U.S. congressional leaders chose to keep the NSA surveillance program a secret
Washington - Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday U.S. congressional leaders he briefed in 2004 on a surveillance program recently disclosed by leaker Edward Snowden supported it, and both Republicans and Democrats wanted to keep it secret.
Cheney said he was directly involved in setting up the program, run by the National Security Agency, or NSA, in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. He said it has had “phenomenal results” in preventing terrorist attacks.
Cheney did not specify which survelliance program he was referring to. Snowden, a former NSA contractor, is facing espionage charges stemming from his disclosure of U.S. surveillance programs that collect phone records and online data in the name of national security.
“There was a time when it was a very, very close hold. Unfortunately it’s become public,” said Cheney.
He was asked about Snowden’s disclosures at a forum at a Washington think tank on U.S.-Korean affairs. He said the leaks have already caused significant damage to U.S. national security as it had forced the government to declassify information to explain the surveillance program.
“If you tell the enemy how you are reading their mail, it’s going to lessen your capability to do that,” he said.
Cheney, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, said that the way the program was set up, it required presidential approval for anyone outside the agency to be allowed to “read in” to it.
Cheney said he met and briefed congressional leaders — whom he did not identify — about three years after the program started and they were “unanimous” that it should continue.
“I said, ‘Do you think we ought to come back to the Congress in order to get more formal authorization?’ and they said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Everybody, Republican and Democrat, said, ‘Don’t come back up here, it will leak’,” Cheney said.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/06/24/cheney-congressional-leaders-wanted-to-keep-nsa-surveillance-a-secret/
http://www.wkbn.com/2013/06/24/cheney-lawmakers-favored-secrecy-on-surveillance/
NSA deletes surveillance 'fact' sheet:
Washington, D. C. - A day after coming under fire from congressional critics, the National Security Agency is trying to flush a controversial surveillance "fact sheet" down the memory hole.
That fact sheet was supposed to explain how the NSA interprets and uses section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the part of the law that underpins the agency's PRISM data collection program. But after Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Tom Udall (D-Colo.) asserted in a letter that the NSA's explanation contained a "significant" inaccuracy, the agency pulled the FISA fact sheet from its website on Tuesday, delivering users instead a server error.
In a letter to the senators, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said he "agree(d)" that the fact sheet "could have more precisely described the requirements for collection." He pointed them to the text of the law for further information on how the program works.
NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel addressed the removal of the fact sheet in a statement. "Given the intense interest from the media, the public, and Congress, we believe the precision of the source document (the statute) is the best possible representation of applicable authorities," she said.
In other words, the NSA now says the public should simply rely on the text of the surveillance law to understand how the agency is using its powers. That suggestion is a far cry from the step Wyden and Udall had urged: publicly correcting the record.
Still, Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said withdrawing the fact sheet was "a step in the right direction" for the NSA. For years, Wyden and Udall have derided the NSA and the intelligence community generally for their reliance on "secret law" -- internal interpretations of written laws that twist those laws so far as to be unimaginable to even their authors.
The NSA's interpretation of FISA is so highly classified that Wyden and Udall did not feel at liberty in their letter to explain what statement on the fact sheet, still available elsewhere online, was inaccurate.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/nsa-fisa-fact-sheet_n_3499026.html
With more surveillance technology becoming available, can we stop Big Brother from spying on us?
Article first appeared in privacysos.org
Think surveillance and communications privacy law is bad now? Just wait until the military’s “bioreactive taggants” and “smart dust” migrate back to the United States, and end up in the arsenals of the FBI, DHS, DEA, ATF, LAPD, and NYPD.
That day will come, and we couldn’t be lesser prepared.
In 2013, more than a decade after the dot com boom and bust, we still don’t have across the board standards requiring law enforcement to get warrants before reading our emails. Protections for our metadata -- records about our communications, such as who we talk to, where and when -- are effectively nonexistent, from the NSA all the way down to your local prosecutor’s office.And it’s about to get a whole lot worse, fast. We are about to enter yet another brave new world of technological change, and we are not even close to ready.
In Jeremy Scahill’s latest book, ‘Dirty Wars,’ he describes some innovative and frankly frightening technologies currently being fine tuned by the US Military Special Operations Command for use in the field (a.k.a. the entire world):
Known as Continuous Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating,” or CTTL, it involved using advanced biometrics and chemistry to develop a long-range facial recognition program as well as a “Human Thermal Fingerprint” that could be isolated for any individual. They also used a chemical “bioreactive taggant” to mark people by discreetly swabbing a part of their body. The taggant would emit a signal that [the Joint Special Operations Command] JSOC could remotely monitor, enabling it to track people 24/7/365. It was like a modern version of the old spook’s tracking devices made famous in films, where spies would weave them into an enemy’s clothes or place them on the bottom of a vehicle. The taggant allowed JSOC to mark prisoners and then release them to see if they would lead the task force to a potential terror or insurgent cell. Putting them on nonprisoners was a greater challenge, but it happened. The use of such technology, along with the accelerated pace of the killings and captures, would inspire President Bush’s declaration that “JSOC is awesome.”
Click here to see the entire Special Operations Command powerpoint presentation on CTTL.
But that's only the beginning.
There’s also ‘smart dust’ -- tiny computers that pack processors, power and wireless communications into technology the size of a grain of sand. Good luck finding one of those in your car, placed just so by an FBI agent grateful you left your window open a crack.
It should go without saying that tools like these, developed by the US military at a cost of untold hundreds of millions of dollars, will migrate back to the United States for use by domestic law enforcement and intelligence.
But the FBI has plans of its own, and isn’t waiting for the military’s futuristic spook tools to trickle down to its agents. The bureau is already working on a host of high-tech surveillance and tracking mechanisms for implementation here in the states, with a heavy emphasis on those that use a range of biometric identifiers, from scent to gait and everything in between. My personal favorite is the video sensor technology that may someday identify our heart beats from drones. (Yes, our heart beats are unique, and therefore biometrics.)
Gizmodo reports on another DOJ funded research project:
Tracer Detection Technology Corp. marks targets with a paraffin wax crayon, filled with a perfluorocarbon, a thermally-stable compound used in everything from refrigerators to cosmetics. The perfluorocarbon’s vapor can then be tracked with sensors, such as a gas chromatograph. The smell lingers for hours. Think locking yourself in a room with the windows closed or removing the tag will help? Too bad, you still reek. According to a research report submitted to the Justice Department (.pdf), the perfluorocarbon tracers can “permeate closed doors and windows, containers and luggage,” and even give you away for a while after a tagged item is removed.
If you thought working metadata into Fourth Amendment protected space was hard, imagine trying to get a warrant requirement for electromagnetic tracking, or any of these other almost alien technologies.
We have a lot of work to do if we want to avoid living in a dystopian nightmare powered by miniature, bug-sized drones and invisible tracking ink. The nanotech revolution will require a privacy evolution alongside it, but our related laws are still stuck in the big hair era. Putting our heads in the sand while the military and the FBI develop yet more invasive and powerful surveillance and tracking tools is a good way to ensure that the power inequities and extreme state secrecy we are experiencing today only metastasize. Tinkering around the edges is not going to cut it -- and waiting around for the Supreme Court to bestow us with rights we deserve is not advisable.
So how do we reform the law? Europe’s privacy model is an interesting place to start. Ultimately, we need overarching, broad privacy reform that takes into account these technological advancements and the ones coming down the pike -- and something with teeth.
But in order to achieve any kind of systemic reform, we need to first overcome an ideological hurdle. Enough with the technological utopianism. Technology can help us do really cool stuff, but it can also hurt us -- badly. Before we can reshape our privacy law for the 21st century and beyond, we have to come to terms with this basic fact.