to reject the demand, or else find itself bombarded on all sides by enjoinders from all other internet companies. Which in turn will put Obama in an even more unpleasant place: against the companies.

Because if anything, at least until this point he could spin the ever-escalating scandal as one in which the US was collaborating with an very eager private sector. This will very soon no longer be the case.

And if the accelerating of PRISM-gate means further loss of revenues and profits for some of the biggest companies in the world as a result of Obama's resolute defense of his Dubyalegacy inheritance which he has succeeded in putting on steroids, then we would most certainly open a long private sector, short Obama pair trade.

and .....

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-18/nsa-foiled-nyse-terrorist-plot-we-now-learn

NSA Foiled NYSE Terrorist Plot, We Now Learn

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/18/2013 11:59 -0400

New York Stock Exchange

Newspaper

To think it only took the world's most (in)famous whistleblower to get the NSA to disclose that it had heroically managed to prevent terrorist attacks involving the New York Stock Exchange (we supposed they refer to the Manhattan-based TV studio and not the actual exchange where the servers are now housed in Mahwah, NJ) and the NY Subway. Because whereas there was a time in the past when the various US secret services would scurry at the opportunity to disclose their expertise to the general public, now it is a false negative that is supposed to disprove a positive (pervasive spying on the US population is good for you because...). Of course it takes one non-false positive to disprove a false negative, namely the Boston Bombers, who as far as we recall, used cell phones to communicate. But so much for details: now please praise the NSA, and also comply with the Administration's push to rescind the second amendment. Or is Obama no longer pushing for "arms control"?

From NBC:

National Security Agency surveillance programs helped disrupt plots to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and the New York subway system, an FBI official told Congress on Tuesday.

The official, Deputy Director Sean Joyce, said that the programs also linked an American citizen in Chicago to the 2008 terror attacks on hotels in India and to a plot to bomb the offices of a Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, told the committee that the programs had helped stop more than 50 “potential terrorist events” since the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he would provide classified details of all of them to the committee Wednesday.

“I would much rather be here today debating this point than trying to explain how we failed to prevent another 9/11,” Alexander said.
Joyce gave limited details on the foiled plots. In the stock exchange plot, he said, the NSA monitored an extremist in Yemen who was in contact with an operative in the United States.

In the subway plot, he said, the NSA intercepted an email from a terrorist in Pakistan in 2009 who was talking with someone in the United States about perfecting a recipe for explosives. He said that person turned out to be Najibullah Zazi, who later pleaded guilty in the plot and is in federal prison.

DHS hopes to get same cyber-spying powers as NSA

June 18, 2013

Print Version

Source: Daily Caller

Domestic spying capabilities used by the National Security Agency to collect massive amounts of data on American citizens could soon be available to the Department of Homeland Security — a bureaucracy with the power to arrest citizens that is not subject to limitations imposed on the NSA.

Unlike the DHS, the NSA is an intelligence agency, not a domestic law enforcement agency. It cannot arrest those suspected of wrongdoing. That power of the federal government lies with agencies under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, the Treasury, Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies.'

The NSA and DHS have waged a long Capitol Hill turf war over cybersecurity. Bills such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act and the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 have sought to clearly define the relationship between the two agencies, but struggled to get off the ground.

Until recently, the NSA’s military access to domestic private sector records — including personally identifiable consumer information — fueled opposition to CISPA’s passage from civil liberties advocates, the White House and Senate Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republican critics of the DHS believed the department was too incompetent and inexperienced to conduct meaningful cybersecurity oversight for the nation’s critical infrastructure. Both CISPA and the Cybersecurity Act died in session last year.

21 Facts About NSA Snooping That Every American Should Know

June 18, 2013

Print Version

Michael SnyderAmerican Dream

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the NSA is actually doing. Are they reading our emails? Are they listening to our telephone calls? Do they target American citizens or is it only foreigners that they are targeting? Unfortunately, the truth is that we aren’t going to get straight answers from our leaders about this. The folks running the NSA have already shown that they are willing to flat out lie to Congress, and Barack Obama doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to telling the truth. These are men that play word games and tell lies for a living. So it would be unrealistic to expect them to come out and tell us the unvarnished truth about what is going on. That is why it is so important that whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden have come forward. Thanks to them and to the brave journalists that are willing to look into these things, we have been able to get some glimpses behind the curtain. And what we have learned is not very pretty. The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should know…
#1 According to CNET, the NSA told Congress during a recent classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls…

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

#2 According to U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, members of Congress learned “significantly more than what is out in the media today” about NSA snooping during that classified briefing.

#3 The content of all of our phone calls is being recorded and stored. The following is a from a transcript of an exchange between Erin Burnett of CNN and former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente which took place just last month…

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.

#4 The chief technology officer at the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following statement back in March…

“We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.”

#5 During a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing in March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the intelligence community has the ability to access emails “as they come in”…

“We put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”

#6 Back in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress that the president has the “constitutional authority” to authorize domestic spying without warrants no matter when the law says.

#7 The Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that the NSA was not collecting any information about American citizens. When the media confronted him about his lie, he explained that he “responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner“.

#8 The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA has four primary data collection systems…

Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.
The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.
For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM projectreported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

#9 The NSA knows pretty much everything that you are doing on the Internet. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Yahoo article…

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and largerNSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

#10 The NSA is supposed to be prohibited from spying on the Internet activity of American citizens, but it is doing it anyway…

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’ private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
“You have to assume everything is being collected,” said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

#11 It has been estimated that the NSA gathers 2.1 million gigabytes of dataon all of us every single hour of every single day.

#12 In addition to collecting data on their own, a recent Bloomberg articleclaims that “thousands of firms” are giving your personal information directly to the NSA.

#13 Companies that share their data with the NSA are exempt from prosecution due to a law that Congress passed back in 2008…

AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to a law that Congress enacted in 2008 and renewed in 2012. It’s a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as the FISA Amendments Act.

#14 The NSA is constructing the largest data center in the world out in Utah. It is going to have about a million square feet of storage space, it is going to cost about 2 billion dollars to build, and it is going to take about 40 million dollars a year just to pay for the energy needed to run the facility. It is also being reported that it will have the capability of storing 5 zettabytes of data.

#15 The NSA has a budget of about 10 billion dollars a year.

#16 Overall, the United States government spends more than 80 billion dollars a year on intelligence programs.

#17 According to NSA whistleblower William Binney, the NSA has a “target list” of somewhere between “500,000 to a million people“.

#18 Binney also claims that the NSA “has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email.”

#19 According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 57 percent of all Americans believe that the government will use the information that it collects “to harass political opponents”.

#20 Benjamin Franklin once wrote the following…

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

#21 This is what the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says…
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Flash Back: Yahoo: US 'backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report

June 18, 2013

Print Version

Source: Yahoo News
The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad's regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.

A new report, that contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence, showed a scheme 'approved by Washington'.

As per the scheme 'Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons,' the Daily Mail reports.

Barack Obama made it clear to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that the U.S. would not tolerate Syria using chemical weapons against its own people.

According to Infowars.com, the December 25 email was sent from Britam's Business Development Director David Goulding to company founder Philip Doughty.

The emails were released by a Malaysian hacker who also obtained senior executives resumes and copies of passports via an unprotected company server, according to Cyber War News.
According to the paper, the U.S. State Department has declined to comment on the matter. (ANI)

Read More...

Catharsis Ours

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

NSA and cyberspying updates - June 18 , 2013.....

FBI director admits domestic use of drones for surveillance

No, NSA Spying Did NOT Prevent a Terror Attack on Wall Street

“Civil Libertarian” Obama’s Options On Surveillance

Google Challenges Surveillance Gag Order: Squares NSA Secrecy Against First Amendment

NSA Foiled NYSE Terrorist Plot, We Now Learn

DHS hopes to get same cyber-spying powers as NSA

21 Facts About NSA Snooping That Every American Should Know

Flash Back: Yahoo: US 'backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report

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