Former President Jimmy Carter announced support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden this week, saying that his uncovering of the agency’s massive surveillance programs had proven “beneficial.”
Speaking at a closed-door event in Atlanta covered by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Carter also criticized the NSA’s domestic spying as damaging to the core of the nation’s principles.
No American outlets covered Carter’s speech, given at an Atlantic Bridge meeting, which has reportedly led to some skepticism over Der Spiegel’s quotes. But Carter’s stance would be in line with remarks he’s made on Snowden and the issue of civil liberties in the past.
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.
President Obama will cancel a planned meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid mounting anger over Russia’s decision to allow National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden into the country, the White House said Wednesday.
Obama had intended to visit Russia’s capital and meet with Putin in advance of next month’s G-20 summit in St. Petersburg. But Obama has decided he will not meet with Putin one-on-one — a rare diplomatic snub — and will only attend the G-20 summit.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies’ internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.
FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI’s legal position during these discussions is that the software’s real-time interception of metadata is authorized under the Patriot Act.
Attempts by the FBI to install what it internally refers to as “port reader” software, which have not been previously disclosed, were described to CNET in interviews over the last few weeks. One former government official said the software used to be known internally as the “harvesting program.”
Carriers are “extra-cautious” and are resisting installation of the FBI’s port reader software, an industry participant in the discussions said, in part because of the privacy and security risks of unknown surveillance technology operating on an sensitive internal network.
It’s “an interception device by definition,” said the industry participant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because court proceedings are sealed. “If magistrates knew more, they would approve less.” It’s unclear whether any carriers have installed port readers, and at least one is actively opposing the installation.
Two House members, GOP Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia andDemocratic Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, have provided the Guardian with numerous letters and emails documenting their persistent, and unsuccessful, efforts to learn about NSA programs and relevant FISA court rulings.
“If I can’t get basic information about these programs, then I’m not able to do my job”, Rep. Griffith told me. A practicing lawyer before being elected to Congress, he said that his job includes “making decisions about whether these programs should be funded, but also an oath to safeguard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which includes the Fourth Amendment.”
Rep. Griffith requested information about the NSA from the House Intelligence Committee six weeks ago, on June 25. He asked for “access to the classified FISA court order(s) referenced on Meet the Press this past weekend”: a reference to my raising with host David Gregory the still-secret 2011 86-page ruling from the FISA court that found substantial parts of NSA domestic spying to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as governing surveillance statutes.
In that same June 25 letter, Rep. Griffith also requested the semi-annual FISC “reviews and critiques” of the NSA. He stated the rationale for his request: “I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution, and I intend to do so.”
One morning last week, 38-year-old software developer Phil Mocek was walking to work in Seattle when he paused to photograph what appeared to be civilian vehicles parked in a restricted area near a downtown federal building. He snapped a few pictures and began walking away, when a white truck whipped out of one of the parking spots and pulled up perpendicular to the curb. A large man wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt emerged from the cab and angrily grabbed the camera from Mocek, who hollered for help and fumbled with his phone to dial 911.
Police quickly arrived on the scene, responding to Mocek’s report of a possible robbery. The black male suspect identified himself as an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and told the officers that he was concerned about Mocek posting images of his vehicle online due to the nature of his job. The ATF agent explained that he had confiscated the camera and examined its contents because he “wanted to delete the picture that was taken of him.” Nobody was arrested.
For Mocek, the encounter was both unsettling and absurd. A gadfly for government transparency and police accountability, he has a history of prodding law enforcement to the point of exasperation. He says he was taking the pictures for an ongoing project that aims to raise awareness about law enforcement tracking vehicles on U.S. city streets and highways. The fact that a federal agent was concerned about Mocek violating his privacy rights would have been laughable if it weren’t so frightening.
This is big news. No one’s actually come out and admitted this before, although Marcy Wheeler says that during John Bolton’s confirmation hearing, it was clear he had seen intercepts with Colin Powell’s name on it. This is why we have to fight this stuff, the potential for abuse is just too tempting for political animals. Just keep asking yourself: WWTCD? (What Would Ted Cruz Do?)
Joel Brenner, former NSA IG (and currently affiliated with the Chertoff Group security profiteers) pinky swears it’s all changed since then and everything’s hunky dory!
JUDY WOODRUFF: And we pick up on the continuing fallout from the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the government’s requests to gather intelligence information on Americans.
Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA officials, a former inspector general and two NSA veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the secret government intelligence agency.
William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in 2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection to whistle-blowers.
He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago.
RUSSELL TICE, former National Security Agency analyst: The United States were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of senior military people and industrial types.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is the early 2000s.
RUSSELL TICE: This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito’s targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?
WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn’t aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually — there wasn’t anybody who wasn’t a part of this collection of information.
UPDATE: Local police say the Catalanos were reported by an employer. See something, say something — even if you’re just a possibly-paranoid job creator, I guess!
Freelance journalist Michele Catalano, a former music contributor at Forbes, received a friendly visit at her Long Island home from six agents from a joint terrorism task force on Wednesday morning.
In March Google reported that the FBI monitors the Web for potential terrorist activity, although the FBI told Adrien Chen of Gawker that the “FBI had no part in this law enforcement action.”
The FBI told to the Guardian that Catalano was “visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department.”
Catalano said she had researched pressure cookers and her husband was looking for a backpack, a combination of terms that raises flags in the wake of bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and injured more than 260.
Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.
MOSCOW — A Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden says the National Security Agency leaker has received asylum in Russia for one year and left the transit zone of Moscow’ airport.
Anatoly Kucherena said he handed over the papers to Snowden on Thursday. He said Snowden left Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport where he was stuck since his arrival from Hong Kong on June 23.
Kucherena said that Snowden’s whereabouts will be kept secret for security reasons.
The U.S. has demanded that Russia send Snowden home to face prosecution for espionage, but President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the request.
