NSA recruiters coming to a campus near you

When NSA recruiters went to the University of Wisconsin earlier this week to pitch language students on working for the agency, they got more than they bargained for. “Is there anyone you don’t consider an adversary?”
 
The informed students turned the question-and-answer session into a hearing. On trial were the NSA’s lies, their legality, and how they define “adversary.” You've got to hear this! Click the audio link: https://soundcloud.com/madiha-1/students-question-the-nsa-at

Watch a full NSA recruitment video here. It contains a slide that proclaims, “NSA does not spy on Americans.” I wonder how much longer that video will be up? 

NSA Career Campus Poster:
 http://www.ntid.rit.edu/sites/default/files/nce/nsa-job-fair-poster.pdf

NSA College Career Fair Schedule:
http://www.nsa.gov/applications/careers/recruit_events/
  
NSA's power to surveil Americans is worse than you think:


Washington, D. C. -  Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases.

A McClatchy review of public records, statements by Obama administration officials and interviews with cyber and telecom security experts lends credence to assertions that the capability for such surveillance exists.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee on March 30, 2011, that “technological improvements” now enable the bureau “to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”

The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records – a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data.

Security experts, including a former AT&T engineer, say that the NSA has tapped into fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data in cities across the country.

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian who reported on the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, said in a speech over the weekend that an upcoming story will describe a classified document that “talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its own repositories 1 billion cellphone calls every single day.”

“What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,” Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. “It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk#storylink=cpyJonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, charged that what’s already known shows that the NSA has violated the Constitution and created “the greatest threat to privacy in the history of this country. . . . They have created a system that for the first time makes every citizen visible to the government at the simple pressing of a button.”

Michael McConnell, a Stanford University law professor and a former federal appeals court judge, agreed that the program is potentially “dangerous,” but he called the case that it is illegal “extremely weak.” He likened the NSA’s collection of general data, such as who emailed whom, to an airport search of all passengers.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk#storylink=cpy
The Guardian reported that the British spy agency GCHQ has tapped into more than 200 cables carrying the world’s phone calls and Internet traffic and is sharing the data with the NSA. By May 2012, it said, 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to help comb through the mountain of data.
Digitized records of calls over Google Voice, Skype and other “voice over Internet” systems, many of them to points overseas, would be among the records.

NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel said that the “NSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself.”

NSA’s doubters point, in particular, to the agency’s push to build the massive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whose storage capacity will be measured in the highest metric now used – “yodabytes,” named for Yoda, the “Star Wars” character.

Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive who challenged the data collection for several years, said the agency’s intent seems obvious.

“One hundred million phone records?” he asked in an interview. “Why would they want that each and every day? Of course they’re storing it.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.” 
In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said. 
The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. 
That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.” 
Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system. “That whole notion is missing in this process,” he said. 
Drake, who fears that NSA chief Alexander is building “extraordinary power,” wound up as the fourth American to face charges under the Espionage Act after he blew the whistle on a wasteful NSA data-collection system. His prosecution, which Drake alleges was both retaliatory and an attempt to silence other potential leakers, eventually crumbled.

Lending credence to his worries, The Guardian’s latest report quoted a document in which Alexander purportedly remarked during a 2008 visit to an NSA intercept station in Britain: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk#storylink=cpy
The Patriot Act gave intelligence and law enforcement authorities a huge tool for looking at phone and Internet data to help identify terror networks. It authorized them to obtain orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that directed telecom and Internet giants such as Google, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple to share email and phone data.

Effectively, the law enabled the intelligence agencies to keep up with technological leaps that have transformed the world of surveillance. Nearly all personal data now moves over fiber-optic cables, each of whose tiny filaments can use pulsating flashes of light to transmit up to 100 billion bits of data per second.
ead more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk#storylink=cpyhttp://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/02/195606/hints-surface-that-nsa-building.html#.UdSd7N7D-Uk
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?hp&_r=1&


U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court public filings beginning June 2013:
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/fisc-13-0629/fisc-13-0629.htm