PRISM

[Lamplighter]

You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans' Movements

The headline here is pretty misleading.
There's a real issue about "You" when the data is being stored for years.

At least the "red-light cameras" that give you a $300 "ticket-by-mail" have a photo of the offending driver.
How many car owners can say who was driving their car on a particular highway
on any particular date at any particular time...4 or 14 or 44 years ago.

This amassing of enormous amounts of "data" is a waste of resources,
because the digital age has created one truism: garbage in - garbage out.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by tw

First define the resulting problems. Then address them. Who controls the data?

That should be done before the readers are installed, not after the horse has left the barn.

[Griff]

Absolutely.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

That should be done before the readers are installed, not after the horse has left the barn.

You are asking for our Congress to advance America. When so many preach the gospel according to Limbaugh. "We want America to fail".

Good luck solving a problem that Cheney and other 'we fear them' wackos wanted. After all, extremist see evil hiding in every phone booth. (Does Superman know how much they hate illegal immigrants?)

[glatt]

The NSA is apparently absolutely enormous.
Big article in the Washington post today goes into some detail on how it has grown since 9/11. But the interesting thing is the slideshow.

Did you know that the NSA building in Ft. Meade Maryland is larger than the Pentagon? I thought the Pentagon was still the largest office building in the US Government. The Pentagon is huge.

But the NSA headquarters is bigger, and they plan to make it another 50% larger with a new addition.


Did you know that the NSA also has huge facilities in Aurora CO, and Bluffdale Utah?

How about in Yorkshire, England? Did you know they have a large facility there?


Check out the slideshow.

[Lamplighter]

Who says the government doesn't create jobs...

[ZenGum]

And yet, they are incapable of spying on even themselves, apparently.

http://www.propublica.org/article/ns...rch-own-emails

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency's public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person," rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

[editing by ZG]

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

[Lamplighter]

Ron Wyden is still at it... hinting, but not disclosing.
This weekend new issues may be becoming public.

Washington Post
David A. Fahrenthold
July 28, 2013

With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear

It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill:
For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.

Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information he had learned as a member
of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Wyden (D-Ore.) was bound by secrecy rules, unable to reveal what he knew. <snip>

Two years later, they found out.

The revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden
— detailing vast domestic surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls,
e-mails and other electronic communications —
have filled in the details of Wyden’s concerns.
<snip>
Now, in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, Wyden is pressing his case on two fronts.<snip>

On Friday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. responded to a letter co-authored by Wyden with new details.


Washington Post
Peter Wallsten
July 26, 2013

[Lamplighter]

Holder Tells Russia Snowden Won’t Face Torture or Death...

Water-boarding or a few other extreme interrogation techniques ? Well maybe.
But NO torture... and death would certainly be something of an "Ooooops"

[ZenGum]

In other news, Holder grants Snowden immortality, apparently.

[Lamplighter]

And the beat goes on... 32 pages of newly declassified documents
that show details of even larger surveillance "projects"


NY Times
CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: July 31, 2013

U.S. Outlines N.S.A.’s Culling of Data for All Domestic Calls

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday released
formerly classified documents outlining a once-secret program of the National Security Agency
that is collecting records of all domestic phone calls in the United States,
as top officials testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
<snip>
The documents released by the government, meanwhile, include an April ruling
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that supported a secondary order
— also leaked by Mr. Snowden — requiring a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all
of its customers’ phone logs for a three-month period.

It said the government may access the logs only when an
executive branch official determines that there are
“facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion”
that the number searched is associated with terrorism.
<snip>

The newly disclosed XKeyscore presentation focuses in particular on Internet activities,
ncluding chats and Web site browsing activities, as intelligence analysts
search for terrorist cells by looking at “anomalous events” like who is using encryption
or “searching the web for suspicious stuff.”

[Griff]

Ho hum. Another day another violation of the 4th Amendment.

[Lamplighter]

The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald
8/4/13

Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA

Documents provided by two House members demonstrate
how they are blocked from exercising any oversight over domestic surveillance
<snjp>
Two House members, GOP Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia and
Democratic 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.
<snjp>
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.

And then there is the question of Freedom of Information...

NBC News
Michael Isikoff
6/12/13
Secret court won't object to release of opinion on illegal surveillance

In a rare public ruling by the nation’s most secretive judicial body,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled Wednesday that
it did not object to the release of a classified 86-page opinion concluding
that some of the U.S. government’s surveillance activities were unconstitutional.

The ruling, signed by the court’s chief judge, Reggie Walton, rejected
the Justice Department’s arguments that the secret national security court’s rules
prevented disclosure of the opinion. Instead, the court found that
because the document was in the possession of the Justice Department,
it was subject to release under the Freedom of Information Act.
<snip>
The EFF’s lawsuit was inspired by a July 20, 2012 letter from an aide to
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,
that stated that “on at least one occasion,” the FISC held that “some collection”
carried out by the U.S. government under classified surveillance programs
“was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

[BigV]

I flatly refuse to believe that the government is only intercepting communications of foreigners.

I know that should some American citizen (wacko extremist though he may be) located in the country, make mention of some threat to the president, that it would be acted upon, even though the aforementioned wacko extremist was previously unknown to the government.

Where is the fucking due process in this whole farce? Where is the check and balance of the three co-equal branches of government? Where is the transparency?

sickening!

[Griff]

Screw checks and balances, no branch should be actively subverting the Constitution and right now by my count we are at two and three is likely.