Report: Documents reveal details behind AT&T-NSA partnership

Under a decades-old program with the government, telecom giant AT&T; in 2003 led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net” and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its first months of operation, The New York Times reported. The Fairview program was forwarding more than 1 million emails a day to the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, the separate Stormbrew program, linked to Verizon and the former company MCI, was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic.


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Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.
In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.


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Senate rejects NSA amendments

The Senate has rejected all three controversial amendments from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to legislation reforming the National Security Agency (NSA), edging closer to sending the bill to President Obama's desk. The first amendment from McConnell, rejected in a 42-56 vote, would have changed the structure of a new expert panel created by the USA Freedom Act to weigh in one some matters before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees spying matters.


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X DARPA Director & Google Exec Pushes Microchipping Human Beings

With the recent revelations by NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden, it’s no secret that we live on a planet characterized by mass surveillance and virtually zero privacy. We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with the idea that we face threats, that a high level of national security is needed in order to keep us safe. Think about it, the United States pumps a large majority of their money into the Department of Defence. A state of fear, war and terror is needed to keep those funds flowing in that direction. Many people are starting to wake up and realize a lot of the so called threats we face and have been facing are largely manufactured and fabricated in order to justify a specific agenda, agendas that deal with the black budget world.

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NSA performed warrantless searches on Americans' calls and emails – Clapper

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "back door" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications. The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases.  Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

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NSA Official: 'We Are Now a Police State'

Last year, high-ranking NSA official Bill Binney said, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” Now, Binney says that the U.S. has already become a full-blown police state.

Binney told Washington’s Blog on Wednesday that: “The main use of the collection from these [NSA spying] programs [is] for law enforcement. [See the 2 slides below].”

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Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

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. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

Peggy Noonan - What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious? ✧ Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past? ✧ We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror. ✧ Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

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Leaked docs: SOD squad feeds NSA intelligence to drug enforcement plods

Leaked documents have revealed the existence of a Special Operations Division (SOD) within the Drug Enforcement Agency that receives and distributes tips gleaned by the NSA to arrange arrests, and then hides where that information came from.

 "That's outrageous," Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association, told Reuters. "It strikes me as indefensible."

According to documents seen by Reuters, SOD was set up in 1994 to deal with drug cartels and organized trafficking of narcotics, and uses information provided by the NSA and other sources to inform agents of possible arrest possibilities.

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AIM: Citizens’ Commission Challenges White House Claim that Benghazi is a “Phony Scandal”

While the Administration continues to assert that the IRS and Benghazi scandals are “phony” distractions, Accuracy in Media (AIM) has joined with a distinguished group of retired military officers and intelligence professionals in an effort to expose the truth behind the latter scandal with its new Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, launched July 30 at the National Press Club. “There are conflicting stories” about Benghazi, said Roger Aronoff, editor of AIM, at the event. “There’s conflicting evidence…”

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The Government is Spying on US with Drones too

FBI director Robert Mueller said the government has used surveillance drones in the U.S. — though "in a very, very minimal way, very seldom" — at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "It's very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident when you need the capability," Mueller said before the judiciary committee. "It is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized needs." He said he did not know what happens to the images the drones capture.

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NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

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Facebook: Around 10K requests for info from gov't in last 6 months

Facebook's top attorney says after a week of negotiations with national security officials, the company is allowed to make new revelations about government orders for user data. General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers, but is lobbying to reveal more, and the permission received is still unprecedented. Following the guidelines, Ullyot says Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from government entities in the last six months of 2012, on subjects from missing children to terrorist threats.

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NSA surveillance: anger mounts in Congress at 'spying on Americans'

Anger was mounting in Congress on Tuesday night as politicians, briefed for the first time after revelations about the government's surveillance dragnet, vowed to rein in a system that one said amounted to "spying on Americans".

Intelligence chiefs and FBI officials had hoped that the closed-door briefing with a full meeting of the House of Representatives would help reassure members about the widespread collection of US phone records revealed by the Guardian.

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Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week's disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper.

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Dem. Senator disputes Obama’s claim that Congress was briefed

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday disputed a claim President Obama made at a press conference only moments earlier, when the president said that every member of Congress had been briefed on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic phone surveillance program.  Merkley said only select members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the program, and that he was only aware of it because he obtained “special permission” to review the pertinent documents after hearing about it second-hand.

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