64 percent growth in electronic spying since president Obama took office.
Washington D.C. - The Justice Department's use of electronic devices to intercept phone numbers, email addresses and online information has climbed by 64 percent since 2009, according to a study of records released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Government data shows that from 2009 to 2011, the combined number of court orders for so-called pen registers and trap and trace devices on phones rose from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Though used far less frequently, the combined number of court orders targeting individuals' email and network communications data rose from 360 in 2009 to 1,661 through the end of 2011. When combined, the total intercepts represent a 64 percent increase.
The civil liberties advocacy group made the FOIA request, analyzed the released documents and issued a report on them Thursday.
A pen register records all numbers dialed from a particular telephone line. A trap-and-trace device records the telephone numbers of inbound callers to a suspected criminal telephone.
http://www.washingtonguardian.com/big-brother-listening
Feds’ warrantless surveillance targeted more people in past two years than entire previous decade.
Disturbing new documents from the United States Department of Justice reveal that federal agents are increasingly being given real-time access to the social networking accounts and e-mails of Americans without having to obtain a search warrant.
Unfortunately, this is hardly surprising given that the Obama administration has fought to maintain their warrantless wiretapping powers and similarly declared that cellphone location data is not constitutionally protected.
Given that former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) have exposed the massive illegal surveillance program going on in our nation, is it really all that surprising to learn of this type of widespread real-time surveillance?
That being said, the dramatic rise in the numbers is hardly easy to brush aside.
The reports made available by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) were only handed over by the government after the ACLU was forced to sue the Department of Justice and enter into months of litigation.
The documents are the 2010 and 2011 attorney general reports on the use of so-called “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance methods, which gather information on communications via Internet, e-mail and telephone.
While these surveillance tools had to be physically installed just twenty years ago, “Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware,” according to the ACLU.
http://endthelie.com/2012/09/27/feds-warrantless-surveillance-targeted-more-people-in-past-two-years-than-entire-previous-decade/
New book details the NSA’s Warrantless wiretapping program, as government moves to avoid all accountability in Court.
Former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s new book, published last week, provides yet more details about how the the NSA’s unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program came about, and confirms that even top Bush Administration lawyers felt there was a “strong argument” that the program violated the law. “Officials might be slammed for violating the Fourth Amendment as a result of having listened in on calls to people inside the country and collecting so much personal data," Eichenwald wrote, and “in the future, others may question the legality” of their actions.
Yet even today, eleven years later, the government continues to claim that no court can judge the program's legality. In the next month, the government will argue—in EFF's case in federal district court and ACLU's case in the Supreme Court—that courts must dismiss the legal challenges without ever coming to a ruling on the merits.
Eichenwald's book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, describes how the NSA’s illegal program—what he calls "the most dramatic expansion of NSA's power and authority in the agency's 49 year history"— was devised just days after 9/11 to disregard requirements in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Instead of getting individualized warrants to monitor Americans communicating overseas, the Bush administration unilaterally gave the NSA the power to sweep up millions of emails and phone calls into a database for analysis without court approval:
Connections between a suspect e-mail address and others—accounts that both sent and received messages there, whether in the United States or not—would be examined. At that point, a more detailed level of analysis would be applied creating something of a ripple effect. The suspect e-mail address would lead to a second, the second to the accounts it contacted.
In other words, the NSA was given the green light to warrantlessly spy of Americans communications on American soil—a power that was illegal under FISA. And the government—instead of finding probable cause for surveillance like the Constitution requires—started using a burden of proof akin to the game Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/new-book-details-nsa-warrantless-wiretapping-program-government-moves-avoid-all