Greenwald: Low-Level NSA Analysts Have Powerful and Invasive Search Tool [video]
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
1. Greenwald testifies and talks about all the awful things the NSA has been up to.
2. NSA offials will deny any and all claims made by Greenwald.
3. Greenwald will release documents that directly refute the NSA's testimonial.
[1] http://majority.fm/2013/07/25/725-glenn-greenwald-the-impact...
> “In fact, we don’t monitor emails. That’s what kind of assures me is that what the reporting is is not correct. Because no emails are monitored now,” [Senator] Chambliss said. “They used to be, but that stopped two or three years ago. So I feel confident that there may have been some abuse, but if it was it was pure accidental.”
They've essentially admitted that Greenwald's information is accurate, they're just claiming that Greenwald is late to the party and they've already dealt with the problem in secret.
It's interesting, because if you go back over the testimony I'm very sure that all of the NSA denials will be in the present tense. So it's quite possible that the NSA has not been lying at all, they've just been counting on us to fill in "That has never happened" when all they've said is "we do not [currently] do that."
Only one of two things are likely to happen on Wednesday. He discusses the truth and they admit it or he discusses the truth, they deny it, he provides evidence to the contrary that confirms both the truth and that those at the NSA blatantly lied to Congress. Either way, there is no way this can go down well for those protecting these abuses of Constitutional rights.
I'm really looking forward to this hearing.
GreEnwald is exposed down there in Brazil. A petty street robbery gone bad, a car accident, or a simple "sudden" heart attack, could all make this into a nothing event.
People in this kind of position have habits of "committing suicide" from the "stress":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams
I would put money on the act that Gareth Williams worked on, or knew about both Tempora and Prism.
"Williams' working life, after graduating with a first
in mathematics in 1996 aged 17, was spent in Cheltenham
at GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency. He joined
in 2001 after completing a PhD in computer science at
Manchester University. His final role in GCHQ had been
designing "practical applications for emerging
technologies".
In 2007, he applied to become a secret agent by
transferring to SIS, the UK's human intelligence agency
responsible for spies and spy recruitment. He was put
through a series of aptitude and skill tests. He failed.
He also attended Black Hat 16 the same year, according
to an SIS witness, presumably also then staying on to
attend Defcon."
Maybe he was Snowden part 1: the failed mission.
End conspiracy theory...
The greatest risk would be bribery of his security personnel to provide a "backdoor" for an assassination. If that were the case, it definitely wouldn't look like one of the scenarios you described. It would be obvious that it is a targeted assassination.
FWIW: I'm Brazilian, have lived in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and have had known many people with private security and armored cars there.
In today's world you need the media to treat him as a martyr to make him one in the general public's eyes. There is currently a smear campaign against him stating things like, "he is no longer just a journalist, but actively aiding and abetting the enemy", "aiding a fugitive", "helping to commit treason", gay with a green-card-denied-gay-lover, etc
The knives are out. He would be a martyr to a few that cared. The ambivalence in the masses to this subject is truly scary.
Greenwood is being treated like Applebaum and the other Wikileaks personnel surrounding Assange. They are viable targets as they are aiding dissenters that are determined, effective and dangerous to the status quo.
I don't actually believe that the US is going to try and remove Greenwald from the picture now, but not for the reasons you state.
The dam is breached so he is no longer a real threat. The usual process now is to control the response, public opinion and any senators that might raise any opposition.
They are very very good at it; well practiced and effective. You don't go up against the combined resources of the United States government and expect to win. This is like a gnat attacking an elephant.
If Greenwald strikes any more than a flesh wound on the US government then I'd be surprised. They are already back to business as usual and now with the added cart blanche, which is the knowledge that the public know they are being spied on, but the NSA now know that most of them don't give a shit, as long as they can still read status updates on Facebook.
Until officials are held accountable, why wouldn't they continue lying and denying? It's starting to get to the point where I'm more angry at congress members who should provide oversight, than the lying officials themselves.
As a simple example, if I'm an NSA official and contrast how James Clapper experienced absolutely no real consequences for perjuring himself [1], with how Snowden has been treated for rocking the boat, I honestly don't know what decision I would make.
[1] http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/how_james_clapper_will_get_a...
"I have been assured ... that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without a court order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any e-mail.” Chambliss said that any monitoring of emails is purely “accidental.”
You can't have it both ways. Either there is "no capability", or the monitoring is "accidental." It can't be both.
1. A denial that they have the "capability" to do [insert method of mass surveilance], leaving open the possibility that "capability" means legal authorization;
2. A quasi admission that maybe the surveillance happens (Clapper: "not wittingly").
In other words, "we're collecting everything, but we'll only inspect your data if you're not American, or have a relationship of any kind with someone who has ever contacted a terrorist suspect."
Or if a random analyst is bored and finds you interesting for some reason.
At this point - every single "analysts" security-clearance worthiness has been jeopardized.
I don't trust ANY NSA employee at this point. NONE.
I would imagine that the schedule of who members of congress meet during the course of the day are part of the public record and should be subject to a FOIA request.
If our elected officials can see value in knowing the metadata of his or her citizens, then the citizens that elected those officials should be able to see the metadata of everyone his or her congressman calls, meets with or emails. The same should apply to all the senior staff of any elected official. One of the easiest way to handle making sure official meetings outside the office are logged is to only allow expense reports to be honored, when the other party in the meeting is logged.
How _dumb_ must one be to continue to trust these agencies for just about anything, now? After they blatantly lie in Congress and then dare to "apologize" for lying in Congress, how much more do these "politicians" really need to start thinking for themselves?
Have they already been lobotomized? Are they lizards? Or what else exactly is going on?
The case today, that is; tomorrow....
(Technical note: right now I gather the NSA et. al. are making a distinction between Hoovering up "everything", like all of Verizon Business's call records in that blanket warrant we've seen, and actually looking at them. Infamously, "collection" only referrers to the latter act. Just like how inside a decrease from an automatically increased baseline, even an increase after inflation, is called a "cut".)
This is such a common social phenomena that it should be obvious to everyone, especially those in positions of power and administration.
If he showed up unannounced at the NSA, with a bunch of pointed questions and could talk to any NSA employee at will one on one, then he would be much more likely to learn the truth. But to show up announced, meeting with specific people on a predetermined schedule with a previously announced goal, he will only be told what they want him to know.
credit: Hanlon's Razor.
I am entirely willing to believe that Chambliss is simply technologically naive enough that he doesn't even know how to ask the NSA if the enforcement is meaningful. He's also probably quite happy to take them at their word, despite all their history of using their own dictionary to define their words.
Never mind that it's not legal to read emails, except with a single court order saying that it's legal to read EVERYONE'S emails. Which I believe they have.
The main problem is the "business records" clause in PATRIOT must be found unconstitutional. If it is somehow constitutional, then there is no privacy.
That's true for the vast majority of law enforcement though.
The police have the technical ability to pepper spray you, or arrest you, or shoot you. It is compliance with policy and legal requirements that (generally...) prevent them from not shooting you, not a technical safeguard. It's policy/legal safeguards that prevent the local health inspector from arbitrarily shutting down your restaurant. NSA analysts get held to policy as well; there have been analysts caught looking up information on ex-wives, for example, and fired for cause, so while an analyst may have the technical ability to task PRISM inappropriately, it's not an unlimited ability.
Do I think that PRISM should have better technical safeguards on it? Absolutely, if only because it's easy enough to do, and the system is way more powerful than what a random county sheriff might have available to them. But I wouldn't read any more sinister connotation into the current level of safeguards; even nuclear weapons can be disabled by only 2 compromised missile techs, so this level of protection seems pretty ordinary for government work.
I think you've completely missed the point. The impression that a layman will take from Chambliss's statement is that it is technically impossible for the NSA to collect emails.
This situation is not the same as your examples like pepper spray because everyone understands that a cop with a can of pepper spray is able to use it or misuse it and no amount of legal mumbo jumbo will stop him in the moment. The naive - and intended - interpretation of Chambliss's statement is the equivalent of saying the cops don't have any pepper spray to begin with.
Taking a deep breath for a moment, if you look at TFA it contains two contradicting allegations, from sources that appear to me to be roughly similarly credible.
On what evidentiary basis have you decided one source is more reliable than the other? And why are the people who believe the other source "lobotomized"?
I am not really sure what is going on here, but I do not feel that this article alone presents a sufficient basis for a reasonable person to form an opinion.
On what evidentiary basis have you decided one source is more reliable than the other?
I hope none of the involved politicians and companies ever speak of "privacy" or "security" again. It'd be embarrassing.
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone… I, sitting
at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from
you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the
president if I had a personal email.”
The details are fuzzy due to incomplete reporting, but it seems Snowden had worked for the CIA for many years before going to Booz Allen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career_in_the_U....
Rather I'd suggest that the PRISM search tool be made available to every individual on the planet. Perhaps in competition to Google (If we don't get rid of snooping in its entirety that is.). At least we can weed out Weiners which are on one end of porn-spectrum to Camerons who say they are on the other end of porn-spectrum.
Of course you are joking. But if you think about it:
If humanity is forced to give up privacy, the only way we could achieve this would be by giving it up symmetrically:
If everybody is naked, it's normal and not a problem anymore, provided we can then evolve our culture to completely drop the "judging".
I'm not saying this is what you truly feel, but you relate a cultural convention that perpetuates a stereotype that young people are stupid.
What I was saying is: I doubt that, at the time Zuckerberg launched FB, he was thinking "privacy is already dead, so let's see how we can make things better again for everybody" when at that same time he, being 20, said those stupid things.
Take civil rights: imagine Rosa Parks calls MLK while she's waiting to get on the bus (she was a community leader, not a random instant-activist). If she made and communicated that decision to sit at the front before she got on she could have been arrested, significantly delaying historical change.
We need privacy from the power structures to maintain those rights to organize and protest and change laws, and I honestly don't see why those who are yelling about not giving up their guns because of the right to keep arms against government overrule aren't applying exactly the same concept to their right to privacy.