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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.
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.
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.
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]
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
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
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.
Even the Russians knew these guys were trouble. But the NSA/FBI/CIA/DHS did not. No reason why the FBI could not have added their names/phone numbers to a list of potentials and kept an eye on them. Instead, they are strip-searching grandma, reading 15-year-old girls' text messages, and obtaining phone records from the AP and James Rosen (and his parents).
sudo make me a sandwich
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.