We Have No Privacy, We Are Always Being Watched.

Actually, they do not know who is a terrorist and who is not.

The New York Times
June 11, 2013
A.C.L.U. Files Lawsuit Seeking to Stop the Collection of Domestic Phone Logs

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed last week by a former National Security Agency contractor — is illegal and asking a judge to stop it and order the records purged.

The lawsuit could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who came forward Sunday to say he was their source.

The program “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations,” the complaint says, adding that it “is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and others who would otherwise contact” the A.C.L.U. for legal assistance.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit.

In other lawsuits against national security policies, the government has often persuaded courts to dismiss them without ruling on the merits by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and so lacked standing in court.

This case may be different. The government has now declassified the existence of the program. And the A.C.L.U. is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services — the recipient of a leaked secret court order for all its domestic calling records — which it says gives it standing.

The call logging program keeps a record of “metadata” from domestic phone calls, including which numbers were dialed and received, from which location, and the time and duration.

The effort began as part of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 programs of surveillance without court approval, which has continued since 2006 with the blessing of a national security court. The court has secretly ruled that bulk surveillance is authorized by a section of the Patriot Act that allows the F.B.I. to obtain “business records” relevant to a counterterrorism investigation.

Congress never openly voted to authorize the collection of logs of hundreds of millions of domestic calls, but some lawmakers were secretly briefed. Some members of Congress have backed the program as a useful counterterrorism tool; others have denounced it.

“The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. “I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.”

Over the weekend, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that officials may access the database only if they can meet a legal justification — “reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” Queries are audited under the oversight of the national security court.

Timothy Edgar, a former civil liberties official on intelligence matters in the Bush and Obama administrations who worked on building safeguards into the phone log program, said the notion underlying the limits was that people’s privacy is not invaded by having their records collected, but only when a human examines them.

“When you have important reasons why that collection needs to take place on a scale that is much larger than case-by-case or individual obtaining of records,” he said, “then one of the ways you try to deal with the privacy issue is you think carefully about having a set of safeguards that basically say, ‘O.K., yes, this has major privacy implications, but what can we do on the back end to address those?’ ”

Still, privacy advocates say the existence of the database will erode the sense of living in a free society: whenever Americans pick up a phone, they now face the consideration of whether they want the record of that call to go into the government’s files.

Moreover, while use of the database is now limited to terrorism, history has shown that new government powers granted for one purpose often end up applied to others. An expanded search warrant authority justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, was used far more often in routine investigations like suspected drug, fraud and tax offenses.

Executive branch officials and lawmakers who support the program have hinted that some terrorist plots have been foiled by using the database. In private conversations, they have also explained that investigators start with a phone number linked to terrorism, and scrutinize the ring of people who have called that number — and other people who in turn called those — in an effort to identify co-conspirators.

Still, that analysis may generally be performed without a wholesale sweep of call records, since investigators can instead use subpoenas to obtain relevant logs from telephone companies. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, two Democrats who have examined it in classified Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, have claimed that the evidence is thin that the program provided uniquely available intelligence.

But supporters privately say the database’s existence is about more than convenience and speed. They say it can also help in searching for networks of terrorists who are taking steps to shield their communications from detection by using different phones to call one another. If calls from a different number are being made from the same location as calls by the number that was already known to be suspicious, having the entire database may be helpful in a way that subpoenas for specific numbers cannot match.

It remains unclear, however, whether there have been any real-world instances in which a terrorist was identified in that way, or whether that advantage is to date only theoretical.

A 1979 ruling over small-scale collection of calling metadata held that such records were not protected by the Fourth Amendment privacy rights since people have revealed such information to phone companies. In a 2012 case involving GPS trackers, however, the Supreme Court suggested that the long-term, automated collection of people’s public movements might raise Fourth Amendment issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?pagewanted=all

would really help prevent another 9/11 or Boston Marathon disaster,

Not like you to scuttle off into the corner and pout.

Frank, if someone could actually convince me that by giving up my right to privacy and allowing the gummint to stick its proboscis into places it has no business visiting would really help prevent another 9/11 or Boston Marathon disaster, I'd agree with you. But I have absolutely not one scintilla of faith that this is so. And no one has as yet presented an argument for it that I would buy into.

Do you actually trust these people who're running this show?

Pretty much! Do I think it can be abused? Yup...almost anything can be absued.

Quote:

Pretty much! Do I think it can be abused? Yup...almost anything can be absued.

you are being abused right now by your government, the only question is when if ever will you make a stand for yourself. It appears that we are in for a wait.

I dont believe that I said you are a chump in hiding, I simply said that you are a chump.

Snowden has been in Hong Kong since May 20 when he fled his home in Hawaii to take refuge here, a move which has been questioned by many who believe the city cannot protect him.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking HK as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice, I am here to reveal criminality,” he said.

Snowden said that according to unverified documents seen by the Post, the NSA had been hacking computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland since 2009. None of the documents revealed any information about Chinese military systems, he said.

The New York Times
June 12, 2013
N.S.A. Chief Says Phone Logs Halted Terror Threats

By DAVID E. SANGER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — The director of the National Security Agency told Congress on Wednesday that “dozens” of terrorism threats had been halted by the agency’s huge database of the logs of nearly every domestic phone call made by Americans, while a senator briefed on the program disclosed that the telephone records are destroyed after five years.

The director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who heads both the N.S.A. and United States Cyber Command, which runs the military’s offensive and defensive use of cyberweapons, told skeptical members of the Senate Appropriations Committee that his agency was doing exactly what Congress authorized after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

General Alexander said he welcomed debate over the legal justification for the program because “what we’re doing to protect American citizens here is the right thing.” He said the agency “takes great pride in protecting this nation and our civil liberties and privacy” under the oversight of Congress and the courts.

“We aren’t trying to hide it,” he said. “We’re trying to protect America. So we need your help in doing that. This isn’t something that’s just N.S.A. or the administration doing it on its own. This is what our nation expects our government to do for us.”

But in his spirited exchanges with committee members, notably Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, General Alexander said he was seeking to declassify many details about the program now that they have been leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who came forward to say he was the source of documents about the phone log program and other classified matters.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the first to disclose that the records are eventually destroyed. She said that she planned to hold a classified hearing on Thursday on the program. But at the Wednesday hearing, where testimony about the government’s planned $13 billion spending on cybersecurity was largely swept aside for a discussion of the surveillance program, Ms. Feinstein also revealed that investigators had used the database for purposes beyond countering terrorism, suggesting it might have also been employed in slowing Iran’s nuclear program.

Analysts can look at the domestic calling data only if there is a reason to suspect it is “actually related to Al Qaeda or to Iran,” she said, adding: “The vast majority of the records in the database are never accessed and are deleted after a period of five years. To look at or use the content of a call, a court warrant must be obtained.”

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

In his testimony, General Alexander said he had “grave concerns” about how Mr. Snowden had access to such a wide range of top-secret information, from the details of a secret program called Prism to speed the government’s search of Internet materials to a presidential document on cyberstrategy. He said the entire intelligence community was looking at the security of its networks — something other government officials vowed to do after the WikiLeaks disclosures three years ago.

Under the Prism program, the N.S.A. collects information from American Internet companies like Google without individual court orders if the request is targeted at noncitizens abroad. That program derives from a 2008 surveillance law that was openly debated in Congress.

As part of the review from the fallout of leaks about Prism and the phone program, intelligence agencies will seek to determine whether terrorist suspects have increased their use of code words or couriers, have stopped using networks like Facebook or Skype, or have “gone silent” and can no longer be found, current and former senior American officials said separately from the hearing.

The review, which will most likely last for months to determine the long-term impact of the disclosures by Mr. Snowden, will also include a “cost benefit analysis” of the programs.

“Now that it’s out there, it will be looked at in a different way,” one of the current officials said. “Everyone’s raising questions about whether they have been compromised and whether to continue with them at the same pace. They are wondering whether or not they are going to continue to yield good information.”

While senior intelligence officials — including James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence — have asserted that the disclosures have significantly damaged the government’s intelligence capabilities, the current and former officials were far less sure of the lasting impact.

Philip Mudd, a former F.B.I. deputy director for national security, said that there could be some short-term impact on the programs but that terrorists would find it very hard to function without using electronic communications. “Good luck trying to communicate in this world without leaving a digital exhaust — that’s not going to happen,” he said.

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, called for the prosecution of journalists who published the classified information in the documents leaked by Mr. Snowden. Mr. King told Fox News he was specifically talking about Glenn Greenwald, the columnist for The Guardian, whom he accused of threatening to release the names of covert C.I.A. agents.

On Twitter, Mr. Greenwald said it was a “lie” that he had made such a threat, and shot back with a reference to Mr. King’s past support for the Irish Republican Army: “Only in America can a renowned and devoted terrorism supporter like Peter King be the arbiter of national security and treason,” he wrote.

Public opinion, judging by two polls with differently worded questions that yielded different results, is divided over the government’s tracking of the communications of Americans. In a Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll conducted June 6-9, 56 percent of Americans said the N.S.A’s program tracking the phone records of “millions of Americans” was an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, while 41 percent said it was unacceptable. But a CBS News poll conducted June 9-10, which instead asked about collecting phone records of “ordinary Americans,” found that just 38 percent supported it and 58 percent opposed it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/nsa-chief-says-phone-record-logs-halted-terror-threats.html?ref=us

I am not willing to give up my right to privacy even at the cost of another 911.

And so would many other Americans who do want, and expect, the government to protect us from terrorist threats.

Most people, unlike you, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for better national security.

Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?

The marathon bombs triggered a reaction that is at odds with last week's inertia over arms control


The thriving metropolis of Boston was turned into a ghost town on Friday. Nearly a million Bostonians were asked to stay in their homes – and willingly complied. Schools were closed; business shuttered; trains, subways and roads were empty; usually busy streets eerily resembled a post-apocalyptic movie set; even baseball games and cultural events were cancelled – all in response to a 19-year-old fugitive, who was on foot and clearly identified by the news media.

The actions allegedly committed by the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, were heinous. Four people dead and more than 100 wounded, some with shredded and amputated limbs.

But Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They're right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we've seen previously in the United States. It was yet another depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the "threat" of terrorism.

After all, it's not as if this is the first time that homicidal killers have been on the loose in a major American city. In 2002, Washington DC was terrorised by two roving snipers, who randomly shot and killed 10 people. In February, a disgruntled police officer, Christopher Dorner, murdered four people over several days in Los Angeles. In neither case was LA or DC put on lockdown mode, perhaps because neither of these sprees was branded with that magically evocative and seemingly terrifying word for Americans, terrorism.

To be sure, public officials in Boston appeared to be acting out of an abundance of caution. And it's appropriate for Boston residents to be asked to take precautions or keep their eyes open. But by letting one fugitive terrorist shut down a major American city, Boston not only bowed to outsize and irrational fears, but sent a dangerous message to every would-be terrorist – if you want to wreak havoc in the United States, intimidate its population and disrupt public order, here's your instruction booklet.

Putting aside the economic and psychological cost, the lockdown also prevented an early capture of the alleged bomber, who was discovered after Bostonians were given the all clear and a Watertown man wandered into his backyard for a cigarette and found a bleeding terrorist on his boat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law

“Only in America can a renowned and devoted terrorism supporter like Peter King be the arbiter of national security and treason,” he wrote.

The families, friends, and loved ones, of the 3,000+ people killed on 9/11 would likely not agree with you. And so would many other Americans who do want, and expect, the government to protect us from terrorist threats.

Most people, unlike you, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for better national security. That doesn't mean they want their personal privacy intruded on, by the government, without their knowledge, or without clear-cut reason for the necessity of violating their privacy.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

Most people, unlike you, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for better national security. That doesn't mean they want their personal privacy intruded on, by the government, without their knowledge, or without clear-cut reason for the necessity of violating their privacy.

There's something for both sides in that. The only trouble is that with a foot on each side the legs get wider apart with every day that passes.

a better answer: victims do not under the law have the power to suspend my Constitutional rights, and we are a people of the law.

Victim culture is now so strong that many assume that it supersedes the Constitution. No.