The NSA Can Collect Everything You've Done On The Net

[Nickdfresh]

Obama 'open to NSA surveillance reform' at meeting with lawmakers

President met key members of Congress as White House attempts to contain anger at NSA surveillance
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Senator Ron Wyden, a vocal proponent of NSA reform, attended the White House meeting. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

President Obama told key members of Congress on Thursday that he was "open to suggestions" for reforming the National Security Agency surveillance programs that have embroiled his administration in controversy.

Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is among the Senate's leading critics of the NSA's bulk phone records collection, said he left a meeting at the White House confident that "constructive" changes to the programs would soon take shape.

"The president said, and I accept what he said, that he was open to suggestions," Wyden told the Guardian after the White House meeting. "And I smiled and said, 'You all are going to get a number of them from me."

Wyden said he "just plain out said" to Obama that the NSA's bulk ongoing collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records "must end".

NSA officials have described the phone-records collection as a vital intelligence tool, though deputy director John C Inglis conceded in a Senate hearing on Wednesday that at most one terrorist attack was prevented because of the bulk collection during the program's seven-year history.

"My focus was on the urgency of reform," Wyden said. "The false choices that you could either have security or liberty, I don't think, is a case that the American people would accept."

Obama called the meeting with top legislators to address the upsurge in congressional discomfort with the surveillance, particularly the bulk phone records program. Last week, the House of Representatives came a few votes short of voting to end it, despite fierce White House and NSA lobbying.

But several lawmakers at the meeting signaled that they would fight to protect the bulk phone records and other NSA surveillance programs, despite the current uproar.

After the meeting, the Republican and Democratic chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees said the meeting was "productive". They said in a joint statement: "We will continue to work through the August recess on proposals to improve transparency and strengthen privacy protections to further build the confidence of the American public in our nation's counterterrorism programs."

The meeting came a day after the Guardian revealed details of another National Security Agency surveillance program which, according to documents, allows analysts to to search through huge databases of emails, online chats and browsing histories without prior authorisation.

The training documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden suggested that the program, called XKeyscore, is the NSA's "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

Hours before the Thursday meeting, Snowden left the limbo of Moscow airport after being granted permission to stay in Russia for a year.

Almost two months on from the initial NSA disclosures in the Guardian and the Washington Post, based on documents leaked by Snowden, the White House appears to have entered a new phase as it seeks to head off criticism. The president has directed intelligence officials to find ways to make the NSA programs "as transparent as possible", while senior administration officials have testified before Congress that they are open to reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which issues orders for surveillance.

On Wednesday, the administration voluntarily declassified previously top-secret documents in an attempt to mollify critics.

Officials pointed to the documents to claim the surveillance programs are restrained, as rules imposed by the Fisa court require analysts to only search through phone data if they have "reasonable articulable suspicion" that the phone number is associated with terrorism or espionage. But on Wednesday, several senators on the judiciary committee objected during a contentious hearing that Americans' privacy is already compromised once the NSA collects their phone records in bulk without suspicion of wrongdoing.

Guardian LINK

[Never was]

Not an endorsement of Carter or bash of Reagan but just a point the love affair with an idea does not always produce results. Reagan's clique philosophically fell in love w the big systems dismissed the human aspect. The intel on Beirut was better than reported just not listened to due to philosophy and politics. Beirut was warned about in advance, we ignored the warning as it conflicted w politics. Beirut was a loss of life and huge loss for the country due to politics not intel. The two just do not mix. The 70's was publicly a lot of show, smoke, bluster and new rules to make the public feel good about the sins of past but on the ground human intel and gathering was not impacted a lot. Some covert activities were but the community remained robust and had a new influx of talent and good networks. Headlines in the 80's were a lot of bluster and big guns but those networks got dismantled, dismissed and whithered on the vine as resources were funneled away into big dick programs that ended up bearing little fruit.

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I really don't think the problem with the CIA under Reagan was budgets, I think it was idiots like Casey and incompetence of the ideologically predispositioned...

I recall reading that the U.S. Army had a very good network of dissident Iranian spies after the revolution there and were collecting very high level intelligence. The CIA then took over those assets and they were rolled up in a matter of months - all of them executed by the gov't there. I believe they tried to transfer a lot of the paramilitary capability of the CIA to the military. But of course that makes no sense because the whole reason is to have an undercover paramilitary capability that can't be tied easily to the U.S. military or gov't...

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updated_NSA_breaches16_606.jpgNSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
By Barton Gellman, Published: August 15

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

[FISA judge: Ability to police U.S. spying program is limited]

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”

There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.

The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.

But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other *facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak*ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.

One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.

In what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.

The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.

In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.

Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.

The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”

Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.

“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.

The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.

One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”

Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006. Those records include the telephone numbers of the parties and the times and durations of conversations, among other details, but not their content or the names of callers.

The NSA’s authoritative def*inition of data includes those call records. “Signals Intelligence Management Directive 421,” which is quoted in secret oversight and auditing guidelines, states that “raw SIGINT data . . . includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and/or unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and some forms of computer-generated data, such as call event records and other Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata as well as DNI message text.”

In the case of the collection effort that confused calls placed from Washington with those placed from Egypt, it is unclear what the NSA meant by a “large number” of intercepted calls. A spokesman declined to discuss the matter.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.

The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.

In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.

The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.

In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.

Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.

“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”

Julie Tate and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.

© The Washington Post Company

[Coyote]

Oh shit, the NSA knows I'm a half-decent shredder who likes T&A, Monty Python and reeks of YSL Kouros?

Colo(u)r me paranoid...

[jhale667]

Oh shit, the NSA knows I'm a half-decent shredder who likes T&A, Monty Python and reeks of YSL Kouros?

Colo(u)r me paranoid...

Hey, me too! Except for the last part: right now I only slightly reek of armani code and Weird part is I'm coming to the conclusion the latter is preferable to the former...

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[Hardrock69]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/2011-ruling-found-an-nsa-program-unconstitutional.html?_r=0

Secret Court Rebuked N.S.A. on Surveillance
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE
Published: August 21, 2013


WASHINGTON — A federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic e-mails and other Internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday.


The 85-page ruling by Judge John D. Bates, then serving as chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, involved an N.S.A. program that systematically searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications, without a warrant, in a hunt for discussions about foreigners who have been targeted for surveillance.

The Justice Department had told Judge Bates that N.S.A. officials had discovered that the program had also been gathering domestic messages for three years. Judge Bates found that the agency had violated the Constitution and declared the problems part of a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.

The release of the ruling, the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, was the latest effort by the Obama administration to gain control over revelations about N.S.A. surveillance prompted by leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The collection is part of a broader program under a 2008 law that allows warrantless surveillance on domestic networks as long as it is targeted at noncitizens abroad. The purely domestic messages collected in the hunt for discussions about targeted foreigners represent a relatively small percentage of what the ruling said were 250 million communications intercepted each year in that broader program.

While the N.S.A. fixed problems with how it handled those purely domestic messages to the court’s satisfaction, the 2011 ruling revealed further issues.

“The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding N.S.A.’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Judge Bates wrote.

One of the examples was redacted in the ruling. Another involved a separate N.S.A. program that keeps logs of all domestic phone calls, which the court approved in 2006 and which came to light in June as a result of leaks by Mr. Snowden.

In March 2009, a footnote said, the surveillance court learned that N.S.A. analysts were using the phone log database in ways that went beyond what the judges believed to be the practice because of a “repeated inaccurate statements” in government filings to the court.

“Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, N.S.A. had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying,” Judge Bates recounted. He cited a 2009 ruling that concluded that the requirement had been “so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall ... regime has never functioned effectively.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and privacy rights group, sued to obtain the ruling after Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, fought last summer to declassify the basic fact that the surveillance court had ruled that the N.S.A. had violated the Fourth Amendment.

In a statement, Mr. Wyden — an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance — said declassification of the ruling was “long overdue.” He argued that while the N.S.A. had increased privacy protections for purely domestic and unrelated communications that were swept up in the surveillance, the collection itself “was a serious violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Mark Rumold of the Electronic Frontier Foundation praised the administration for releasing the document with relatively few redactions, although he criticized the time and the difficulty in obtaining it. But he also said the ruling showed the surveillance court was not equipped to perform adequate oversight of the N.S.A.

“This opinion illustrates that the way the court is structured now it cannot serve as an effective check on the N.S.A. because it’s wholly dependent on the representations that the N.S.A. makes to it,” Mr. Rumold said. “It has no ability to investigate. And it’s clear that the N.S.A. representations have not been entirely candid to the court.”

A senior intelligence official, speaking to reporters in a conference call, portrayed the ruling as showing that N.S.A. oversight was robust and serious. He said that some 300 N.S.A. employees were assigned to seek out even inadvertent violations of the rules and that the court conducted “vigorous” oversight.

The ruling focused on a program under which the N.S.A. has been searching domestic Internet links for communications — where at least one side is overseas — in which there are “strong selectors” indicating insider knowledge of someone who has been targeted for foreign-intelligence collection. One example would be mentioning a person’s private e-mail address in the body of an e-mail.

Most of the time, the system brings up single communications, like an e-mail or text message. But sometimes many messages are packaged and travel in a bundle that the N.S.A. calls “multi-communication transactions.”

A senior intelligence official gave one example: a Web page for a private e-mail in-box that displays subject lines for dozens of different messages — each of which is considered a separate communication, and only one of which may discuss the person who has been targeted for intelligence collection.

While Judge Bates ruled that it was acceptable for the N.S.A. to collect and store such bundled communications, he said the agency was not doing enough to minimize the purely domestic and unrelated messages to protect Americans’ privacy. In response, the N.S.A. agreed to filter out such communications and store them apart, with greater protections, and to delete them after two years instead of the usual five.

A Justice Department “white paper” released with the ruling shed new light on N.S.A. surveillance of communications streaming across domestic telecommunications networks. Such “upstream” collection, which still must be targeted at or be about noncitizens abroad, accounts for about 10 percent of all the Internet messages collected in the United States, it said; the other 90 percent are obtained from Internet companies under the system the N.S.A. calls Prism.

The administration also released a partly redacted semiannual report about “compliance” incidents, or mistakes involving the privacy rights of Americans or people in the United States. It found that there had been no willful violations of the rules, and that fewer than 1 percent of queries by analysts involved errors.

The document also showed that the government recently changed the rules to allow N.S.A. and C.I.A. analysts to search its databases of recorded calls and e-mails using search terms designed to find information involving American citizens, not foreigners — an issue that has long concerned Senator Wyden and that was mentioned in a document leaked by Mr. Snowden and published by The Guardian.

The number of “selectors” designed to filter out and store communications targeted at foreigners had gone up steadily, the document said, although the numbers were redacted. And its increase is expected to “accelerate” because the F.B.I. recently made the ability to nominate people for such collection “more widely available to its field office personnel.”

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