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NSA Official Disputes Chief's Claim That Agency Doesn't Collect American Data
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander was playing a "word game" when he said the agency does not collect files on Americans according to William Binney, a former technical director at the NSA. Binney says the NSA does indeed collect e-mails, Twitter writings, internet searches and other data belonging to Americans and indexing it. "Unfortunately, once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone in that data," he said. "You can simply call it up by the attributes of anyone you want and it's in place for people to look at."
Yes, you're 100% correct. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 is stricter than previous law. It is expressly prohibited to target, collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the communications content of US Persons without a warrant.
Your mistake is, apparently, believing that it's happening without any sort of proof.
What we have done is shifted the notion of who is or isn't a US Person from the a place to a person.
Before 9/11, we assumed anyone — or any traffic — inside the US was a US Person, and that anyone outside the US was fair game. After 9/11, and with the increasing levels of foreign traffic traveling over the internet instead of walkie-talkies in foreign countries, the IC, and NSA in particular, was in the difficult position of needing to target traffic within the US. A series of secret orders and stopgap legislation (like the temporary Protect America Act) supported this.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 completely changes the pre-9/11 paradigm. Now an individual warrant is required to target a US Person anywhere on the globe, while foreign targets — even within the US — explicitly do NOT require a warrant. Foreign targets outside the US have never required a warrant, and shouldn't just because they or their traffic enter the US.
Right now, this very second, government and law enforcement have all sorts of powers they can abuse, and they have since the founding of our nation. At the same time, intelligence operations require secrecy in order to be successful. Sun Tzu said this millennia ago, long before any construct of the US, much less the West, ever existed. Yet, instead of actually becoming informed about the purpose and function of our foreign intelligence activities, people choose to believe that our government is on a singular mission to spy on Americans illegally.
If anyone claims to care about this topic at all:
1. Read my other comment on this story
2. Read former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden's 2006 remarks on this topic at the National Press Club (if you do nothing else, just read this)
3. Watch this months-old National Geographic Documentary on NSA
4. Ask yourself if it really makes sense that hundreds, if not thousands, of professional civilian and military members of our government have so little regard for their fellow citizens that they are systematically violating both the letter and spirit of law and the Constitution, not just once or twice or a handful of times, but every single day, with respect to every single American — when NSA's primary purpose and reason for being is FOREIGN signals intelligence — while utterly ignoring the legitimate complexity and challenges of targeting foreign traffic, in real time, on equipment and networks within the United States.
Technicalities like you are pointing out are certainly little more than a poor cover for breaking our own laws. As I just pointed out in this thread, these people (as in NSA, financial and political elites, MIC etc) are no longer held accountable to the law of the land. The dont care that they are violating the fourth amendment, technicality or not... there are no repercussions for their illegal actions (other than some wining in some online forums and twitter - with no political consequences even for that).
The past decade has witnessed the most severe crimes imaginable by political and financial elites: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, domestic spying perpetrated jointly by the government and the telecom industry without the warrants required by the criminal law, an aggressive war waged on another country that killed hundreds of thousands of people, massive financial fraud that came close to collapsing the world economy and which destroyed the economic security of tens of millions, and systematic foreclosure fraud that, by design, bombarded courts with fraudulent documents in order to seize homes without legal entitlement. These are not bad policies or mere immoral acts. They are plainly criminal, and yet – due to the precepts of elite immunity which were first explicitly embraced during Ford’s pardon of Nixon — none of those crimes has produced legal punishments.
By very stark contrast, ordinary Americans are imprisoned more easily, for longer periods of time, and in greater numbers than any nation on earth. New legal classes of non-persons with no rights have been created over the last decade as well. Thus, over the same four decades that elite immunity has taken hold, the nation — namely,the same elite class that has aggressively vested itself with the right to act with impunity — has resorted to ever more merciless punishment schemes for ordinary Americans and others who are marginalized who, for multiple reasons, have very few defenses when the state targets them for punishment. While being rich and powerful has always been an advantage in the judicial system (and in all other aspects of American life), our political culture has now explicitly renounced the concept of equality of law, and it is thus now unabashedly clear that who you are is far more important than what you do.
It's fine to take issue with it, but that's how it's always been — this isn't a new construct in foreign intelligence. For as long as the US Intelligence Community has existed, foreign targets have NEVER required a warrant, because foreign targets are not seen by the law or the courts to have Fourth Amendment protections under the Constitution.
I repeat: this is not new and this is not "post-9/11". Make no mistake, foreign targets are still TARGETED. The US doesn't just eavesdrop on foreign targets for the hell of it — a target is picked after analysis of intelligence, which may identify more targets, which feed into the next "loop" of the intelligence process. It's not some kind of dragnet.
However, to pick out communications from anywhere in real time, which is the ideal state that even NSA admits it is trying to reach, you must necessarily have the ability to, well, pick out communications from anywhere in real time. To quote former DIRNSA Michael Hayden: "NSA needed the power to pick out the one, and the discipline to leave the others alone."
Furthermore, it's not a double standard — if the Constitution applied, in a practical sense, to everyone on the globe, what is the purpose for national borders? Why should a US court decide whether the Intelligence Community can target a Chinese military communications hub, or an al Qaeda satellite phone? Moreover, even if a warrant WAS required, the capability and infrastructure to capture the communications must still exist!
Every single capability that government or law enforcement has, or has ever had, can be abused. History tells us as much. Every single one of them can be turned against innocents. Every. Single. One. What stops that? Oversight and the law. We do not have direct oversight of intelligence, only institutional oversight by proxy. But that's not new, either. We constantly strive for the right level of government power vs. checks on that power.
...The constitution mentions god-given, inalienable rights. Those are by definition held by everybody, or nobody. You play "yes, but" games with it, you loose the whole thing...
Can you point to where the Constitution mentions God? I'm not recalling the mention. The Constitution: The first sentence of the constitution begins with "We the people of the United States...establish this Constitution for the United States of America.". The fourth amendment says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...". In both cases it is the same people being referred to; the citizens of the United States. I don't think that the Constitution says much of anything about foreign people or non-citizens, but I'm happy to hear your counter argument.
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies:... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
The Constitution of the United Sates and The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies are not the same document.