[246] Apartheid in Israel: Dispelling Myths of the Jewish State, NSA`s Six Degrees of Implicati
[246] Apartheid in Israel: Dispelling Myths of the Jewish State, NSA`s Six Degrees of Implicatio [246] Apartheid in Israel: Dispelling Myths of the Jewish State, NSA`s Six Degrees of Implicatio...
By: Koykaya Koyki
Do Americans have a right to privacy? At what point does national security take precedence over that right? Intelligence expert Amy Zegart discussed those issues and more with Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency. Hayden served as NSA director from 1999 to 2005, and was also CIA director for three years. Zegart is codirector of Stanfords Center for International Security and Cooperation, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business (by courtesy), where she coteaches a course on political risk management with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The following are edited excerpts from their conversation:
The 215 program has to do with telephone metadata. So its not email traffic; its voice. And its not content, its fact of. What the agency gathers is who called whom, when, for how long. Its also within the technical definition of metadata to include locational data. But this program doesnt. Its consciously excluded. What youve got is a record of all phone calls made within the United States or between the United States and overseas thats given to the National Security Agency on a daily basis by the telecom providers.
Its not technically electronic surveillance. These are actually business records kept by the phone company in order to charge you for your phone usage. That data is then bent toward the National Security Agency, where its stored.
A key point about this is that it is unarguably domestic. Its your stuff. Its my stuff. And its put into this large database. Now, that in itself causes a lot of people concern because even with good intent, theres some nervousness about the government having that kind of information.
The NSA view is that, although that is kind of theoretically frightening, as a practical matter, one has to look at what happens to that data in order to make a coherent judgment about it.
That data is locked and inaccessible at NSA except under a very narrow set of circumstances. Number one, the number of people who are allowed to access that data is about two dozen. Actually, the right number is 22. And the way you access the data is through a number, almost always foreign, about which you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the foreign number is affiliated with terrorist groups.
A specific example so you raid a safe house in Yemen. And you go in with your Yemeni allies and you grab some people. And you grab whats called pocket litter, which is identifiable stuff inside their pockets.
It confirms that, yeah, these guys are who we thought they were. Theyre affiliated with AQAP Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or some other group. And you discover a cellphone that youve never seen before. Now you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that that cellphone is, in fact, affiliated with a terrorist.
What you then get to do and Im going to be a little cartoonish, here, but its kind of how it works. What you then get to do is walk up to that database, kind of yell through the transom, and say, Hey, anybody in here talk to this phone? And then if a number in the Bronx raises its hand and says, Yeah, I do every Thursday, NSA gets to say to the number in the Bronx, Well, then who do you talk to?
Thats the program. Theres no mining of the data, and theres no pattern development, no pattern recognition. It is: Did any of those phone events that were captured there relate to a phone that we have reason to believe is affiliated with al-Qaida?
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Former NSA Head Michael Hayden: The Agency "Cannot Survive Without Being More Transparent"
The NSA #39;s Mass-Surveillance Program Is About to Go on Trial
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-nsa-s-mass-surveillance-program-is-about-to-go-on-trial-20141103.
By: mikeroweRules12
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The NSA's Mass-Surveillance Program Is About to Go on Trial - Video
Egya Koo Nimo plays "aban kaba da me nsa" @ Ashesi
Palm wine music with Egya Koo Nimo.
By: Kpanie Addy SJ
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Egya Koo Nimo plays "aban kaba da me nsa" @ Ashesi - Video
Before May, Congress has no alternative but to endorse or end NSA spying on the phone calls of virtually every American. What is the will of the new party in charge?
Toby Melville/Reuters
The Patriot Act substantially expires in May 2015.
When the new Congress takes up its reauthorization, mere months after convening, they'll be forced to decide what to do about Section 215 of the law, the provision cited by the NSA to justify logging most every telephone call made by Americans.
With Republicans controlling both the Senate and the House, the GOP faces a stark choice. Is a party that purports to favor constitutional conservatism and limited government going to ratify mass surveillance that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment? Will Mitch McConnell endorse a policy wherein the Obama administration logs and stores every telephone number dialed or received by Roger Ailes of Fox News, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, the Koch brothers, the head of every pro-life organization in America, and every member of the Tea Party? Is the GOP House going to sacrifice the privacy of all its constituents to NSA spying that embodies the generalized warrants so abhorrent to the founders?
The issue divides elected Republicans. Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash are among those wary of tracking the phone calls of millions of innocent people. Senator Richard Burr favors doing it. Republicans pondering a run for president in 2016 will be trying to figure out how mass surveillance will play in that campaign.
Many would rather not take any stand before May, as if governingthe very job citizens are paying them to dois some sort of trap. But their preferences don't matter.
This fight cannot be avoided.
Nor is it the only one that touches on surveillance. The dubiously named USA Freedom Act began as an effort to reform the NSA and has since been weakened. The NSA and FBI engages in lots of questionable surveillance besides the phone dragnet. Republicans will now run the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Rather than urging the GOP to avoid "the governing trap," National Review and other outlets purportedly dedicated to constitutional conservatism ought to be demanding that Republicans use their newfound power to rein in our surveillance bureaucracy, for anyone with a healthy mistrust of government should see how easily its staggering power, exercised in secret, could be ruinous to liberty. A limited government movement that does not demand oversight and reform, now that its party has regained power, is a farce. To endorse the national surveillance bureaucracy as it now stands is tantamount to declaring oneself a trusting statist.
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Now the GOP Must Choose: Mass Surveillance or Privacy?