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NSA collecting over 250 million email contact lists every year as well as

BobStackFan4Life

BobStackFan4Life

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500,000 buddy lists from chat services per day. In June, President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.” Liar.
The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
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Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information...Taken together, the data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person’s life, as told by personal, professional, political and religious connections.
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The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States. The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”
Because of the method employed, the agency is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets, he said.

When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.”

In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes — in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
 
It's no big deal. Diane Feinstein said it was no big deal.
 
Meet the new boss same as the old boss. George w. Obama.
 
Here, plant your face in this, el Capiton...

Denver - Governments that try to force citizens to decide between a free press and national security create a “false choice” that weakens democracy, and journalists must fight increasing government overreach that has had a chilling effect on efforts to hold leaders accountable, the president and CEO of The Associated Press said Saturday.
Gary Pruitt told the 69th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association that the U.S. Justice Department’s secret seizure of records of thousands of telephone calls to and from AP reporters in 2012 is one of the most blatant violations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution the 167-year-old news cooperative has ever encountered.
The Justice Department action involving the AP resonated far beyond the U.S., including Latin America, where journalists for decades have fought to exercise press freedoms under authoritarian regimes, Pruitt said.
“The actions by the Department of Justice could not have been more tailor-made to comfort authoritarian regimes who want to suppress the news media. ‘The United States does it too,’ they can say,” Pruitt said.
A free and independent press “differentiates democracy from dictatorship; separates a free society from tyranny,” he said.
“Governments who try to set up a situation where citizens think they must choose between a free press and security are making a mistake that will ultimately weaken them, not strengthen them. It’s not a real choice. It is a false choice.”
Pruitt said he was encouraged by proposed Justice Department guidelines, introduced after the records seizure, that would give news media advance notice of subpoenas so the press can challenge those actions in court; protect not just phone records but reporters’ email, text messages and other forms of electronic communication; and guarantee that journalists won’t be prosecuted for doing their jobs.
“But you can bet that we will be watching closely to make sure they are implemented and enforced,” Pruitt said.
In 2012, the Justice Department secretly obtained records of work, cell and home numbers of AP journalists, as well as AP bureau numbers in New York, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Conn., and the AP number in the U.S. House of Representatives press gallery. It did so after an Associated Press story revealed the foiling of a plot in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner at a time the Barack Obama administration was insisting publicly that it had no information about terrorist organizations plotting attacks on the United States in that period.
The Justice Department was trying to identify who leaked information for the AP story — but it didn’t tell the AP about its phone records seizure until a year after the story ran.
The seizure was “hardly a surgical strike on a few carefully chosen targets. It was overbroad, sloppy and a fishing expedition into a wide spectrum of AP news journalism and journalists — most of whom had nothing to do with the issues in question here,” Pruitt said.
It also differed from the National Security Agency’s broad monitoring of global communications because it was specifically directed at locating the source of AP’s reporting.
Just as alarming, the seizure has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to the AP and numerous other news organizations, even about stories not related to national security, Pruitt said.
“Now, the government may love this. I think they do. But beware a government that loves secrecy too much,” he said.
And the challenge isn’t going away, Pruitt said.
“The attack on journalism — here in the United States and throughout the rest of the world — is not going to cease any time soon. In fact, I think it will become even more difficult to counter as technology gives governments very powerful tools to monitor the actions and communications of citizens and journalists,” he said.
The Miami-based Inter American Press Association has about 1,400 member news organizations and promotes press freedoms throughout the Americas.

By: AP
 
It reminds me of the creepy shit Scientologists do to try and keep their followers in line. And this article does a good job of dissecting the talking points and explaining why they're such bullshit, with many of the talking points being outright lies. #thegovernmentpropagandizingitscitizens
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/02/nsa-sent-home-talking-points-for-employees-to-use-in-conversations-with-family-friends-during-holidays/
A Misleading Statistic on Disrupting Terrorism the NSA Won’t Stop Promoting

“NSA programs protect Americans and our Allies,” the document reads. “As an example, they have helped to understand and disrupt 54 terrorist events since 9/11: 25 in Europe, 11 in Asia and 5 in Africa. Thirteen of those had a homeland nexus.”

Deputy Director John Inglis admitted in August during a Senate hearing, when pressed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, that US bulk records phone spying had been “critical” in stopping just one terrorist plot. He clarified that the spying on phone records had only “made a contribution” to discovering the 13 plots.

Sens. Ron Wyden, Mark Udall & Martin Heinrich, who filed a brief in support of an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit challenging the collection of phone records of all Americans, explained the Executive Branch has defended the program by conflating it with “other foreign intelligence authorities.” The senators highlighted the fact that the collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act had played “little or no role in most of these disruptions.”

“Indeed of the original fifty-four that the government pointed to, officials have only been able to describe two that involved materially useful information obtained through the bulk call-records program,” the senators added. “Even the two supposed success stories involved information that [the senators] believe—after repeated requests to the government for evidence to the contrary—could readily have been obtained without a database of all Americans’ call records.”

At this point, any intelligence agency leader, member of Congress or government official who highlights 54 “thwarted” plots is advancing propaganda to save the NSA from being forced into giving up this power to collect the phone records of all Americans.

FISA Court Opinions Show the NSA Has Not Performed Its Mission in Lawful and Compliant Manner

The claim that NSA “performs its mission” in a manner that is “lawful, compliant, and in a way that protects civil liberties and privacy” is demonstrably false.

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge ruled, when reviewing a program that was collecting records of Internet communications” that the agency had committed “longstanding and pervasive violations” of prior orders by the court. It found that government officials knew or had reason to know that “portions” of collection constituted “unauthorized electronic surveillance.” This unauthorized and illegal surveillance “included information concerning the identity of the parties and the existence of communications to or from persons in the United States.”

FISC Judge John Bates stated that the government had a “history of material misstatements”—otherwise known by Director for National Intelligence James Clapper as “least untruthful” answers and known among non-members of the national security state as lies. The government had a “poor track record” of exceeding the implementation constraints or going beyond purported privacy safeguards represented to the court.

Another ruling by the FISA Court in 2009 found, the NSA “frequently and systematically violated” the agency’s “minimization procedures,” intended to protect Americans’ privacy, “that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall [business records] regime has never functioned effectively.”

As Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute recently recounted, “For the first three years of the call records program’s current incarnation, the FISC was misinformed about how it really worked. As a result, software tools routinely accessed the data without the required approvals: Of the 17,835 phone numbers searched by one automated alert list from 2006 to 2009, only 1,935 had been vetted for “reasonable suspicion.” Query results were also improperly shared with the CIA and FBI.”

In fact, journalist Marcy Wheeler, who has written in extensive detail on all the released NSA documents so far, has demonstrated through multiple posts that the NSA has continued an illegal wiretapping program that has grown in size since it was first exposed under President George W. Bush.
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