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Wyden: Obama’s NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don’t Go Far Enough

by t07c6o Posted on August 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Friday afternoon, President Obama held a press conference where he promised to bring increased transparency to the NSA’s digital surveillance programs. He announced a series of proposed reforms to the way the NSA collects data and to how the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) operates, along with plans to convene a group of “outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies.”

US Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been one of the biggest thorns in the administration’s side when it comes to raising questions about how mass surveillance programs threaten civil liberties. After the president’s remarks, he said that he was encouraged by Obama’s suggestions, several of which the Senator and others have been pushing to get for years.

The press conference came on the heels of the Guardian‘s latest scoop based on documents it obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Contrary to President Obama’s oft-repeated claim that Americans’ data is protected from warrantless bulk collection and analysis, the paper reported on Friday morning that the NSA can access US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant using a “secret backdoor into its vast databases.”

While Wyden said he appreciated Obama announcing his support for reforming the section of the Patriot Act that the government has secretly interpreted to justify gobbling up millions of Americans’ records, and praised his plan to make proceedings at the foreign intelligence court more adversarial, the senator pointed out areas where he thought the president didn’t go far enough.

“Notably absent from President Obama’s speech was any mention of closing the backdoor searches loophole that potentially allows for the warrantless searches of Americans’ phone calls and emails under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Wyden said, referring to the program most recently disclosed by the Guardian. “I am also concerned that the executive branch has not fully acknowledged the extent to which violations of the FISC orders and the spirit of the law have already had a significant impact on Americans’ privacy.”

While Obama said at the press conference that he had been pushing for reform all along, he maintained that Snowden was no “patriot,” even though he conceded the disclosures may have sped up the process. (The administration had revealed very little about NSA surveillance until Snowden’s leaks forced its hand.) In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Wyden criticized the administration for leaving the American public in the dark for so long.

“I feel very strongly, very strongly, that this debate should have begun long, long ago by government officials, by members of Congress and the White House rather than by a contractor,” Wyden said.

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Wyden: Obama’s NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don’t Go Far Enough

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law 48 years ago today. But this June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the law, freeing jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to change their voting laws without federal permission. For decades, Section 5 of the VRA required a number of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to seek the feds’ approval—called preclearance, in legal parlance—before modifying voting rules. The Supreme Court’s decision gutted Section 5, paving the way for new discriminatory laws.

Since the high court ruling, North Carolina has passed what critics have called the worst voter-ID law in the country, Texas pushed ahead with a voter-ID law and redistricting plan that the VRA blocked last year, and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to continue to challenge discriminatory voting laws despite the Supreme Court ruling. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott announced this week that he would renew his efforts to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, a messy, inaccurate practice that the Justice Department says violates the VRA and unfairly targets black and Hispanic voters.

In honor of the VRA’s anniversary, here are five recent and egregious examples of of minority discrimination that were blocked by Section 5, the part of the law the Supreme Court eviscerated in June:

In 2001, the all-white board of aldermen in the town of Kilmichael, Miss. (pop. 830), canceled town elections after an unprecedented number of black candidates made it onto the ballot. When the DOJ forced an election and the town finally voted, it elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.
During a 2004 city council primary in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a Vietnamese-American candidate, Phuong Thanh Huynh, ran against white incumbent Jackie Ladnier. Ladnier and his supporters challenged about 50 Asian-American voters at the polls. Their reason? If they couldn’t speak English well, they might not be citizens. The DOJ intervened, and Huynh became the first Asian-American on the city council.
Texas is perfect example of the continued need for the VRA. The state has been repeatedly blocked from implementing both local and statewide changes that blatantly disenfranchise minority voters, from redistricting schemes to the elimination of polling places and early voting in minority districts. A report from Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that the between 1982 and 2006 Texas was second only to Mississippi in the number of DOJ objections under Section 5. One example: In 2007, officials in Waller County, home to the historically black Prairie View A&M University, enacted strict voter registration rules (without federal approval) that allowed them to reject voter registration applications, mostly from PVAMU students, for minor errors or omissions. After the Justice Department sued the county, a local judge told the Houston Chronicle that registrars “were maybe being a little picky with some of the things they were rejecting for.”
In 2008, Alaska submitted for federal preclearance a plan that would have required some Native Alaskan voters to travel by air or boat to cast a ballot. The state withdrew its submission after it was challenged by the DOJ.
After the 2010 census indicated that blacks had become the majority of the voting-age population in Georgia’s Augusta-Richmond, a consolidated city and county, the state legislature passed a bill that rescheduled voting from November, which had a traditionally high black voter turnout, to July, which had a low turnout overall, but especially for blacks. The change only affected Augusta-Richmond, and, not surprisingly, was rejected under Section 5.

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

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The Bradley Manning Trial is One More Step Toward a Post-Constitution America

by SFGJrg Posted on August 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law, stating “that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

Two hundred thirty-five years later, on July 30, 2013, Bradley Manning was found guilty on 20 of the 22 charges for which he was prosecuted, specifically for “espionage” and for videos of war atrocities he released, but not for “aiding the enemy.”

Days after the verdict, with sentencing hearings in which Manning could receive 136 years of prison time ongoing, the pundits have had their say. The problem is that they missed the most chilling aspect of the Manning case: the way it ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-Constitutional America.

The Weapons of War Come Home
Even before the Manning trial began, the emerging look of that new America was coming into view. In recent years, weapons, tactics, and techniques developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the war on terror have begun arriving in “the homeland.”

Consider, for instance, the rise of the warrior cop, of increasingly up-armored police departments across the country often filled with former military personnel encouraged to use the sort of rough tactics they once wielded in combat zones. Supporting them are the kinds of weaponry that once would have been inconceivable in police departments, including armored vehicles, typically bought with Department of Homeland Security grants. Recently, the director of the FBI informed a Senate committee that the Bureau was deploying its first drones over the United States. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security and already flying an expanding fleet of Predator drones, the very ones used in America’s war zones, is eager to arm them with “non-lethal” weaponry to “immobilize targets of interest.”

Above all, surveillance technology has been coming home from our distant war zones. The National Security Agency (NSA), for instance, pioneered the use of cell phones to track potential enemy movements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSA did this in one of several ways. With the aim of remotely turning on cell phones as audio monitoring or GPS devices, rogue signals could be sent out through an existing network, or NSA software could be implanted on phones disguised as downloads of porn or games.

Using fake cell phone towers that actually intercept phone signals en route to real towers, the US could harvest hardware information in Iraq and Afghanistan that would forever label a phone and allow the NSA to always uniquely identify it, even if the SIM card was changed. The fake cell towers also allowed the NSA to gather precise location data for the phone, vacuum up metadata, and monitor what was being said.

At one point, more than 100 NSA teams had been scouring Iraq for snippets of electronic data that might be useful to military planners. The agency’s director, General Keith Alexander, changed that: he devised a strategy called Real Time Regional Gateway to grab every Iraqi text, phone call, email, and social media interaction. “Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,'” said one former senior US intelligence official. “Collect it all, tag it, store it, and whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

Sound familiar, Mr. Snowden?

Welcome Home, Soldier (Part I)
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that the “collect it all” technique employed by the NSA in Iraq would soon enough be used to collect American metadata and other electronically available information, including credit card transactions, air ticket purchases, and financial records. At the vast new $2 billion data center it is building in Bluffdale, Utah, and at other locations, the NSA is following its Iraq script of saving everything, so that once an American became a target, his or her whole history can be combed through. Such searches do not require approval by a court, or even an NSA supervisor. As it happened, however, the job was easier to accomplish in the US than in Iraq, as internet companies and telephone service providers are required by secret law to hand over the required data, neatly formatted, with no messy spying required.

When the US wanted something in Iraq or Afghanistan, they sent guys to kick down doors and take it. This, too, may be beginning to happen here at home. Recently, despite other valuable and easily portable objects lying nearby, computers, and only computers, were stolen from the law offices representing State Department whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn. Similarly, a Washington law firm representing NSA whistleblower Tom Drake had computers, and only computers, stolen from its office.

In these years, the FBI has brought two other NSA wartime tools home. The Bureau now uses a device called Stingray to recreate those battlefield fake cell phone towers and track people in the US without their knowledge. Stingray offers some unique advantages: it bypasses the phone company entirely, which is, of course, handy in a war zone in which a phone company may be controlled by less than cooperative types, or if phone companies no longer cooperate with the government, or simply if you don’t want the phone company or anyone else to know you’re snooping. American phone companies seem to have been quite cooperative. Verizon, for instance, admits hacking its own cellular modems (“air cards“) to facilitate FBI intrusion.

The FBI is also following NSA’s lead implanting spyware and other hacker software developed for our war zones secretly and remotely in American computers and cell phones. The Bureau can then remotely turn on phone and laptop microphones, even webcams, to monitor citizens, while files can be pulled from a computer or implanted onto a computer.

Among the latest examples of war technology making the trip back to the homeland is the aerostat, a tethered medium-sized blimp. Anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan will recognize the thing, as one or more of them flew over nearly every military base of any size or importance. The Army recently announced plans to operate two such blimps over Washington, D.C., starting in 2014. Allegedly they are only to serve as anti-missile defenses, though in our war zones they were used as massive surveillance platforms. As a taste of the sorts of surveillance systems the aerostats were equipped with abroad but the Army says they won’t have here at home, consider Gorgon Stare, a system that can transmit live images of an entire town. And unlike drones, an aerostat never needs to land. Ever.

Welcome Home, Soldier (Part II)
And so to Bradley Manning.

As the weaponry and technology of war came home, so did a new, increasingly Guantanamo-ized definition of justice. This is one thing the Manning case has made clear.

As a start, Manning was treated no differently than America’s war-on-terror prisoners at Guantanamo and the black sites that the Bush administration set up around the world. Picked up on the “battlefield,” Manning was first kept incommunicado in a cage in Kuwait for two months with no access to a lawyer. Then, despite being an active duty member of the Army, he was handed over to the Marines, who also guard Guantanamo, to be held in a military prison in Quantico, Virginia.

What followed were three years of cruel detainment, where, as might well have happened at Gitmo, Manning, kept in isolation, was deprived of clothing, communications, legal advice, and sleep. The sleep deprivation regime imposed on him certainly met any standard, other than Washington’s and possibly Pyongyang’s, for torture. In return for such abuse, even after a judge had formally ruled that he was subjected to excessively harsh treatment, Manning will only get a 112-day reduction in his eventual sentence.

Eventually the Obama administration decided Manning was to be tried as a soldier before a military court. In the courtroom, itself inside a military facility that also houses NSA headquarters, there was a strikingly gulag-like atmosphere. His trial was built around secret witnesses and secret evidence; severe restrictions were put on the press—the Army denied press passes to 270 of the 350 media organizations that applied; and there was a clear appearance of injustice. Among other things, the judge ruled against nearly every defense motion.

During the months of the trial, the US military refused to release official transcripts of the proceedings. Even a private courtroom sketch artist was barred from the room. Independent journalist and activist Alexa O’Brien then took it upon herself to attend the trial daily, defy the Army, and make an unofficial record of the proceedings by hand. Later in the trial, armed military police were stationed behind reporters listening to testimony. Above all, the feeling that Manning’s fate was predetermined could hardly be avoided. After all, President Obama, the former Constitutional law professor, essentially proclaimed him guilty back in 2011 and the Department of Defense didn’t hesitate to state more generally that “leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”

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The Bradley Manning Trial is One More Step Toward a Post-Constitution America

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"Green Billionaire" Launches Big-Money Blitz Against Virginia GOPer

by publik23 Posted on August 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund manager turned climate activist and big-spending political player, already has one notch in his belt, helping elect Massachusetts’ Ed Markey to the US Senate earlier this year. Now he’s aiming for notch No. 2: pummeling Republican Ken Cuccinelli and electing Cuccinelli’s opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s next governor.

Politico reports that Steyer’s super-PAC, NextGen Climate Action, will run its first wave of TV ads in Virginia this week. NextGen and its consultants are also laying the groundwork for a statewide get-out-the-vote effort this fall targeting Virginians who care about the climate. GOTV efforts are especially important in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial race because it is an off-year election and the year after a presidential race. Voters are following politics less closely, and turnout is expected to be low.

That Steyer would choose the Cuccinelli-McAuliffe race as his next target is no surprise. Cuccinelli, who is currently the state attorney general, is one of the loudest members of the GOP’s chorus of climate change deniers. He has frequently attacked the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases, and he led a witch hunt into the research of prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University.

If Steyer’s goal is to use his wealth and today’s lax campaign finance rules to force candidates to discuss climate change and to oust those candidates who don’t take it seriously, then attacking Cuccinelli is a no-brainer. “I would say there’s a very clear choice on this topic between these two candidates, and I think the citizens of Virginia deserve to understand both what the truth is and what the implications of that are,” Steyer told Politico.

Here’s more on Steyer’s big Virginia blitz:

While Steyer’s first overt move in Virginia comes in the form of paid television advertising, he told Politico repeatedly that he views get-out-the-vote efforts as a better overall investment, along with digital advertising and other, less-traditional independent expenditure methods.

“Our going-in assumption is that the bulk of what we’re doing is field—is enabling the citizens to literally speak to each other,” Steyer said. Referring to the Prop. 39 fight, he explained: “Our sense in California was that technology enabled a lot of viewers to just skip our ads.”

He added on a wry note: “The other thing that’s true, as I’m sure you know, is the traditional way for consultants to get paid is through a percentage of the TV buy…So it’s like you say, you know, ‘There’s a flood in Afghanistan.’ And they’ll say, ‘We need a bigger TV buy.'”

The billionaire freely acknowledged that he was a newcomer to Virginia, but in a whirlwind tour of Richmond last week, he introduced himself to a number of prominent figures in the state political and clean-energy communities.

Steyer met in Virginia’s capital city Thursday with a collection of climate activists and another group of about 20 energy executives. One of those executives—Mike Healy of Skyline Innovations, who invited Steyer to Richmond in the first place—delivered a letter signed by several colleagues asking that Steyer use his financial firepower in the governor’s race.

The consensus in that meeting, Steyer said, was that the advanced-energy sector could pack a much bigger punch in state politics if it were better organized politically and more deliberate about pushing the message that green policies can translate into jobs. (And, it goes without saying, if a deep-pocketed out-of-state figure would be willing to deliver a nuclear-level strike against a politician like Cuccinelli.)

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"Green Billionaire" Launches Big-Money Blitz Against Virginia GOPer

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Does the FBI Monitor All Your Google Searches?

by neogrom Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

UPDATE: The Suffolk County Police Department says today that they recently received a tip “from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee.” Based on that, they paid him a visit. The FBI apparently wasn’t involved, and neither was any kind of surveillance of Google searches. More here.

Doug Mataconis passes along a blog post from Michele Catalano about a recent visit her family got from six agents belonging to a joint terrorism task force. It turns out that she had been googling for pressure cookers, her husband had been googling for backpacks, and her son had been googling for news about the Boston bombings. This raised some red flags and produced the JTTF visit. Mataconis comments:

As Catalano notes in her post, as well as in several Tweets regarding the incident collected by Gizmodo, the agents were respectful of her family and didn’t disturb the house in any significant way while conducting their “search.”….Nonetheless, it does raise some interesting questions about exactly what kind of Internet surveillance is going on out there. Quite obviously, the FBI would not have shown up at the Catalano home if some connection had not been made between Google searches conducted several weeks in the past, their IP address, and eventually their home address. On a basic level, this would seem to require; (1) that there is a program out there monitoring seemingly random Google searches by American citizens, (2) that this program allows the government to track IP addresses, or obtain them from Google by some means, and (3) that they were then able to connect the IP address to a home address, presumably with information obtained from whichever company happens to provide the Catalano’s with their internet access.

All of this raises several legal questions, of course. For example, under what legal authority is the Federal Government monitoring the Google searches/Internet activity of American citizens, presumably without a warrant?….More important, though, is how the FBI managed to get its hands on this information and on the Catalano’s home address. Was there a FISA warrant issued?….Was there any warrant issued at all?

Why yes, those are good questions! They’re especially good since the agents told Catalano’s husband that they make about 100 visits like this each week. Inquiring minds would like to know more.

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Does the FBI Monitor All Your Google Searches?

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

One of China’s largest and most prominent media companies—12 percent of which is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox—has been rocked by a major sexual harassment and assault scandal. A lawsuit filed on July 19 in federal court against Phoenix Satellite Television contains a series of jaw-dropping allegations concerning its onetime Washington, DC, bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu. The Chinese journalist is accused of a litany of offenses, including encouraging job applicants to meet him in hotel rooms for interviews and then groping them, attempting to coerce the wife of a cameraman to have sex with him to preserve her husband’s job, telling a job candidate about the “gigantic and powerful penis” of his black friend, and attempting to rape a reporter.

The plaintiffs, two of whom are US citizens, claim at least one high-ranking Phoenix executive knew about this conduct for years before the company fired Liu last December. They also say that after Phoenix ousted Liu, the media conglomerate installed a new bureau chief who proceeded to retaliate against employees who had complained about the alleged abuses.

Four of the five plaintiffs—Meixing Ren, Ching-Yi Chang, Taofeng Wang, and Haipei Shue—are men who say that Tao Lu, the current bureau chief, punished them for speaking out about his predecessor’s alleged conduct by downsizing their job duties and firing one of them. The fifth plaintiff is a former Phoenix intern who alleges that Liu repeatedly groped her. Another former Phoenix intern filed a separate lawsuit in New York earlier this year making similar allegations. Mother Jones interviewed three of the male plaintiffs and four of Liu’s alleged female victims.

Phoenix Television, which is based in Hong Kong, is one of few private broadcasters permitted by the Chinese government to operate in mainland China. The multimedia empire maintains bureaus around the world, covers more than 150 countries, and is worth about $1.9 billion. In 2008, the company’s current CEO, Liu Changle, won an International Emmy for being “one of Asia’s leading broadcast entrepreneurs.”

The lawsuit is “full of inaccuracies and false statements about the Company,” Wu Xiaoyong, the CEO of Phoenix’s American subsidiary, told Mother Jones in a statement. “We have retained counsel to defend the Company’s interests, and we will have no further comment regarding this case.” Mother Jones left messages at several phone numbers associated with Liu; he did not respond to these repeated requests for comment. Both Xiaoyong and the law firm representing the plaintiffs said they do not know the ex-bureau chief’s whereabouts. Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox declined to comment.

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

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Democrats To Introduce Supreme Court Ethics Bill

by dwsfwa Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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â&#128;&#139;Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been in the news recently after Mother Jones revealed her involvement in Groundswell, a secret effort by a group of conservatives to organize their fight against liberals, mainstream Republicans, and Karl Rove. Her political activity has once again raised questions about whether she is creating conflicts of interest for her husband, and whether he should be forced to recuse himself from cases that involve Ginni’s work.

Such calls for Thomas to recuse from cases hit a fevered pitch when the Affordable Care Act was before the high court and Ginni was actively lobbying against it. As it turned out, there’s no mechanism for concerned citizens to complain about a Supreme Court justice, or even a clear set of rules that the justices must follow in making recusal decisions. Supreme Court justices are exempt from the Code of Conduct for United State Judges, the rulebook that every other federal judge in the country has to follow.

That code would have prohibited the justices from a number of controversial activities the Supreme Court has engaged in over the past few years. In 2011, for instance, Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia headlined a fundraiser for the conservative legal group, the Federalist Society. Ordinary federal judges couldn’t have done that. Both also have attended hush-hush political events hosted by Koch Industries that are billed as efforts “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it.” Koch Industries is owned by the right-wing Koch family that’s been dumping millions of dollars in the Republican politics, particularly after the court decided in Citizens United to allow unlimited corporate money into the electoral system. The code also requires federal judges to recuse themselves from cases in which a spouse or family member has a financial interest, a rule that might apply to the Thomases.

Several members have decided to try to do something about the appearance of impropriety by some of the justices. On Thursday, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Chris Murhpy (D-CT), and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), plan to introduce the Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2012 that would force the high court to adopt an ethics code much like the one that binds lower court judges. The idea has support from legal scholars, who’ve been urging the court to adopt such a code since last year. More than 125,000 people have signed a petition calling on Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. to apply the Code of Conduct to the court. But Roberts has been pretty adamant that he thinks the justices are perfectly capable of policing themselves without the need for silly codes (codes which most of the sitting justices once had to abide by on a lower court).

Without buy-in from Roberts, any attempt, even by Congress, to require the justices to give themselves a written code of ethics is probably a tough sell. The new bill, if it could even pass through the full Congress (also doubtful), could set off an epic separation of powers battle between the two branches of government. A spokesman from Slaughter’s office says that the bill is absolutely constitutional, as Congress has the authority to regulate the administration of the court—setting the number of justices and whatnot. Still, it’s possible that the court could put up a fight—a fight that might ultimately have to be decided by….the Supreme Court.

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Democrats To Introduce Supreme Court Ethics Bill

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The NSA’s Biggest Surveillance Program Yet: X-KEYSCORE

by NielPostma231 Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Glenn Greenwald’s latest disclosure from the Snowden files is an NSA program called X-KEYSCORE, which collects a truly vast amount of information. How vast?

The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large….The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: “At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours.”

To solve this problem, the NSA has created a multi-tiered system that allows analysts to store “interesting” content in other databases, such as one named Pinwale which can store material for up to five years.

It’s not clear precisely what’s being collected, but it appears to be exclusively foreign signals intelligence: phone conversations, emails, chat, etc. Because it’s non-U.S., this includes the content of the communications, not just the metadata:

An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages. An analyst can monitor such Facebook chats by entering the Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen. Analysts can search for internet browsing activities using a wide range of information, including search terms entered by the user or the websites viewed….The XKeyscore program also allows an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.

But does this include U.S. persons, or only foreign nationals? This is where things get a little murky:

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a ‘US person’, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

….The NSA documents assert that by 2008, 300 terrorists had been captured using intelligence from XKeyscore.

….While the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 requires an individualized warrant for the targeting of US persons, NSA analysts are permitted to intercept the communications of such individuals without a warrant if they are in contact with one of the NSA’s foreign targets….An example is provided by one XKeyscore document showing an NSA target in Tehran communicating with people in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and New York.

Greenwald suggests that this validates Snowden’s statement in an earlier interview that “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.” But that’s not clear at all. X-KEYSCORE appears to be a database search tool, not a real-time surveillance tool, nor does it appear to give anyone “authority” to wiretap a U.S. citizen. Rather, it hoovers up tremendous volumes of foreign communications, which can then be searched by NSA analysts.

As Greenwald points out, there are known “compliance problems” with NSA’s surveillance programs, since communications by U.S. persons end up in this database if the other end of the conversation is overseas—and these communications can therefore end up on an analyst’s desktop. The NSA’s minimization procedures are supposed to prevent such “inadvertent” targeting of U.S. persons, but as Greenwald reported earlier, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.

Anyway, this is my best guess about what this all means. But I might have missed something. Read the entire story for more.

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The NSA’s Biggest Surveillance Program Yet: X-KEYSCORE

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Unfortunately, the NSA Surveillance Program Probably Won’t Cause an Overseas Uprising

by Rob Sutter Posted on July 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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James Fallows recommends a Guardian column from this weekend about the real effect of the Edward Snowden affair. John Naughton says it’s not about Snowden—and I agree. Rather, it’s about what we now know:

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.

Actually, this isn’t really true. We’ve known for years that federal agencies have been issuing NSLs and warrants to get data from Facebook and others. We’ve known for years that the NSA was collecting phone records.

Which isn’t to say that Snowden’s disclosures haven’t mattered. They have. The public (and Congress) react far more strongly to documented details than they do to general knowledge that something is going on. Snowden’s revelations have plainly galvanized public opinion and spurred Congress into action. That’s a big deal. But it’s not because we really know all that much more than we did before. This is why I’m a little skeptical of the conclusion Naughton draws from this. I’m going to quote Fallows’ version of it since it’s a little clearer:

In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet’s continued growth.

American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance;
American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet’s standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world’s digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world’s customers have trusted U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world’s nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

This is one of those arguments that I’d really like to believe. After all, it’s perfectly logical, and it helps make the case against a program that I don’t like. And yet, for several reasons, I just don’t think I buy it.

First, I suspect that the vast, vast majority of overseas Facebook/Microsoft/etc. customers already assume that intelligence agencies can read their files if they want to, and they just don’t care. These users aren’t spies or terrorists, and rightly or wrongly, they believe that intelligence agencies aren’t interested in them and won’t find anything interesting even if they are.

Second, would moving to a non-U.S. service protect you? Sure, if it’s one of those super-secure, highly-encrypted data vaults you read about once in a while. But that’s something very few people are interested in. They just want ordinary internet services: email, social networking, chat, etc. And if you’re a foreign national using a non-U.S. service, guess what? The NSA has no restrictions at all about spying on you. It’s true that they actually have to figure out how to get your data, since they can’t just demand it via warrant. But they can use any method they want to intercept or steal it. There are no rules when it comes to overseas data.

Third, I assume that most foreign governments have police and intelligence agencies that work in much the same way as the FBI and the NSA. We don’t hear much about this since they operate on a far smaller scale, but if the French police want access to your email, they can get a warrant issued for it. Likewise, I suspect that French intelligence agencies have some of the same data mining capabilities as the NSA. It’s certainly nowhere near as broad, but I’ll bet it exists.

Put all this together, and it’s really not clear to me that broad public reaction is going to be very strong. Will Danish users stop using Facebook until some Danish company creates an alternate social networking platform? Probably not. The fear of NSA spying is simply nowhere near as compelling as the huge inconvenience of everyone being on a different platform and being unable to chat and share pictures with their friends in other countries.

As for businesses, they’re probably less interested in avoiding NSA spying than they are in staying ahead of hackers and concealing their more dubious dealings from ordinary law enforcement agencies. Using a non-U.S. platform won’t do them any good on either of these scores.

We’ll see, of course. Maybe this is the beginning of a long decline in U.S. information services, as overseas users start to move to other platforms. It’s possible. Unfortunately, I sort of doubt it. At most, I suspect we’ll start to see a bit more nationalistic reliance on domestic network infrastructure, but that’s something that’s always been likely anyway. Beyond that, people will just keep on doing what they’ve been doing.

UPDATE: For a contrary take, read Henry Farrell here. He believes that privacy authorities in Europe will drive major changes in surveillance law, which is a fairly widespread view. I suspect that things will turn out differently than Henry does, but it’s worth reading his argument.

Originally posted here – 

Unfortunately, the NSA Surveillance Program Probably Won’t Cause an Overseas Uprising

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Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Act Unleashes GOP Feeding Frenzy

by Magdalynamez Posted on July 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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When the Supreme Court recently gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it did so under the theory that there was little evidence of continuing racial discrimination in the states that were required to get preclearance before changing their voting laws. Congress had rather pointedly disagreed when it renewed the VRA in 2006, but no matter. The Supreme Court knew better.

So how has that theory worked out? Normally we’d have to wait a while to find out. Even Citizens United, which gutted campaign financing law, took a few years before its full effect was obvious. But in this case, a few weeks has been enough. A couple of days ago, the North Carolina Senate voted to approve a draconian set of changes to its voting laws, and there’s not much question that final passage will come shortly. Check out this astonishing list of changes in the bill:

Require voter ID at polling places.
Reduce the early voting period from 17 days to 10 days.
Prohibit counties from extending poll hours by one hour on Election Day even in extraordinary circumstances, such as in response to long lines. (Those in line at closing time would still be allowed to vote.)
Eliminate pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, who currently can register to vote before they turn 18.
Outlaw paid voter registration drives.
Eliminate straight-ticket voting.
Eliminate provisional voting if someone shows up at the wrong precinct.
Allow any registered voter of a county to challenge the eligibility of a voter rather than just a voter of the precinct in which the suspect voter is registered.

Why North Carolina’s Voter ID Bill Might be the Nation’s Worst

In the past, all of this would have required preclearance from the Justice Department, and it almost certainly would have been dead on arrival. But with the end of Section 5 there was nothing left to stop them, so the bill turned into a feeding frenzy of provisions designed to suppress voting among blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the young. “What’s happening in North Carolina,” said Ed Kilgore, “is the product of a gang of ideologues led and funded by gazillionaire Art Pope who stormed the ramparts of a once-progressive state.”

There is, needless to say, virtually no justification for any of this. “Election integrity” is the stated reason, but examples of voter fraud are vanishingly rare and no one in North Carolina has even bothered to pretend otherwise. They just want to reduce voting among any group that happens to support Democrats. If that means reducing the black and Hispanic vote—something that North Carolina’s own Secretary of State has confirmed will happen—well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, can you?

So is there any hope of overturning this law? There’s not much in North Carolina itself. But on Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would file a suit to halt a new voter ID law in Texas. “My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against such discrimination wherever it is found,” he told an audience in Philadelphia, and a suit to stop North Carolina’s law is likely too. So this is where the fight is headed. Section 5 is dead, and despite some early noises from congressional Republicans about passing a new version, there was never any serious chance of that happening. What’s happening in North Carolina, after all, is part of broad push by the Republican Party itself throughout the country. So now it’s up to the Justice Department to go in after the fact and take these laws to court one by one. The Supreme Court seemed to think this was a perfectly adequate subsititute for preclearance. We’ll soon find out if they were serious when once of these challenges eventually wends its way onto their docket.

From – 

Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Act Unleashes GOP Feeding Frenzy

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