Former NSA chief claims the gov't. will use an attack against the U.S. as a reason to take away our remaining Constitutional liberties
Washington, D.C. - Former National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden hinted Sunday at how the NSA's eavesdropping and data collection program is likely to evolve over time. Critics of the project have warned that by building the capacity to track the electronic communications of all American citizens, the government will inevitably be tempted to employ every tool it has at its disposal and scuttle whatever constitutional safeguards stand in the way.
Not to do so eventually would in fact be more surprising, goes the argument.
In an appearance on CBS' "Face The Nation," Hayden -- also the former head of the CIA -- unintentionally opened a window into just how that evolution will likely unfold.
Asked by host Bob Schieffer about the president's proposal for a civil liberties advocate to argue on behalf of the Constitution in the secret court that oversees the NSA, Hayden said that such a setup would be inappropriate for fast-moving investigations. But he did float a hypothetical scenario in which such a safeguard might be appropriate: After an attack, he said, the NSA would want to use the vast store of information it has been collecting in more aggressive ways.
Hayden said that in general he was opposed to a civil liberties advocate's involvement in the process, and warned that slowing it down would lead to criticism.
"When you're looking in your rearview mirror after the next successful attack, this runs the danger of looking like bureaucratic layering," he said. "And, so, you need to be careful about how many processes you put in there even though I freely admit, you don't get to do this at all unless the American people feel comfortable about it."
He continued, adding that an advocate might be appropriate after an attack, when the temptation to overreach is greatest.
"This is no one's proposal," he cautioned, before unveiling his hypothetical. "You've got this metadata. It's now currently queried under very, very narrow circumstances. If the nation suffers an attack, there are other things you could do with that metadata. There are other tools. So in that kind of emergency perhaps you would go to the court and say, 'In addition to these very limited queries we're allowed to do, we actually want to launch some complex algorithms against it.'"
"That's the kind of argument that frankly, even I could accept you might wanna have an advocate there," he said.
In Hayden's hypothetical, the NSA would want to use an advanced algorithm to search through the information it had collected on American citizens. Such an algorithm could, for instance, read the email of every American, the type of search that is strictly prohibited by the Fourth 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," the amendment reads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/michael-hayden-nsa_n_3739610.html
NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens' emails and phone calls:
The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.
The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".
The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.
The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.
The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as "incidental collection" in surveillance parlance.
But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals' communications.
A secret glossary document provided to operatives in the NSA's Special Source Operations division – which runs the Prism program and large-scale cable intercepts through corporate partnerships with technology companies – details an update to the "minimization" procedures that govern how the agency must handle the communications of US persons. That group is defined as both American citizens and foreigners located in the US.
"While the FAA 702 minimization procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data," the glossary states, "analysts may NOT/NOT (not repeat not)implement any USP [US persons] queries until an effective oversight process has been developed by NSA and agreed to by DOJ/ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)."
The term "identifiers" is NSA jargon for information relating to an individual, such as telephone number, email address, IP address and username as well as their name.
The document – which is undated, though metadata suggests this version was last updated in June 2012 – does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls
Did Obama admit the NSA Was collecting Americans' phone audio?
In his August 9 press conference, President Obama seems to have paved the way for a government admission that the NSA is recording the telephone calls of millions of Americans. While not being explicit, the president pointedly didn't deny that the NSA was collecting the audio and transcripts of the phone calls. And he maintained that the NSA needed to collect the “haystack” to find the terrorist needle among us.
In the press conference, Obama expressed frustration at how the London Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and others in the media have gradually reported information from Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance of Americans' private Internet and telephone traffic. “What I’m going to be pushing the IC [Intelligence Community] to do," he said, "is rather than have a trunk come out here and leg come out there and a tail come out there, let’s just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they're looking at.”
President Obama may have revealed the elephant with his lawyer's dodge of a press conference. He pointedly didn't deny that the NSA was collecting Americans' phone call audio. "As I’ve said, this program is an important tool in our effort to disrupt terrorist plots. And it does not allow the government to listen to any phone calls without a warrant."
The key words above are "listen to." Notice that Obama didn't say the NSA wasn't seizing the audio from Americans' phone calls and storing it in central data-centers, or even searching through computer-generated transcripts of the conversations. Intelligence officials have continuously stressed the difference between gathering the data into a database and searching through the data. Gathering any kind of “third party” data into a central database, Obama administration lawyers claim, does not violate a “reasonable expectation of privacy” on the part of the American people. It is only searching through that data that is a search in the context of the Fourth Amendment, the false administration narrative asserts. (The Fourth Amendment includes a prohibition on the “seizure” of documents without warrants and probable cause, in addition to the requirement for warrants and probable cause to accompany searches.)
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/16260-did-obama-just-admit-the-nsa-was-collecting-americans-phone-audio
NSA cites ONE case as success of their phone data-collection program:
“There’s no reason why NSA needed to have its own database containing the phone records of millions of innocent Americans in order to get the information related to Moalin,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a Senate Intelligence Committee member who has been pressing officials for evidence of the program’s effectiveness. “It could have just as easily gone directly to the phone companies with an individualized court order.”
Moalin’s lawyer said he is surprised that counterterrorism officials have cited his client’s case as a hallmark success.
“The notion that this case could be used to justify a mass collection of data is mind-boggling, considering it’s $8,500 that went to Somalia,” said Joshua Dratel, who denied that his client sent money to the terrorist group.
It was a tip that put Moalin on the FBI’s radar in 2003. But when investigators found no link to terrorism, they closed the case. Then, in 2007, the NSA came up with a number in Somalia that it believed was linked to al-Shabab. It ran the number against its database.
Inglis said officials had no idea whether the number had ties to any number in the United States. “In order to find the needle that matched up against that number, we needed the haystack,” he said.
The NSA found that the San Diego number had had “indirect” contact with “an extremist outside the United States,” FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce told the Senate last week. The agency passed the number to the FBI, which used an administrative subpoena to identify it as Moalin’s. Then, according to court records, in late 2007, the bureau obtained a wiretap order and over the course of a year listened to Moalin’s conversations. About 2,000 calls were intercepted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-cites-case-as-success-of-phone-data-collection-program/2013/08/08/fc915e5a-feda-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html
Former NSA chief thinks privacy and free information activists are potential terrorists:
While people are fixated on former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden's Tuesday comments that the NSA's sifting through metadata is “really good news,” they should be far more concerned about how he characterized pro-Snowden, pro-privacy activists and hackers.
In a Bipartisan Policy Center cybersecurity speech, Hayden invoked a century's worth of terror descriptors, calling Snowden supporters and privacy proponents “nihilists, anarchists... twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in a five or six years.”
What else would you expect from one of the chief architects of the NSA's domestic wiretapping program? How Hayden manages to define individuals who are so very clearly for something (privacy, free information) as “nihilists” is quite astonishing. It's more than likely rhetoric aimed at America's legions of impressionable, jingoistic patriots, but it shows an utter lack of regard for extremely valid concerns.
The use of the term “anarchists” serves the same function—it strikes fear or terror in the hearts of America's heartland just as effectively as the Islamic terrorist that is everywhere, always plotting to destroy lives and freedom.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-former-nsa-chief-thinks-privacy-and-free-information-activists-are-potential-terrorists
To paraphrase from “The Sabotuer” an Alfred Hitchcock movie about a possible WW2 sabotuer.
The police labeled a suspected American citizen played by Robert Cummings a “sabotuer” [in today's America he'd be labeled a terrorist].
An actress played by Priscilla Lane addresses her blind uncle played by Vaughan Glaser and says he's dangerous and its our duty to turn him in.
The uncle responds, police are always on the alarmist side. How could they [the police] be “heroes” if the citizens were harmless.
Click on the link to watch the full movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5CiGHJG3is