Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee
c-spanvideo.org
c-spanvideo.org
The effectiveness isn't what's at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about "tradeoffs" between security and privacy.
1) More money being wasted to support certain corporations (Booz etc) in return for future plum jobs by these representatives/senators or heads of these agencies. Thus the cycle continues in favor of supporting these programs rather than analyzing whether we really need it or not.
2) Abuses by contractors or employees when they have this much access and power in seeing all the private data
3) Corruption of these committees due to the feeling of being "in" where others are not.
In other words, it's going to get worse.
And they'll listen to who is pregnant in the future, and force us to all get implants for the babies, thereby making a super race of Americans to rule the world! lightning flash MWAHAHAHA.
Please cite any proof you have.
There is ZERO reason to believe this doesn't happen for ALL sectors of government. So, I would say, the burden of proof would land on the shoulders of those who say that it DOES NOT happen.
How about McConnell?
Lot of examples out there. Not hard to connect the dots if you spend less time reacting like a third grader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
This isn't exactly here say and speculation.
And perhaps the bigger risk to using the 'it prevented terorrist plots' argument is that it creates a convenient excuse for more surveillance and curtailing of rights. All that needs to happen is for a few more terorrist plots to slip through, then the argument will be, 'We need MORE power to stop these people' or, 'If you just allowed us to do this, this, and this, we could've prevented that'.
Then long after a significant threat of Jihadist terrorist attack is gone, we'll still be dealing with a uber-powerful police state.
Metadata is JUST number + duration. Not localtion, cell phone tower...
targetting cannot be done on citizens or permanent citizens, or people in the US. Permanent citizen in Madrid is safe.
No "reverse" targetting(targetting foreigner but really interested in US nat'l)
if citizen/perm. res accidentally targeted, info not used, FISA court signalled, house intel + judiciary signalled.
If targeted person is initially out of US, but venture in, targeting stops IMMEDIATELY.
Info accidentally gotten (for example, lag when stopping of the targetting mentioned previously), ineligible info is purged. All ineligible info is purged.
All targeting is reviewed beforehand , both by DNI and judiciary. All targets are audited
This hearing restored some confidence in checks and balances. And a good point by Deputy AG Cole: This is for foreign surveillance ONLY. There used to be no oversight for foreign surveillance. Now there is through FISA Court and this second court order with all these rules in it.
Also, NSA can't listen to the calls without fixed warrant, and the brothers were in the US at the time of planning their thing, so out of NSA jurisdiction anyways.
I'm frustrated by them asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. They should be asking FBI about listening to Americans' phone calls. They're not dong it, in the bits I've heard, yet.
Edit: FBI did chime in on reading emails in real-time, indicating FISA court as the means for doing so, but nothing else I heard. (~1:28?) Edit2: Grunt. I clearly don't understand what's going on here. (~1:42). I'm just going to shut up for another couple days and see what the Guardian releases in response.
The metadata is still collected and presumably stored for all, they just escalated it to additional surveillance for 300 numbers.
> 20 people in the world have access to the info.
[citation needed] Keith Alexander today said they have 1000 sysadmins like Snowden, most contractors. Snowden said, and the other NSA whistleblowers confirmed, that a sysadmin at the NSA has access to all data with little to no restrictions.
> This is for foreign surveillance ONLY.
And how do they determine whether or not it's foreign or domestic? Surely they must analyze content in order to be sure?
The metadata is collected, destroyed after 5 years, but cannot be queried except under the stringent circumstances. So it's basically if they could just go "back in time" on looking at certain phone numbers.
and the 20 people is in the conference. Alexander said that 20 analysts and 2 managers (himself and Inglis) are the only people with access to this database.
They've also said they are not allowed to monitor U.S. citizens living abroad. What if they have a number outside the U.S. How do they detect that a number belongs to a U.S. citizen or resident? If a non-U.S. person has a phone number from the U.S. but they are not a citizen/resident and are not inside the U.S., is that protected or not?
> The metadata is collected, destroyed after 5 years, but cannot be queried except under the stringent circumstances.
That seems to contradict what they also said today, that no court order is required to query the database and it just requires reasonable suspicion on the part of the analyst.
> Alexander said that 20 analysts and 2 managers (himself and Inglis) are the only people with access to this database.
Is that technical access or legal access? In other words, are there technical limitations preventing anyone but those 22 people from accessing the data, or is everyone else just not supposed to? If they have sysadmins managing the databases, surely they have access too, as Snowden and Binney have both said?
The data that was queried, however, is not -- so the query could be run again later if someone wanted to.
"The metadata is collected, destroyed after 5 years,"
An awfully big window for policies to change. Destroyed after 5 years can become destroyed after 10 years, or never destroyed at all, when the people in charge change their minds. How would we even know about the change, when everything is done in secret? The fact that members of Congress need to be told what the period of time is means that they did not know beforehand; will they be told when the period of time is lengthened (I have no hope for it getting any shorter)?
"Alexander said that 20 analysts and 2 managers (himself and Inglis) are the only people with access to this database."
Assuming everyone always follows the rules, which is a pretty stupid assumption.
That's why there's oversight. What's the point of making rules if you assume no one follows them? This is Rule of Law 101.
The problem here is that you have a secret agency that is saying, "Look, really, we have these policies and we promise that we follow them. Of course, you cannot come in and check to see if we are following them, because our operations are a secret." It does not help that whistleblowers are considered to be traitors in this situation. How exactly do you think the rule of law works?
I don't have that much of a problem with this because the warrant is needed in order to actually do anything with the information. Also, to be precise, it's more as if the USPS scan the mail sender/receiver info (metadata after all). No content.
How do they stop him? It sounds like "can't access the data" means "the rules say he cannot access it, and if he is caught he'll get in trouble." Given that the people we are talking about think in terms of "the least untruthful statement" they can make, I would demand as much detail as possible.
"I don't have that much of a problem with this because the warrant is needed in order to actually do anything with the information."
Today a warrant is needed. Tomorrow, maybe not. What if tomorrow, the law changes, and the government starts hunting down anyone with leftist leanings? The first thing they'll do is query the database.
Laws are not sacred. Laws can be ignored or changed at any time. When we have to worry that the list of people we speak with today might be used against us tomorrow, there is a chilling effect on free speech. That is the danger of these databases. It is not enough that the data is held but can only be touched with a warrant; the data should not exist without a warrant.
If you think that's a possible reality you're living in a paranoid lala land - which isn't surprising given all the apocalyptic narratives we get from the media (gov't turning evil, zombies/robots taking over, evil agencies controlling the world).
The reality is that no wealthy democratic government in the past 50 years (some of which are less obsessed with protecting liberties) has slid back into tyranny. There are statistics that indicate that past a certain GDP threshold tyrannical governments become unsustainable.
This kind of thing is simply never going to happen.
When you start looking more than 50 years into the past you need to realize that this was a time when people thought blacks were lesser people than whites, women couldn't vote, many people were illiterate, people didn't have access to information, and maybe most importantly people were much much poorer (just look at the GDP). Now a days people for the most part live comfortable lives, and what we think of as "hard times" now is not the same as before (where it would often mean starvation for a large segment of the population) So to think history will repeat itself seems to me very simplistic.
You're also the kind of person that would be up in arms when the FBI takes someone into custody because Russia says he's trouble.
"The 4th amendment doesn't apply under the Patriot Act."
Also, a student with a naturalized American brother who travels to visit family and speak with radical Islamists at his old home is not the kind of thing that either collecting phone call information or using Facebook Open Graph^W^W^W Prism is going to work well against. There are other types of terroristic threats, Prism/phone watch lists will work better against those.
If anything Maj. Nidal Hasan would almost be a better example, except that the NSA system worked perfectly... it was only in the follow-up investigation that it was decided that Hasan was just making innocent probes, so it was the investigation that failed and not the NSA system.
Arguing that monitoring every communication on the planet makes no sense... even with contractor augments there are not enough U.S. citizens to monitor all world communications, and the pool of available analysts quickly drops when you consider security clearance issues, training required, pay available, the qualifications needed, etc.
So no, it doesn't follow that you could perfectly foil terrorist plots even with interception and monitoring of worldwide communications, so the fact that NSA is as successful as they are can't be waved away by saying "anyone could do it". They can't monitor everyone even with their Utah data center, so apparently they've been doing a good job at focusing their resources at the mission at hand.
Any either way there's always a tradeoff. You wouldn't accept a 9/11 in your country every day to ensure absolute privacy as soon there would be no one left to be private from, so let's not act like the priority value is ∞. The staggering success of Twitter, Facebook and Google reveal how much people truly value their privacy.
Even the Constitution is in on the act, as both warrants and "reasonable searches" are explicitly mentioned as limits to Fourth Amendment rights, and people don't seem to freak out about those.
So while people may have different answers about where they fall on privacy <==> security (where a given program has a tradeoff between the two), don't act like the extreme choice is the only one; even the Framers didn't think that.
The 4th Amendment covers the relationship between you and the government. It does not cover the relationship between the government and a third-party, unless Congress passes additional legislation to add that protection.
Congress has done so for the mail, for landline telephone, beepers, and cellular telephones. They have not done so in the general case for email or other electronic data hosted by a third-party, and yet email and other electronic services somehow have become incredibly popular.
>The 4th Amendment covers the relationship between you and the government.
Yes, of course it does. And it's because the gov't cannot scan and fish facebook for crimes to solve that people feel comfortable enough to share such information.
These past 2 hearings don't seem to intend to shed any light on this. They seem to be held to help protect whatever NSA is doing.
It's not whether each of us individually have something to hide: it's whether our politicians, our activists, our reporters, our lawyers, our doctors, our military, our police, our courts, our spies, our business leaders, our celebrities, our friends & family have something to hide.
Because if any of them can be manipulated by the data that is being gathered, then all of us lose.
In principle, members of congress do not have an interest to be monitored and spied on. However raising protest as an individual member can cause you problems, because the NSA can pressure you.
But if they act collectively, they might have a chance.
"If you believe the security of the realm is at risk
you don't hold a security enquiry, you call in the Special Branch.
Government security enquiries are only used for killing press stories."
- Yes Prime Minister S01E08
There are lots of other apposite quotes but I can't seem to find any just now.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: No. They have a right to be ignorant. Knowledge only means complicity in guilt; ignorance has a certain dignity.
Think of it this way: If you've been briefed on some supersecret surveillance since at least 2008, when the FAA was enacted, and you never raised a privacy alarm, what do you do when everyone else finds out? Do you say "I was wrong?" Or do you say "Nothing to see here, move along."
Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right.
[edit] and here it is... "Under 702, we do get content"
[edit] I'm sure at this point the endgame here is gonna be a crazy dance around the word 'collect'. It's increasingly obvious that the secret definition they're using for 'collect' is "an analyst pulls it from our database, where we've already collected some broad swaths of communication by any reasonable person's definition of the term"
[edit] One interesting note is that there have been strong denials that the metadata contain any location/cell-tower data. Still wonder if there's another shell game there and it's available via some other source.
Which doesn't really make me feel better.
I haven't done anything wrong or illegal, but there is no way I'm not a big red flag on their map.
This hearing , if you listen to all of it, went into surprising amount of detail concerning how these programs function. Just because they have to use big words (because this is about the law) doesn't mean they're trying to hide anything. This has been pretty illuminating.
Still some issues with the problem (notably "probable suspicion" clause concerning querying the database, there isn't enough oversight apart from in NSA).
At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.
One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured.
This point is extremely important and is what Snowden continuously returns to. In yesterday's Q&A he said "policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens." This idea is critical to having an intelligent debate of the issues at hand.
There's infinite bad things that can be committed by anyone, from the government or otherwise, where the only thing preventing it is policy and procedure. The only thing preventing an Apache helicopter from firing on schoolchildren under order of the president.... is policy. Theoretically, as commander-in-chief, the president has the authority to order that, right? But what's important is that he doesn't. What's important is there's policy that prevents it.
A better method of prevention would be to not build Apache helicopters.
It's easy to say someone else should unilaterally drop to their knees and bow the head.
Until Utopia arrives we have to make sure our current reality is as optimal as it can be.
To be fair, it wasn't apache helicopters.
Where is that made clear? Listen at 1:00:20-1:01:00
This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window.
And when it does, any word games they try to play now will just be devastating to them then. Absolutely devastating. It will not protect them, it will not help them, it will damn them.
So, given that it will come out and it will hurt them when it does...why play the games?
Either they aren't storing the data (which seems possible still, though less likely than I thought 2 weeks ago), or they're operating with the future planning capability of a fruit fly.
I don't know which it is,but this doesn't feel like it's going to end well for anyone.
General Alexander: "No we do not have that authority."
I think it's pretty clear by now that they're collecting phone call content.
Here's another and I'm paraphrasing:
"Is there something else being collected?"
"Besides the 215(?) and 702(?)? I'm not sure as I don't know whether that info has been declassified."
Yeah well the ones we know. Now we need to know the others.
I like what John Oliver said on the Daily Show - “We’re not saying anyone broke any laws, we’re just saying it’s a little bit weird that you didn’t have to.”
One guy says people don't have an expectation of privacy because they are used to giving their data to the phone companies.
I think I heard enough. And Europe and China, yes, all communications of your citizens are being recorded, and yes it's a privacy violation.
I've heard enough.
"Does the technology exist at the NSA to record american's phone calls, or read their emails?"
"No"
There's something weird going on -- this seems too far off from Snowden's reports to be true. Like, p(Snowden leak | no technology like that) is just too small relative to p(Snowden leak)
That is consistent with what Snowden said in the Q+A with the guardian yesterday:
US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with.
This is referring to the Attorney Generals statement that we do not have a reasonable expectation for our meta data not to be public.
He referenced a court decision about that. Can someone who knows what the case might be find it?
(probably because that's exactly what they're arguing)
Should be interesting.
"Hey guys, we're here to tell you all about anything except what you actually want to know about" = the game of secrecy vs the public
Also, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberg just said the words "True Facts"