Snowdon is a dummy

this helicopter's low-altitude flight was intended to be a shot across the bows.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/21/us/russians-denny-the-use-of-antennas-for-spying.html

RUSSIANS DENNY THE USE OF ANTENNAS FOR SPYING
By LYNN ROSELLINI, Special to the New York Times
Published: December 21, 1981

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18— The Soviet Embassy has denied that rooftop antennas on its 16th Street chancery are used for intelligencegathering. The embassy says that the purpose of the equipment is to maintain radio communication with Moscow.

But Theodore Gardner, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's field office here, repeated his earlier statement that some of the antennas were used to monitor telephone calls by Government officials and others. Mr. Gardner has said that the electronic surveillance is under the direction of the K.G.B., the Soviet Union's intelligence and internal-security agency.

Mr. Gardner also maintained that an article on the Washington Talk page of The New York Times on Dec. 11, outlining the intelligencegathering use of some of the antennas, was correct. Calls Were Not Returned

Telephone calls made to the Soviet Embassy in an effort to get information for the original Times article went unanswered earlier this month. But after the article appeared, Valentin Kamenev, the Embassy press counsellor, wrote a letter of complaint to the editor of the Times.

''The antenna on the roof of the Soviet Embassy,'' Mr. Kamenev wrote, ''was installed and has been used under U.S.S.R.-U.S.A. bilateral agreement of June 23, 1969, for one simple purpose - to maintain radio communications with Moscow. On the reciprocal basis the same type of antenna has been installed on the roof of the American Embassy in Moscow.

''The antenna, necessary for long distance (Moscow is about 5,000 miles away from Washington, D.C.) transmissions, was installed in compliance with the rules of the District of Columbia. The radio transmitter itself operates in accordance with the International Convention on long distance communication as well as U.S. regulations for international radio and telegraph communications.

''It should also be noted that the type of the antenna has been selected on the advice of the Department of State and purchased in this country.'' 'We Know Better' Than F.B.I.

After The Times received Mr. Kamenev's letter, a reporter telephoned Mr. Gardner, who repeated his earlier statement that some of the antennas are used for surveillance. Asked for comment, Mr. Kamenev said, ''We know better what we have on the roof or even under the roof than such organizations as the F.B.I.''

On Friday, Attorney General William French Smith said in a speech in Los Angeles that Russian spying in the United States had increased sharply in recent years. Mr. Smith said that one-third of all Soviet bloc personnel at embassies and other foreign installations here ''are believed to be full-time intelligence officers.''

Mr. Gardner said earlier that while the rooftop equipment at the embassy might well include routine transmitters, there were also antennas that had microwave interception capability. This could allow the Soviets to monitor sensitive conversations, he said.

Isent this an act of war?

I thought you Germans were pacifists.

My reply wasn't related to the cold war period but happened just two weeks ago.

So? Normal spying on each other did not end with the cold war.

Well, most Europeans don't think that spying among friends/allies/partners is normal. (Hence many of my responses/links on this thread)

A former senior FBI official implicated in surveillance abuses is poised to become a federal judge in one of the US's most important courts for terrorism cases.

Valerie Caproni, the FBI's top lawyer from 2003 to 2011, is scheduled to receive a vote on Monday in the Senate for a seat on the southern district court of New York.

Caproni has come under bipartisan criticism over the years for enabling widespread surveillance later found to be inappropriate or illegal. During her tenure as the FBI's general counsel, she clashed with Congress and even the Fisa surveillance court over the proper scope of the FBI's surveillance powers.

And Caproni faces renewed skepticism for describing surveillance conducted under the Patriot Act as more limited than it actually is, now that the Guardian has revealed and the Obama administration confirmed that the National Security Agency uses the act to collect and store the telephone records of hundreds of millions of Americans.

"It is a shame that the White House has chosen to nominate former FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni to a lifelong position as a federal judge given her narrow views of Americans' privacy rights as demonstrated by her actions in the George W Bush administration," said Lisa Graves, a Justice Department official in the Clinton and early Bush administrations.

"Government officials that secretly approved of overbroad surveillance programs the public is only seeing now because of leaks, and whose testimony on the issue obscured rather than revealed these abuses, should be held to account for their actions in a public forum," said Mike German, a former FBI agent.

German, now a lawyer with the ACLU, would not comment on Caproni specifically, citing ACLU policy of neutrality on nominations. But he continued: "Excessive secrecy always threatens democracy, but misleading and incomplete testimony before Congress and the courts simply cannot stand unaddressed without doing real damage to constitutional government." Guardian

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

... ... ...

Obama cannot be trusted.

Yahoo on Monday joined other US technology giants in launching legal action against the federal government over the NSA surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Yahoo filed a suit in the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which provides the legal framework for NSA surveillance, to allow the company to make public the number of data requests it receives per year from the spy agency.

Withholding the information creates mistrust, Yahoo said. Companies are forbidden by law to say how much data they provide.

Yahoo, in its motion, said it and other electronic communication providers have been intensely and publicly scrutinised for their alleged "participation" in government surveillance: "Yahoo has been unable to engage fully in the debate about whether the government has properly used its powers, because the government has placed a prior restraint on Yahoo's speech."
... ... ...

The judge wrote that since the NSA had accessed phone records metadata in an unauthorised manner "on a daily basis". Walton said that Alexander's explanation of the NSA's "non-compliance with the court's orders," which centered around an apparent misunderstanding by the NSA of what data was governed by privacy protections, "strains credulity".

He wrote: "Such an illogical interpretation of the court's orders renders compliance with the RAS [reasonable articulable suspicion] standard merely optional."

The NSA had told the court that "from a technical standpoint, there was no single person who had a complete understanding of the BR [Business Records] metadata architecture."

Walton found that the government's "failure to ensure that responsible officials adequately understood the NSA's alert process, and to accurately report its implementation to the court, has prevented, for more than two years, both the government and the [Fisa court] from taking steps to remedy daily violations" of Americans' privacy.

In fact, Walton, who lamented the court's inability to independently assess the NSA's claims of compliance, appears in 2009 to have considered ending the bulk phone records collection entirely.

"To approve such a program, the court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the court's orders," Walton wrote. "The court no longer has such confidence."

Yet the program continues. The NSA's deputy director, John C Inglis, testified in July that the NSA could not identify a single case where the bulk phone records collection unambiguously led to the prevention of a terrorist attack.

ACLU attorney Alex Abdo said in a statement: "These documents show that the NSA repeatedly violated court-imposed limits on its surveillance powers, and they confirm that the agency simply cannot be trusted with such sweeping authority." He said the program should never have been authorised in the first place. "The NSA should end the bulk collection of information about Americans," he said.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said that the release of the documents stood as "a testament to the government's strong commitment to detecting, correcting, and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes."

But they come as congressional opposition to the bulk phone records collection gained a powerful new ally.

Darrell Issa, the California Republican who chairs the powerful House committee on oversight and government reform, said that he backed legislation to "permanently cease" the bulk phone records collection.

"Government actions that violate the constitution cannot be tolerated and Congress must act to ensure the NSA and the intelligence community permanently cease such acts and hold the appropriate individuals accountable," Issa wrote to House majority leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday. More

Associated Press MATT APUZZO 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The surveillance machine grew too big for anyone to understand.

The National Security Agency set it in motion in 2006 and the vast network of supercomputers, switches and wiretaps began gathering Americans' phone and Internet records by the millions, looking for signs of terrorism.

But every day, NSA analysts snooped on more American phone records than they were allowed to. Some officials searched databases of phone records without even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them.

It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why.

Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them.

You don't understand politics.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24073812/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-says-us-blew-it-nsa-spying-techrunch-disrupt

Zuckerberg, who was clearly prepared for the question, noted that Facebook joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in filing lawsuits this week that seek permission to disclose

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at the annual Tech Crunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2013. ( Dai Sugano )
the number and nature of the user data requests they receive from U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Facebook CEO said the numbers would show the social network has only provided information about a tiny number of the social network's 1.1 billion users worldwide. But he complained that the government has not explained its efforts clearly.

It didn't help the interests of U.S. companies in overseas markets, Zuckerberg added, when the government said, "Don't worry, we're not spying on Americans." He added sarcastically, "Oh wonderful. That's really helpful" for companies that do business around the world. "I think that was really bad."

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.