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Disputed NSA Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says (nytimes.com)
According to a senior Republican congressional aide, the National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans' domestic calls and texts. "The agency has not used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not ask Congress to renew its legal authority, which is set to expire at the end of the year, according to the aide, Luke Murry, the House minority leader's national security adviser," reports The New York Times. From the report: In a raw assertion of executive power, President George W. Bush's administration started the program as part of its intense pursuit for Qaeda conspirators in the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and a court later secretly blessed it. The intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden disclosed the program's existence in 2013, jolting the public and contributing to growing awareness of how both governments and private companies harvest and exploit personal data. The way that intelligence analysts have gained access to bulk records of Americans' phone calls and texts has evolved, but the purpose has been the same: They analyze social links to hunt for associates of known terrorism suspects.
Congress ended and replaced the program disclosed by Mr. Snowden with the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015, which will expire in December. Security and privacy advocates have been gearing up for a legislative battle over whether to extend or revise the program -- and with what changes, if any. Mr. Murry, who is an adviser for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, raised doubts over the weekend about whether that debate will be necessary. His remarks came during a podcast for the national security website Lawfare. Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration "hasn't actually been using it for the past six months." "I'm actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up," Mr. Murry said. He referred to problems that the National Security Agency disclosed last year. "Technical irregularities" had contaminated the agency's database with message logs it had no authority to collect, so officials purged hundreds of millions of call and text records gathered from American telecommunications firms. A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy's office said that Mr. Murry "was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue."
Congress ended and replaced the program disclosed by Mr. Snowden with the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015, which will expire in December. Security and privacy advocates have been gearing up for a legislative battle over whether to extend or revise the program -- and with what changes, if any. Mr. Murry, who is an adviser for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, raised doubts over the weekend about whether that debate will be necessary. His remarks came during a podcast for the national security website Lawfare. Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration "hasn't actually been using it for the past six months." "I'm actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up," Mr. Murry said. He referred to problems that the National Security Agency disclosed last year. "Technical irregularities" had contaminated the agency's database with message logs it had no authority to collect, so officials purged hundreds of millions of call and text records gathered from American telecommunications firms. A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy's office said that Mr. Murry "was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue."
Trump doesn't seem to like the NSA or FBI very much. That could theoretically be a false flag, but I think they actually just don't like each other.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's this. And people don't seem to realize or care.
A lot of the spying that the NSA does has been outsourced to tech companies that collect the same information "for advertising purposes." Totally legal and completely opaque.
They then grant government agencies complete access to their databases as part of secret government contracts. Sometimes these are several layers deep - there are a ton of "aggregation" companies that do nothing but merge "advertising" data from multiple sources. So you'll get a "market research" company that correlates Google and Facebook and Twitter data into a single consumer profile, which can be used to target advertising ... or for the NSA to track people.
The NSA is really shutting down some of its surveillance programs because it legitimately does not need them any more because it can just outsource to private companies. Some of the creepier outsourced programs are things like license plate scanner databases, where private companies drive around scanning license plates and storing the times and locations in a giant searchable database. They sell access to this to repo companies hunting for vehicles... and also the three letter agencies and any police department that wants access too.
We're also starting to see something similar but with facial recognition. Disabled location information on your phone? Fine, malls and hotels will run facial recognition on their surveillance cameras and sell that information to marketing companies who aggregate it with Facebook data to build a profile of where you've been, even if you don't carry a phone and always pay in cash.
(it is called Facebook)
I would like to follow up with John Brennan's comments to Congress, involving the CIA.
He was asked if the CIA was spying on the Senate, he said no. They were (reasons for it were astonishingly bad)
Michael Cohen, most evil person on the planet for lying to Congress saying March 2016 instead of June 2016 (that was the lie that got him 2 year jail sentence).
Meanwhile, Brennan and Clapper were never charged for much worse lies.
DC can't be fixed, NSA and CIA can't be trusted.
> Why would Trump associates continue pursuing a back channel nine days before the inauguration?
See for example the Cuban missile crisis. Which would have been the nuclear war, had it not been for back channels facilitating a peaceful resolution by letting leaders on each side know what the other one would accept and not accept via official communications.
You copy-pasted a lot of stuff about "December 1" and "days before the inauguration". That's when Trump was the president-elect. When he was about to take control of the nuclear football (the big button). It would be extraordinarily reckless for him to NOT start opening lines of communication at that point. Like end-of-world reckless. A US president damn well better have a way to get a message to someone to who can whisper in Putin's ear, and vice-versa.
->Why didn't Mueller recuse himself in the so-called "Russia investigation"?
Assuming this is a serious question and not just retorical propaganda.
Because he didnt have a conflict of interest from being involved in the Trump campaign.
Luckily for the entire Americunt justice system. Previously investigating criminals in the past doesnt mean you have to recuse yourself from investigating criminals in the future.
Being motivated to put effort into finding crime makes for a good investigator.
And also, he had previously been involved in covering up both Trump and Clintons visits to Lolita island, so they could be sure he wouldn't expose too much about the wrong people.