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Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"
That's not the problem. Just tell people what you're doing. Make sure that it's legal and ethical. Don't be shy of what you're doing. Then we might accept it.
Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is.
Unless they figure out that they can just run a check against the phone book. The scary thing is, this guy may be as stupid as he sounds.
Plain and simple. If this were at all true then each of these 20 incidences would have been widely touted in the media. They never would have had to give the source of their intelligence or at worst they could have \ would have said that inside information that was actionable was provided to their security forces.
Why would they need the names? There are lots of programs like 411 that can do a reverse look up on phone numbers.
If only the NSA had pulled 2 more phone numbers, adding the Tsarnaev brothers to their list of terrorists.
sudo make me a sandwich
Bull-fucking-shit.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
First, the "we broke 20 plots" is bullshit. They have have used these tools in 20 investigations, so what? And what about the other 280 they admit to? And anyway, how many people's data was involved in each of these investigations? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
In any case, we still come back to the basic problem: The police could certainly stop a few more crimes, if they were allowed unfettered access to people's homes. See someone suspicious? Walk in and search the house, no warrant required. The point is: This price is not worth paying.
Why? For many reasons, but here are the ones that leap immediately to mind:
(1) People need to feel they have personal privacy.
(2) Government bureaucrats are humans: some good, some bad, most just muddling along. Put this kind of power in their hands, and it will be abused. Whether for political ends, to get back at the ex after a nasty divorce, or whatever. Because they work for the government, they will not be punished. See the recent IRS scandals for a perfect example of this.
It is important to limit government power, because this is the only sure way to prevent abuses. You can't abuse power you don't have. If this makes police work a little more difficult, that is a price well worth paying. Convince a judge and get a warrant before spying on someone - this just isn't that hard.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
It's been established the US government does not want to disclose domestic surveillance programs. They said so in front of cameras, "national security, blah blah".
Now I need to evaluate the claims of a government official regarding domestic surveillance programs... hmmm. Not very comforting.
He seems to want to focus on the 300 "numbers only" they checked and not the big database of "phone records" that exists. But I'm sure the "database of millions of U.S. phone records" he refers to is at least as secure as the existence of the program itself. It's not doubt more secure but that doesn't mean it's safe. And many attackers would love to just get a handful of records (congressmen, judges, candidates, ceos, opposition party leaders).
Plus I've already heard quotes from politicians and other government officials that the database needs to be more widely shared. FBI and DHS need access now. I imagine the IRS could find a few things and "improve" tax collection if it was shared with them. We better not get used to being ok with the NSA having access to "numbers only". The nature of government is to expand and make "better" use of data, not to ignore a valuable resource because of privacy concerns. And also to protect those in power, so any 3rd party leader making progress better have a squeaky clean record. One place the 2 parties can agree is on attacking any opposition to their power.
Once the word is out this database exists, other uses will be found for it, either by the NSA or by other organizations. History has proven that once data exists, people will use it any way they want to.
They can be almost as effective if they only start monitoring those phone numbers that are correlated to "terrorism" because they get dialed by a foreign terrorist. They'd miss "historical data" but I doubt the effectiveness of that will weigh up to the giant loss of privacy people suffer because their "metadata" gets stored.
Nobody has even proven the effectiveness of this sort of measures against terrorism, it costs billions and the elected government is spying on the people that elected them in the first place. If you, as a politician, don't trust the people that voted for you, your democracy as a country is in serious trouble.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
For around 3 years I posted regularly that this was coming, I warned everyone I could about this. I explained why it was important. I was called tinfoil hat, I was humiliated, I was belittled and I was told I was a moron. I gave up. I dont care. Its too late and guess what.. it only takes the APPEARANCE of 51% of the sheep to keep this ball of hell chugging along. Screw every one of you who said "if youre not doing anything wrong.." and "there is no way they have that much control" and the myriad other excuses to get back to American Idol. Screw. You.
Nice how they left out that little fact. In many cases a simple Google search will already be enough. Where that fails, use the customer database of the phone service provider. I expect lifting the anonymity from a number will take significantly less than a minute, possibly less than a second.
This is classical lying by omission. It builds of the lack of understanding of the common person. De-anonymizing metadata is an easy and cheaply solvable and well understood problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They didn't do it.
knowing there is a 'secret court' reviewing every 90 days....
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Bet they cured cancer and helped a little old lady across the street too.
They claim to have a list of millions of phone numbers, against which they only checked 300 numbers last year.
I want to know what criteria they used to generate that list of millions of phone numbers.
More precisely, I want to know what criteria they used to build the training data sets to train the classifiers that filtered through all our communications metadata (and probably our communications content data as well) in order to generate that list.
What are they looking for? How do they say that a phone call goes into the training set or stays out? That's what I want to know; not the details of Snowden's sex life or whatever the media are pushing now.
Finding God in a Dog
But it still doesn't make it legal.
Do you have ESP?
We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box,
And who controls the key to this so called lock box? What accountable party keeps them from unauthorized use? The FISA court isn't accountable. Neither is the administration or congress since they do not publish their findings. By what method does the public find out about abuses of this system?
Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records .
Big deal. Nobody calls these days anyway. What about the rest of the phone meta-data? Emails? Text messages? Facebook? Twitter?
both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
So we have a secret program with secret directives reviewed by a secret court whose findings are secret. Gee, why am I not reassured? [/sarcasm]
...to gush loving, glowing praise over unchecked, jackbooted authority like a Twihard over (Edward/Jacob) once again.
You can't trust anything the NSA says at all. They have everything to gain by lying their asses off and nothing to lose. Assume they're intercepting and recording anything (which personally, I'm pretty sure they're doing) and don't assume that there are any limitations to their access to that info. If you buy any of the backpedaling that's been coming out in the last few days, much of it submitted to Slashdot by cold fjord...well I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Even if this article describes the access interface of some analyst at some agency...all the info is still there, your privacy was still violated.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.
I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
When you hear a politician say "just" in his formal speech, he's lying. Mostly... as in, they mostly just lie through their teeth.
Oh, no, no, no. They lie out their asses too.
After multiple instances of lying or 'lying the least they could', they have given us zero reason to believe yet another explanation of the system. My belief is that this is a system used by the 'powers that be' to keep promoting the political and financial dominance of the powers that be. Whereas, the 'powers that be' is defined as those people with enough financial and political influence that set the agenda and policies of the entire world.
The reason I believe this is because reports show that Germany was one of the countries that was spied on the most. If this was a system used only to 'combat terrorism', it would make zero sense to spy on the country that has repeatedly been shown to be an ally in the 'War on Terrorism'. But, if this was a system used for financial and political gain, it would make sense to keep the most records on the countries with the largest amount of financial competition.
All power structures must answer to the law. In order to prevent the continued movement of the US towards fascism, it is our duty (the peoples') to continually be skeptical of those in power. We need to question this, shine a light on this, get it audited - and even shut it down - if this is a system that violates the US Constitution.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.
That is at best an extreme exaggeration of the value of the cell phone records. I'm sure his data was in the database, and was probably accessed after he was discovered, but his plot was discovered as a result of monitoring that was (or easily would have been) warranted.
Wikipedia: Operation Pathway:
On November 9 2009 The Telegraph reported that the operation produced the tip that lead American security officials to place Najibullah Zazi under investigation. British security officials were reported to have intercepted an email from a Pakistani planner to Najibullah Zazi containing instructions on how to conduct his attack.
The Telegraph: British Spies / Zazi:
The alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being monitored as part of the abortive Operation Pathway was suddenly reactivated.
Operation Pathway was investigating an alleged UK terrorist cell but went awry after the then Met Police counter-terrorism head Bob Quick was pictured walking into Downing Street displaying top secret documents.
Eleven Pakistani suspects were arrested immediately after the gaffe but later released without charge.
However, security staff continued to monitor the email address which eventually yielded results.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Officially they probed less than 300. In this one program. Which is all pointless if an agent can listen in on a conversation without a warrant and no alarm bells go off.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Although (supposedly) only few hundred are listened to, I suspect that ALL conversations are recorded and stored (to be recalled if needed).
Well, to be fair, telling people what you're doing makes doing it pretty useless when "what you're doing" is covert surveillance.
Hardly. You and I are both well aware that our police regularly do covert surveillance of suspected criminals. The fact that they do so is public knowledge and we are fine with that. While it is sometimes necessary to temporarily hide the tactical details of a specific surveillance, it is not necessary to hide the existence of the program to do so or to hide the findings of such surveillance indefinitely. Furthermore the authorization for such surveillance is overseen by reasonably transparent judicial review, it typically limited in scope and time frame and the results of the surveillance are revealed to the public in due course.
The NSA on the other hand has a system where they have a secret program, with secret directives, overseen by a secret court, whose findings are kept secret. Though many suspected the NSA was conducting surveillance of some sort, the very existence of this program was kept secret from the public. At no point in this system does the public have any means by which to be notified of abuses of this system. The entire progress is treated as a secret and hidden effectively forever from public scrutiny. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of our government looking for bad guys but the methods used matter greatly and not all methods are acceptable. This is EXACTLY like the end of the movie "A Few Good Men" where the government is screaming at us that we can't handle the truth and that they do not have to explain themselves to us. Cheesy as that sounds, it is a perfect analogy to what is going on here.
YOU say that, but the majority of the US, who these officials represent, serve, and are employed by, disagree with you. You can't really expect the government to stop doing these things when so many people support it.
Cute. Of course people respond wildly differently depending on exactly what question is being asked. "Do you support killing terrorists?" will get a much higher positive response than "Do you support violating your civil rights so that we can kill terrorists more easily?" I can find surveys with just slightly different phrasing of the questions that will have much different results. Don't get too excited by one survey with misleading results. Some people support using torture too but that doesn't make it acceptable.
The internet can be like an echo chamber...
That's a better than a Star Chamber. Plus just because a bunch of people are saying the same thing does not mean they are wrong. The NSA and by extension our elected officials have overstepped their authority and have tried to hide what they are doing. I do not trust them nor do I trust their explanations. They have clearly lied to us and in my opinion have violated the law. I don't think what they have done is legal nor should it be legal so long as everything is held as a secret.
The claim is that no conversations are recorded. If you believe that... But the assertion that they have to get court approval to actually access the database is meaningless. It's the FISA court, which has only denied a handful of requests (literally a handful) since its creation in 1978. If an agency asks permission, the FISA court grants it. And it doesn't even give slaps on the wrist when agents don't follow the FISA rules.
If what they say here is true, why the world weren't they more honest about what they were doing all along and in the first place? In Europe, government access to phone records is codified in law in such a way that protects the privacy of everybody who isn't a suspect in an investigation, and does so in broad daylight. There may be violations, but the persons whose privacy is invaded also have recourse there. They have no such recourse against the NSA that continues to argue, even as it releases details of this program, that it is "secret" and thus would compromise national security to reveal the details.
One more example of where honesty and truth-telling would be preferable to obfuscation and lies.
Who did what now?
The double speak is getting nauseating. This one in particular: "Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programs". There are 4 programs, which program are they saying had on 300 checked. Which of the 4 is particularly used for tracking phone calls? How manyin total were there among all four programs? As for the FISA oversight, the Amended Act was so controversial that Obama himself said he would never vote to support it, but voted for it despite campaigning otherwise. That act sanctified the inability for citizens to sue the telcos and ISP's for infringing on our civil liberties. The oversite is a complete failure, and this smells like a lie hiding behind more wordplay. For example: Collection = reading the data not collecting.
No, what happened was (from Buzzfed)
Another case cited by that wonderduo Feinstein and Rodgers is of Headley. who cased the Mumbai hotel. Rather that quote why the NSA program had little if anything to do with his arrest (note he was previously a prized drug enforment for the DEA), just read this.
Were I in the same situation, I'd say the same thing, true or not. It might not justify the program, but it might make people feel better about it.
If they want people to buy it, though, they'll need to proffer some proof. Not just some documentation, but something concrete that would be irrefutable. The NSA has the problem that they are coming from a position of weakness. They're in the business of being secretive, they've been caught in a position where they appear to have betrayed the nation's trust, and they'll need something extraordinary to restore that trust.
They should just lay all their cards on the table - declassify all of it. The ne'er-do-wells are already tipped off and working around it, so there's little more to lose if they'd been on the up-and-up. Clearly, if they weren't doing anything wrong, then there's nothing to hide.
If the phone spying program is so inconsequential, then what does the NSA plan to do with the $5.1B data data center they're building in Provo, UT? 300 numbers a year could be checked by one guy in one cubicle, and he'd still have lots of time to spend hanging around the water cooler.
im not a libertarian, but i do get tired of these ignorant /.'ers trying to tell libertarians what they believe.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. ...
Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted â" and it was for blowing the whistle. ...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Lay money: before the year is up, we will hear about an NSA employee (or more likely, one of the several thousand contractors with Top Secret clearance that is given out like tissue paper) using all this data against their ex or soon to be ex-spouse in a nasty divorce fight. Or for stalking the babysitter. Or insider trading. Or screwing over a shitty neighbor. Or...
And this, dear Frightened Compliant Snowflakes, are but a few reasons why this system is dangerous and deadly to democracy; NOBODY IS WATCHING THEM.
From Wikipedia:
General writs of assistance played an important role in the increasing tensions that led to the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America. In 1760, Great Britain began to enforce some of the provisions of the Navigation Acts by granting customs officers these writs. In New England, smuggling had become common. However, officers could not search a person's property without giving a reason. Colonists protested that the writs violated their rights as British subjects. The colonists had several problems with these writs. They were permanent and even transferable: the holder of a writ could assign it to another. Any place could be searched at the whim of the holder, and searchers were not responsible for any damage they caused. This put anyone who had such a writ above the law.
Does this not bear a resemblance to what is going on today?
Let us re-visit the 4th amendment:
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.