After reading the article by Glenn Greenwald...

[kentuck]

After reading the link by Greenwald, it is pretty obvious that he is in possession of a lot of information. And I would assume he got the information from Edward Snowden.
=============
<snip>
Obama told Charlie Rose last night:

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause."

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy
================

And if the NSA has not been following the guidelines set by law, then they should be held accountable. It appears that the laws may have been broken and they need to be fixed from the damage done by the Congress, rushing through legislation at the end of the year before it expires. To do something like that, with something as important as rights guaranteed by our Constitution, is unforgivable.

It seems to me that our entire government, from the top to the bottom have been delinquent in their duties? Even the President has been lax in seeing that the laws are being executed in a lawful way.

The Attorney-General gave his approval to the NSA to do more or less whatever they wanted. And they followed few guidelines. They did whatever they wanted. Make no mistake. This is lawlessness on a grand scale. This is the scandal some folks have been looking for.

But Congress cannot be forgiven for their incompetence. The Attorney-General should resign. The NSA Director, Keith Alexander, needs to step down also. Obama needs to clean house with these people. The American people cannot and will not accept such lawlessness from any government officials. The DNI position should be done away with and go back to the way it was when it worked. The intelligence is too diluted.

Finally, the Senate Intelligence Committee needs to be changed. We need some fresh thinkers with intelligence watching out for us. Those presently on that committee have lost the faith of the American people. They can keep their Senate seats if the voters want them, but they should no longer be sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It is a mess from the top to the bottom and only one person can fix it. That would be Barack Obama. He is the only President we have at this time. This would be his true legacy if he could fix it. But he's going to have to fire some people and replace them with qualified people that see reality in the scope of history. Fortunately, the FBI Director is leaving. That would be a good place to start. This is just my humble opinion.

[kentuck]

1. Did anyone not read the article by Greenwald?

Whether you agee or not, it is very informative.

[KG]

2. ermmigawd! Glenn Greenwald! argleblarglebarg!

[TransitJohn]

3. Well-reasoned, cogent analysis.

Good job.

[closeupready]

4. If you believe that, what can I say. I'm not exactly Einstein, but

the idea that someone like you who has been active on these boards for centuries almost, , apparently either believes that the NSA is obeying the law (and NOT listening to whatever phone calls they want to, warrant or not warrant), or else you don't believe it but you're here anyway pushing this misinformation to board members ...

Both ideas bother me.

[kentuck]

5. I think it is rather obvious...

That the NSA has not followed the law. Power corrupts. If I have to make a choice on a toss-up question, then I am going to choose the side of the Constitution over the NSA and their promise of safety.

[closeupready]

6. Oh, ok, good - I misread your take on this.

Cheers.

[Monkie]

7. its not like the surveillance state is putting people on edge?

i guess it was your turn now!
good post btw.

[Catherina]

8. Well reasoned. The Senate Intelligence Committee and Holder need to go asap

I hope at least one decent member of Congress will come clean on this and admit what they know even if it means career suicide.

They're being muzzled at every turn with the President's heavy use of classifying everything.

Listening to all the word parsing, the spinning people are doing to obfuscate is downright embarrassing.

Another thing we need to do is address the Bluffdale data storage center. The government's claims that it's just metadata doesn't justify all those billions for mega storage facility that handles zettabytes.

There's a huge difference between "No one is listening to your calls" and "We're not recording your calls and having them processed by machine for stored analysis". This all goes hand in hand with the US arresting and abducting people all over the world so we can lock them up indefinitely, using torture and secret courts.

If everything is so legal, so clean, let's see all the judicial rulings and procedures. Let's see all the infrastructure that's been put in place for the next administration to do away with any remaining pretense of constitutional rights. It's like having your next door neighbor outfit his house with high tech surveillance equipment and asking you to trust him, that there are laws about what he can do in total secrecy, and oversight because his mother comes by for a visit 3 times a year.

If Snowden hadn't leaked the Verizon order, Clapper's lie that they're not collecting data on every American would be gospel truth and they'd all still be repeating that lie. Now that they've been caught in that lie, they want us to believe they're telling the truth. Their credibility is shot. Clapper and all of those who knew he lied should resign and face prosecution, for the good of our nation.

Meanwhile in the UK, the media was firmly told to [back off and shut up.

Britain's response to the NSA story? Back off and shut up

Snowden's revelations are causing outrage in the US. In the UK, Hague deploys a police-state defence and the media is silenced

...

It vanished from general view. When the foreign secretary, William Hague, was questioned by the BBC on Monday, no mention was made of the affair. The media has been bidden to ignore the story and has done so. This was despite it running in leading newspapers round the world, from America and Europe to China and Russia.

Complaints at the bugging from governments in Turkey, South Africa and Germany have poured into the Foreign Office, yet the nearest British journalists can get to the story is to report the protests as foreign news.

....

What matters here is first the mendacity. I see no problem in exchanging data between British and American security – except where, as in the NSA's Prism program, it is a device to circumvent legal constraint. There may be few people in Washington or London who really seek a global data empire through blackmailing the world's population; but hoovering intelligence on millions of private individuals extends far beyond the needs of national security, beyond the needs even of normal police work. The war on terror is rotting the internal organs of free states.

Standing in the Commons last week, William Hague denied he wanted to "trawl the contents of people's phone calls" and said every intercept had to be personally signed by him. He said that statute law, together with judicial and parliamentary oversight, had everything under proper control. He did not add that the government does indeed want to trawl the "meta-contents" of all calls and emails. We now know that it has access to once confidential international databases in doing so.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/uk-response-to-nsa-story-back-off-shut-up

This is not America. And that should not be Britain.

Thank you Kentuck. Rec'd

[kentuck]

11. I think the people are truly bothered by this issue.

I believe the President has an opportunity to whittle down the ever-expanding secret intelligence networks and needs to take some bold action to restore people's faith in their country. In my opinion, the status quo does not help the Democratic Party, the President, or the country. Also, I believe Democrats are short-sighted not to see the dangers in this expanding national security state. It's time to wean ourselves off this diet of terror and return to some type of normalcy.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. I don't believe this POTUS, or a future one,

Will wean ourselves of this, not until the Empire dies... We have become Rome in so many ways. That includes the death of the Republic and the utter corruption of the Senate.

[kentuck]

13. I have read..

that the water system in Rome was the most advanced in the world but that it went into decline because they did not want to pay to maintain it. They wanted to keep their wealth to themselves rather than to pay for stuff like infrastructure, etc. I could see the comparison in that sense. Greed is the seed of corruption.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Seneca went into it, yes

The lead lining did not help

[Catherina]

20. He does indeed and Snowden challenged him to take this opportunity

I wish he would but I don't see that happening.

And Obama's problem right now is bigger than just the US because people all over the world are upset, more than we are, that the US dares to collect information on billions of private citizens. And governments over the fact that the US dares to hack into their universities, their hospitals even! One thing Snowden said that made him ill was that the NSA would hack into hospitals, research centers, and when they'd make a mistake whole systems would go down. Whoops right? And the world business community concerned about industrial espionage for reasons of intellectual property theft. Those are just some examples. The outrage hasn't even begun and I don't think the trust is coming back anytime soon because the disregard for the entire world that all your data, all your research, all your secrets belong to us, is massive.

The status quo doesn't help the country, or the party, or us like you said but I don't think they're thinking that way. The bottom line is profit and to make an international profit, well you know the rest.

I wish he would. Does he have the courage? So far he hasn't shown it.

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney,” he said, “is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, (Democratic Party Senator Dianne) Feinstein, and (Republican Representative Peter) King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”

This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous "State Secrets" privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023033003#post85

[kentuck]

21. Someday we will regret it if he does not...

But, to be honest, I do not anticipate him doing anything like that. In my opinion, he is more likely to expand the security state even further, to all our detriment.

Also, it is sad that we have such a weak legislature. I cannot remember in my lifetime such a lack of leadership as in the present Congress and Senate. Does anyone think they would have gotten this by Robert Byrd? I doubt it.

[Catherina]

25. Determined expansion is what I'm seeing too.

Robert Byrd would have denounced this for sure. Wellstone too. I hope, for the sake of our children, that we succeed in changing this.

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. I hate to say it

But this is by design.

[Octafish]

9. ''If you are a US person...''

What about the 16-year-old "US person" blown to bits by a drone? Any word on "Why?"

[Catherina]

10. That's a state secret, like everything else in this transparency n/t

[FarCenter]

15. The warrantless wiretapping is on international calls.

Cross-border communications have generally been intercepted since WW II. That is what NSA does.

They may involve Americans at one or both ends, and when they do, procedures are in place to minimze exposure of US citizen's privacy. But when you place an international call, it can be intercepted and probably will be.

Phone calls within the US are not routinely intercepted. Phone calls of non-US persons within the US may be intercepted if the parties to the call are identified with terrorist or intelligence assets of foreign countries. These calls may involve innocent US citizens, but again, procedures are in place to minimize privacy exposure.

NSA does not have equipment intercepting phone calls in all of the telephone offices in the country, and around half of all calls stay within the local telephone office. Most of the rest involve only one interoffice link.

[kentuck]

16. But didn't the "whistleblower" dispute those facts?

Do we just dismiss his comments and believe the authorities at face value?

[FarCenter]

17. No, read Greenwald's blog carefully -- he is trying to conflate domestic and international calling.

But my summary is consistent with his blog.

[kentuck]

24. How did you interpret this?

<snip>
As a result, under the FAA, the NSA frequently eavesdrops on Americans' calls and reads their emails without any individualized warrants – exactly that which NSA defenders, including Obama, are trying to make Americans believe does not take place. As Yale Law professor Jack Balkin explained back in 2009:


"The Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, effectively gives the President - now President Obama - the authority to run surveillance programs similar in effect to the warrantless surveillance program [secretly implemented by George Bush in late 2001]. That is because New Fisa no longer requires individualized targets in all surveillance programs. Some programs may be 'vacuum cleaner' programs that listen to a great many different calls (and read a great many e-mails) with any requirement of a warrant directed at a particular person as long as no US person is directly targeted as the object of the program. . . .

"New Fisa authorizes the creation of surveillance programs directed against foreign persons (or rather, against persons believed to be outside the United States) – which require no individualized suspicion of anyone being a terrorist, or engaging in any criminal activity. These programs may inevitably include many phone calls involving Americans, who may have absolutely no connection to terrorism or to Al Qaeda."

As the FAA was being enacted in mid-2008, Professor Balkin explained that "Congress is now giving the President the authority to do much of what he was probably doing (illegally) before".

[FarCenter]

29. The preceding paragraph explained it

Under the FAA, which was just renewed last December for another five years, no warrants are needed for the NSA to eavesdrop on a wide array of calls, emails and online chats involving US citizens. Individualized warrants are required only when the target of the surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance.

The key sentence is bolded. If a US person (i.e. a citizen or permanent resident) is inside the US and calls or is called by someone outside of the US, the call can be intercepted without a particular warrant. If a US person is inside the US and calls or is called by a targeted foreign national inside the US, the call can be intercepted under whatever authority is being used to target the foreign national.

For example, suppose that suspected terrorist John Doe's home phone is intercepted by warrant from the FISA court. If Jane Doe uses the phone to call their daughter, the call will be intercepted. In the old days, the person listening to the tap would not record the conversation. These days, I suppose that it gets recorded automatically and gets marked "do not listen to this". If John Doe calls Sam Smith to set up a golf date, the conversation with Sam Smith gets recorded. Therefore, in any wiretapping process, there are people who are unrelated to the investigation that are recorded, either because they use some means of communication that is under surveillance or they are a party to an innocent interaction with the target of surveillance.

[kentuck]

31. And that is the problem.

If it is required and they didn't do it, which it appears they did not, then what? It would be foolish to the extreme to trust these rascals without verification. We cannot assume they followed the law.

[FarCenter]

32. I believe that they follow the law, since they have set up a whole procedure to monitor compliance

[HooptieWagon]

33. Who's policing compliance?

FISA courts?...They've approved all but one warrant, out of thousands requested.
Congress?...Clapper and Mueller already been caught lying to Congress.
What I see is a government agency, equipped with unprecedented technology, operating under strictest secrecy, with virtually no oversight. That is a recipe for abuse, and highly troubling.

[RobertEarl]

18. Anarchy?

The very fact that our constitution DEMANDS the timely removal of the arching powers that rule over us when they treat the people with disregard, to me is the root of anarchy.

Chew on that, peeps.

Heads need to roll, figuratively. The only way to regain the trust of the people is to put in place rulers who treat us with our due respect. The ones in power now show little respect for the people.

Snowden, by example, is showing us respect.

[closeupready]

19. The elites in Congress and on both sides of the aisle are comfy,

comfy with the lucrative war profiteering they do and feeding the surveillance infrastructure/contractors, in a kind of patronage type of corruption they've got going. They are contemptuous of honest people, which is a necessary frame of mind in order to: 1) lessen cognitive dissonance; and 2) keep the gravy train safe from reform and muckraking.

It's remarkable how far things in DC seem to have become like the corrupt 3rd World dictatorships we used to condemn (and still do, though with less and less credibility every single day).

[kentuck]

22. Did anyone notice?

How quickly both sides jumped on the side of the NSA in a bi-partisan way when they haven't agreed on anything else in months and months? What does that say to you?

[closeupready]

23. Astute observation.

I hadn't looked at it like that before, but it is thought-provoking.

[stevenleser]

27. That would be interesting if correct. But it's not. Both parties are split on the issue. nt

[graham4anything]

28. actually, I noticed the anti-Obama people in the media, same as other smears & the BushPaulfamilyinc

getting together.

and I notice it at just the time the 80-20 is coming to be, with the extremist 20 soon going to be rendered politically obsolete
at the voting booth.

at just the time, two major senate races are being done as we are in election season now.

I haven't though noticed one true Barack Obama supporter jumping ship, and as I am one, I haven't either.

What smear will it be tomorrow? The birther one again? Rev Wright again?

80-20 is coming, just like LBJ got a 73-27 victory on this day so many years ago.

[HooptieWagon]

34. Yes, the people supporting Obama's spying are in agreement with Bush, Cheney, Ari Fleischer...

and the rest of BushCo torture regime.
Those opposing Obama's spying are in agreement with Alan Grayson, Bernie Saunders, Noam Chomsky, and many other respected liberal leaders.

[Catherina]

26. That's quite a floodgate Snowden opened. Or rather so many floodgates.

How many groups are organizing as we chat? More than we'll ever know.

Of course so many were hysterically pushing for everyone to move on, yawning lol that there was nothing to see here.

Occupy Wall Street ?@OccupyWallStNYC 4h

How many deaths are #Snowden & #Manning responsible for? 0. How many is US gov. responsible for? Millions. Who should be watching who? #J19

Occupy Wall Street ?@OccupyWallStNYC 4h

Obama wants to extradite #Snowden. Emergency Forum: NYC TODAY Great Hall @ Cooper Union 7PM.EST HANDS OFF! #FreeBrad! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/obama-defends-checks-nsa-surveillance …