NSA Wiretapping and Snowden on the run

No1

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now fauxbama is reviewing the internal spying programs....all this is a result from what fauxbama called a "hacker"
Looks like he wasn't lying.

Panel urges new curbs on surveillance by U.S.

By Ellen Nakashima and Ashkan Soltani, Published: December 18

A panel appointed by President Obama to review the government’s surveillance activities has recommended significant new limits on the nation’s intelligence apparatus that include ending the National Security Agency’s collection of virtually all Americans’ phone records.

It urged that phone companies or a private third party maintain the data instead, with access granted only by a court order.

A report from the five-member Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies contains 40-plus recommendations on the NSA. Read it.


The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies also recommended in wide-ranging report issued Wednesday that decisions to spy on foreign leaders be subjected to greater scrutiny, including weighing the diplomatic and economic fallout if operations are revealed. Allied foreign leaders or those with whom the United States shares a cooperative relationship should be accorded “a high degree of respect and deference,” it said.

The panel also urged legislation that would require the FBI to obtain judicial approval before it can use a national security letter or administrative subpoena to obtain Americans’ financial, phone and other records. That would eliminate one of the tool’s main attractions: that it can be employed quickly without court approval.


The review group also would impose a ban on warantless NSA searches for Americans’ phone calls and e-mails held within large caches of communications collected legally because the program targeted foreigners overseas.

Taken together, the five-
member panel’s recommendations take aim at some of the most controversial practices of the intelligence community, in particular the 35,000-employee NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Md. The signals intelligence agency has been in the news constantly since June, when reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began appearing in The Washington Post and the Guardian.

The White House released the 300-plus-page report as part of a larger effort to restore public confidence in the intelligence community, which has been shaken by the Snowden revelations.

The panel said that the NSA’s storage of phone data “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty” and that as a general rule, “the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information” about Americans to be mined for foreign intelligence purposes.


Despite the proposed constraints, panel member Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, said, “We are not in any way recommending the disarming of the intelligence community.”

The panel made 46 recommendations in all, which included moving the NSA’s information assurance directorate — its computer defense arm — outside the agency and under the Defense Department’s cyber-policy office.

“The review committee has reaffirmed that national security neither requires nor permits the government to help itself to Americans’ personal information at will,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “The recommendations would extend significant privacy protections to Americans.”

Some intelligence professionals were dismayed. “If adopted in bulk, the panel’s recommendations would put us back before 9/11 again,” said Joel F. Brenner, a former NSA inspector general. :patrice:


Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden urged senior intelligence officials to lay out the operational costs of adopting the recommendations. “The responsibility is now in the intelligence community to be ruthlessly candid with the policy leadership,” Hayden said.

Obama met Wednesday morning with the panel, whose suggestions are advisory only, and some intelligence officials predicted that the most far-reaching recommendations, including ending the government collection and storage of bulk phone data, would not be adopted. The White House has said it will announce in January which ideas it has embraced, as it concludes its internal review of surveillance activities.

The NSA’s phone-records program has prompted debate about whether the government has overreached in the effort to prevent terrorist attacks. The review panel is urging that Congress pass legislation to end the NSA’s storage of phone records — estimated by some former officials to number more than 1 trillion — “as soon as reasonably practicable.”

If the data were held by phone companies or a private third party, access to them would be permitted only with an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, based on reasonable suspicion that the information sought is relevant to an authorized terrorism investigation. Each phone number would require a court order.

Currently, the NSA holds for five years the phone records it gathers daily from U.S. phone companies. These “metadata” include the numbers dialed and call times and durations, but not call content or subscriber names.

The review panel is not recommending that the phone companies maintaining the data store it any longer than they do now — periods that vary from as little as six months to 10 years.

In a ruling Monday on the collection program, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leondescribed the technology used to search the NSA database as “almost Orwellian.” The judge said the collection was “almost certainly” unconstitutional.

“The combination of this report plus the judge’s decision Monday makes this a big week for the cause of intelligence reform,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Moving custodianship of the records outside the NSA would diminish the agency’s agility in detecting terrorist plots, supporters of the current arrangement say. With companies holding data for different periods and in different formats, searching across them would become complicated, they argue.

But the panel said the collection program had not proved its utility. “Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of . . . telephony metadata was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders,” it said.

The review group urged that the public have a legal advocate before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the recommendation to end NSA’s bulk collection “goes to the very heart of NSA dragnet surveillance.” He called it “the most necessary recommendation of the review group.”

The NSA’s information assurance directorate, which would be shifted out of the agency, protects classified government computer systems and works with industry to help them better safeguard their systems. That mission differs from the NSA’s job of breaking into systems overseas to gain intelligence, the panel said.


The suggested move, said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, would “end NSA’s dual personality as a code-breaker and cybersecurity-enhancer. It’s good.”

But Tony Sager, a former NSA information assurance executive, said moving the defensive mission out of NSA was unwise. “The defensive mission benefits a lot from the technology and the skills of people who work on the offensive side of the house and vice versa,” he said. “They get better insight into the model of what real adversaries do.”

The panel also recommended a prohibition on the government “in any way” subverting or weakening commercial software in order to get around encryption and urged that it not undermine efforts to create encryption standards. The panel also said the government should add oversight to the use and production of “zero day” hacking tools that can be used to penetrate computer systems and, in some cases, damage or destroy them.

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@Type Username Here is there any thing else that you would add, I figured you'd be a good person to @ for this. With that said, these are recommendations and I don't know which one they'll adapt but at the very least this is good faith transparency because I thought this would be classified information. I guess I'm cautiously optimistic about. While I'm not sure about Snowden's motivations, I think the guy has to deserve Time Person of the Year for what he brought to light.
 

Crakface

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They gave them the keys to the city thinking they were responsible enough to handle it, they fukked up and now they have to be treated like children again. Still, this just puts everything back on the executive branch when theres political fallout and the federal agencies can no longer be used as scapegoats.
 

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And to add NYTimes' Room For Debate Arguments

A Battle That Snowden Is Not Winning
Stewart_Baker-thumbStandard.jpg

Stewart Baker, a lawyer, was the assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.

UPDATED DECEMBER 19, 2013, 2:02 PM

Edward Snowden has managed to create a controversy over the N.S.A.’s collection of domestic telephone metadata. Winning the argument is a different matter.

One federal judge has ruled against the program, and 11 from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have ruled for it. The issue is bound for the appellate courts -- and for Congress, which is reluctant to abandon a tool for identifying cross-border plots like 9/11 without a workable substitute. The president’s review group has proposed a substitute, but not an especially workable one. In short, the debate is on.

Nothing that the panel report on the N.S.A. says vindicates Edward Snowden’s decision to violate the law and put masses of sensitive intelligence at risk.
None of that vindicates Snowden’s decision to violate the law and his oath, or to put masses of sensitive intelligence at risk. Even if you like the debate, it’s hard to like the way Snowden and his journalist allies tried to game it -- withholding for nearly two weeks the court order limiting N.S.A.’s access to the metadata.

Snowden could have spurred the metadata debate by releasing just a handful of documents. But he is disclosing program after program to pursue a broader agenda -- to separate “good” (targeted) spying from “bad” intelligence techniques that require collection of large stores of data. On Snowden’s theory, Chinese hackers stealing American companies’ technology are the “good” spies, and so are Russian agents breaking into the homes of dissidents. But when the American government uses telephone records to construct a terror cell’s social graph, that’s bad spying.

No wonder Snowden sought refuge in Hong Kong and Russia.

As the leaks continue, the American public is catching on. According to an ABC-Washington Post poll, a growing majority believe that Snowden is harming the country. Soon they’ll realize that the damage is deliberate. Inside the United States, Snowden has already lost the broader debate he claims to want, and the leaks are slowly losing their international impact as well.

Snowden’s crimes have indeed caused us harm, but the worst is past.

End His Prosecution
Jameel_Jaffer-thumbStandard.jpg

Jameel Jaffer is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union,which represents Snowden. He is on Twitter.

UPDATED DECEMBER 19, 2013, 12:59 PM

Edward Snowden has made our democracy stronger. He should be praised, not prosecuted.

Here are some things we’ve learned because of him: The N.S.A. is collecting information about every phone call made on U.S. telephone networks — collecting information, daily, about hundreds of millions of innocent Americans. It is searching Americans’ international communications, retaining some untold number of them for years in databases that can be accessed without judicial oversight. It has subverted global encryption standards. It has even revived J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook, plotting to discredit “radicals” by exposing their penchants for pornography.

Without Snowden, the president wouldn't even have drafted the panel that recommended changing the surveillance programs he revealed.
But for Snowden, we wouldn’t know any of these things, and we wouldn’t be having this extraordinary debate about the proper scope of the government’s surveillance powers. We wouldn’t be reconsidering the decision to entrust our privacy rights to a court that meets in secret, hears only from the government and rarely publishes its decisions. We wouldn’t be asking whether the Congressional intelligence committees have been co-opted by the agencies they were tasked with regulating.

Perhaps most important, without Snowden, we would not have had the court case that led to Judge Leon's scathing ruling, or the appointment of a presidential panel recommending the end of programs he revealed.

“I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy,” President Obama said in June, after the first disclosures — but of course it was Snowden who made this debate possible.

Would it be better if all of this had remained secret? Would it be better if ordinary citizens had remained in the dark about the extent to which the N.S.A.’s awesome surveillance powers have been trained not only on terrorists but on them? Some of our political leaders appear to think so. Intelligence agencies can’t be effective if they can’t be secretive, they say.

But while the disclosures have embarrassed intelligence officials, laid bare their distortions and misrepresentations, and compelled them to defend the N.S.A.’s activities to legislators, judges and the public, it’s doubtful they’ve compromised our security. Terrorists were surely not surprised by the revelation that the N.S.A. was trying to listen to their phone calls.

Snowden has done the country — and the world — an immense public service. That his whistleblowing has led to charges under the Espionage Act is a travesty. We ought to be spending our collective energy not persecuting him but ensuring that the next Snowden does not have to resign himself to imprisonment or exile in order to alert his fellow citizens that an agency meant to protect them has become a threat to them instead.
 

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:yeshrug: didn't think people cared. I've made a few threads this on week on real news topics, and they essentially flopped...
I know, but we gotta get a variety of topics on the front page. HL is looking like MSNBC vs. Fox News. I get that political theater can be fun, but come on....[Kanye voice]How many religion, Fox News bashing, politician personal life hypocrisy threads do you want...[Kanye voice]. This thread should be continuously updated until the final report drops in January.
 

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@Candor

Im going to withhold judgement until the suggested implementations are implemented and then reviewed and confirmed by independent sources. It's kind of hard to trust thieves who say they plan to police themselves, especially when several high ranking officials in charge have already been caught lying. For one, I don't but the President and Congress' assertions that this "debate" ( AKA exposing of criminal government activity) could have been brought forth without Snowden doing what he did.

Pardoning Snowden and allowing him to return home a hero would be a good first step.
 

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@Candor

Im going to withhold judgement until the suggested implementations are implemented and then reviewed and confirmed by independent sources. It's kind of hard to trust thieves who say they plan to police themselves, especially when several high ranking officials in charge have already been caught lying. For one, I don't but the President and Congress' assertions that this "debate" ( AKA exposing of criminal government activity) could have been brought forth without Snowden doing what he did.

Pardoning Snowden and allowing him to return home a hero would be a good first step.
I'm confused as to what you mean by independent sources when there is commentary from independent sources in the article. I.E. the ACLU. NPR has brought on individuals to discuss it as well if you don't understand or don't know the full scope of the proposed limitations and recommendations. There's no need to wait to judge these proposals on their merits assuming they were to be implemented. I'm not talking about the character of anybody or anything like that, that will get us nowhere. I already spoke in this very thread about while I don't know what to think of Snowden, the idea that this sort of discussion would have come forth without his actions is disingenuous....without going into why. That tangent is unnecessary My question is specifically about the merits of the recommendations themselves because everyone has, or should have, an opinion on them. Some think they don't go far enough, others think they go too far. I highlighted particular points of interest, especially the public having it's own advocate before the FISA courts. Basically, I'm only really concerned about discussing the efficacy of the proposed process, essentially a policy debate...not a wide-ranging ideological debate.
 

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:yeshrug: didn't think people cared. I've made a few threads this on week on real news topics, and they essentially flopped...
Should've @ me....we have ways of making threads rise to the top :mjpls:
 

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I'm confused as to what you mean by independent sources when there is commentary from independent sources in the article. I.E. the ACLU.

I didn't mean the article, I meant it if the recommendations are implemented. I like a lot of the recommendations I have seen, but to be honest, if in January and February a government official tells me that these recommendations were implemented and we should just take their word for it, that won't make me feel comfortable. I think it's important to note the pattern of deceit, lies and propaganda that has come from this administration, the previous administration and several in Congress in regards to the NSA and its actions.


There's no need to wait to judge these proposals on their merits assuming they were to be implemented.

See above. The proposals are good, I'd like to see them go further, but it's good. I need to have it independently verified that they were implemented and abuses are not occurring. Leaving it up to the government to tell me no laws are being broken is what got us here in the first place. FISA and the rubber stamping "yes" court won't cut it in my opinion. We need truly independent sources and true transparency.

We should also hold people criminally responsible for violations of Constitutional law.
 
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