snooping – praag.org

Poll: More worried about privacy than terrorism

On Wednesday, the Obama administration released several newly declassified intelligence documents in a damage control attempt over the growing NSA snooping scandal. On the same day, the Guardian reported on the NSA tool XKeyscore, which can track everything people do online, including emails, Facebook activity, online chats and browser histories. The White House just can’t keep ahead of the bad news.

The administration maintains that these programs are necessary for the fight against terrorism, but the American people are not convinced. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds that 56% of Americans believe that “federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.” And for the first time in the 10 year history of this poll, more people (47%) say the government has gone too far in restricting civil liberties than those who say it has not gone far enough to protect the country (35%).

This decisive change in attitude crosses the political spectrum. Republicans, Democrats and Independents have all seen double-digit shifts towards concern for liberty over security between October 2010 and July 2013. The shift is most pronounced among Tea Party members; in 2010 only a fifth of them believed the government had gone too far in restricting liberties, while 63% believed it should do more. In the new survey, the number of Tea Partiers concerned with government intrusion jumped to 55%, while those saying the state should keep ramping things up dropped more than half. The only group that showed no significant change in attitude was moderate to conservative Democrats, though the more interesting question is how the Pew Center located any members of this nearly extinct species.

The shift in attitude reflects a change in awareness. In 2010 few Americans knew the extent to which the government was logging the details of their daily lives. Proponents of widespread surveillance and data collection say that these methods keep Americans safer, and in some respects they do. But at some point the issue becomes how much intrusion on privacy is warranted for marginally decreasing increments of safety. No doubt the government could keep everyone safe from almost all terrorism, crime and other evils simply by monitoring everything, all the time, and flooding the country with special agents and block wardens. However, privacy has to count for something, and besides, all the sophisticated technology at the government’s disposal did not stop the Boston Marathon bombings. The best, most advanced counter-terrorism tools in the world can still fail in the hands of fallible people.

Competence is one matter, trust is another. The trade-off between safety and liberty involves a critical third variable, whether the government can be relied upon not to misuse these powerful, intrusive tools. The Pew survey found overwhelming concern that the government is abusing the public trust when it comes to snooping; seventy percent of Americans believe that the Federal government is using the data it collects for purposes other than fighting terrorism.

The White House sloughs off such concerns by saying “trust us,” but the American people simply don’t, and have good reason not to. As the snowballing IRS scandal shows, the administration is not above using official information for political purposes. Massive government databases make unprecedented amounts of information easily accessible, making them ripe for exploitation. The Obamacare “Data Hub” is another example of Federal overreach, which will contain comprehensive health and financial information just about everybody, with few safeguards and a high probability of being misused. It will be an irresistible gold mine for faceless government functionaries with rapidly diminishing ethical standards. Not to mention criminals, blackmailers, and opposition researchers with insider connections.

It will take more than the selective declassification of a few self-serving documents for the White House to regain the people’s trust. And the odds are that the American people still don’t know the worst of it. – rare.us

James S. Robbins, Deputy Editor at Rare, is a former professor at National Defense University who specialized in counter-terrorism.

Rand Paul to challenge unconstitutional snooping by US

“I’m going to be asking all the internet providers and all of the phone companies: ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit,” Paul told host Chris Wallace. “If we get ten million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”

Like many lawmakers, Paul drew a distinction between targeted surveillance and the blanket surveillance revealed this week.

“They are looking at a billion phone calls a day,” Paul said. “That doesn’t sound to me like a modest invasion of primary, it sounds like an extraordinary invasion of privacy.”

“I have no problem if you have probable cause, you target people who are terrorists, and you go after them,” Paul continued. “But we’re talking about trolling through billions of phone records…That is unconstitutional.”

Paul also said he would introduce the Fourth Amendment Restoriation Act, though he offered few details about the still-hypothetical legislation.

“If you talk to young people who use computers every day, they’re absolutely with me,” Paul said. “What I spend on my Visa each month, that’s my business, where I spend it, and whether I read conservative magazines, whether I subscribe to Fox News, or whether I subscribe to Yahoo or Google—what I do with my private life is my private life. If you suspect me of a crime, have probable cause.”

“So much of our life now is digitalized, that we have to protect it from a snooping government,” Paul said. “We’ve now got a government that appears to target people based on their political beliefs. I don’t want my phone records being given to an administration I can’t trust.”

Paul remembered that the public outrage against SOPA and PIPA legislation last year were somewhat successful in pushing back the laws, and predicted that if people reacted with similar severity to the current surveillance measures, they would be successful in repealing them. – MediaITE

Obama has placed the US press under surveillance

by Ilana Mercer

No wonder the language being deployed to describe the forlorn Associated Press reporters is something redolent of a jilted lover.

The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him.

Politico offered readers an endearingly intimate glimpse, “Inside the AP,” where the flaccid folks were overcome by feelings of “fear” and “determination.” Nevertheless, they had not lost their resolve and were proceeding with “heads-down determination.”

What made The Beloved and his dream team turn to rough play?

According to the (idiomatic) mainstream, Obama’s Justice Department had been monitoring AP phone lines in D.C., in the Hartford and New York bureaus, and in Congress. Subpoenaed too were the phone logs, “credit card receipts, airplane records and other digital information” belonging to individual AP editors and reporters. All this in violation of Fourth Amendment protections; without presenting a judge with evidence of probable cause and absent a search warrant (all SOP, or standard operating procedure, at the Transportation Security Administration).

The Justice Department in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed, comically, to have been looking to plug a “very, very, very, serious leak.” Perhaps “the most serious” since the AG started his prosecutorial career in 1976.

A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until Dec. 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping – other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against “United States persons.” Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without “judicial and congressional oversight,” puled the same perverts.

It’s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George W. Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president’s many critics. It was! Sideshow “O,” however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against “friendlies.”

George Bush, you’ll recall (or maybe not), also authorized the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). Subsumed within the PSP are activities whose scope has yet to be disclosed. Attorney General Holder – at the behest of President Obama, no doubt – is expanding the remits of the Surveillance State, as did “W” before him.

The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV – America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder – has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a “perfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.” In other words, without a court order.

National Journal is agreed, writing that “the Obama administration technically broke no rules.” Companies that give up this information to the government have “immunity,” which has been “built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

Here’s the other rub: FISA permits surveillance sans court order, explains Wikipedia, for “the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence.”

And provided the president has authorized the fishing expedition.

In my understanding of the impossibly complex and cancerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Obama has to have authorized the dragnet that was cast at the Associated Press.