US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[David Guyatt]

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is openly accusing the nation's chief intelligence officer of lying to lawmakers in statements earlier this year. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate hearing in March that the National Security Agency does not "wittingly" amass the personal data of millions of Americans. Speaking to CNN, Paul said Clapper lied outright.

Sen. Rand Paul: "What I'm saying is that the director of national intelligence, in March, did directly lie to Congress, which is against the law. He said that they were not collecting any data on American citizens, and it turns out they're collecting billions of data on phone calls every day. So it was a lie. What I'm saying is that by lying to Congress, which is against the law, he severely damaged the credibility of the entire intelligence committee community."

After the recent NSA revelations emerged, Clapper said his answer was the "least untruthful" response he could provide at the time.

"Least untruthful". Hhmm.

Judge: Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Clapper: I almost do, your Honour.

Judge: That's almost good enough for me. But not quite. Will you tell the whole truth?

Clapper: Let me reply this way your Honour. I'll endeavour to answer in the least untruthful way.

Judge: Oh, okay.

Anyway, I have a question. If he lied to Congress and this is a criminal offence, are we going to see him being arrested and charged? I mean it is an offence, openly admitted.

Nah.

[Peter Lemkin]

The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant

Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's surveillance of Americans' communication

Document one: procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons
Document two: procedures used by NSA to minimise data collected from US persons

• Glenn Greenwald and James Ball
  
  
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 June 2013 23.59 BST
  

The documents show that discretion as to who is actually targeted lies directly with the NSA's analysts. Photograph: Martin Rogers/Workbook Stock/Getty

Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.
The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.
The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.
The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed.
The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.
However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:
Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.
The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants.
The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.
Since the Guardian first revealed the extent of the NSA's collection of US communications, there have been repeated calls for the legal basis of the programs to be released. On Thursday, two US congressmen introduced a bill compelling the Obama administration to declassify the secret legal justifications for NSA surveillance.
The disclosure bill, sponsored by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican, is a complement to one proposed in the Senate last week. It would "increase the transparency of the Fisa Court and the state of the law in this area," Schiff told the Guardian. "It would give the public a better understanding of the safeguards, as well as the scope of these programs."
Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which was renewed for five years last December, is the authority under which the NSA is allowed to collect large-scale data, including foreign communications and also communications between the US and other countries, provided the target is overseas.
FAA warrants are issued by the Fisa court for up to 12 months at a time, and authorise the collection of bulk information some of which can include communications of US citizens, or people inside the US. To intentionally target either of those groups requires an individual warrant.

One-paragraph order

One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment.
Those procedures state that the "NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person".
It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases, which can include public information and data collected by other agencies.
Where the NSA has no specific information on a person's location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues.
"In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person," it states "a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person."
If it later appears that a target is in fact located in the US, analysts are permitted to look at the content of messages, or listen to phone calls, to establish if this is indeed the case.
Referring to steps taken to prevent intentional collection of telephone content of those inside the US, the document states: "NSA analysts may analyze content for indications that a foreign target has entered or intends to enter the United States. Such content analysis will be conducted according to analytic and intelligence requirements and priorities."
Details set out in the "minimization procedures", regularly referred to in House and Senate hearings, as well as public statements in recent weeks, also raise questions as to the extent of monitoring of US citizens and residents.
NSA minimization procedures signed by Holder in 2009 set out that once a target is confirmed to be within the US, interception must stop immediately. However, these circumstances do not apply to large-scale data where the NSA claims it is unable to filter US communications from non-US ones.
The NSA is empowered to retain data for up to five years and the policy states "communications which may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on the NSA's ability to filter communications".
Even if upon examination a communication is found to be domestic entirely within the US the NSA can appeal to its director to keep what it has found if it contains "significant foreign intelligence information", "evidence of a crime", "technical data base information" (such as encrypted communications), or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property".
Domestic communications containing none of the above must be destroyed. Communications in which one party was outside the US, but the other is a US-person, are permitted for retention under FAA rules.
The minimization procedure adds that these can be disseminated to other agencies or friendly governments if the US person is anonymised, or including the US person's identity under certain criteria.
Holder's 'minimization procedure' says once a target is confirmed to be in the US, interception of communication must stop. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images A separate section of the same document notes that as soon as any intercepted communications are determined to have been between someone under US criminal indictment and their attorney, surveillance must stop. However, the material collected can be retained, if it is useful, though in a segregated database:
"The relevant portion of the communication containing that conversation will be segregated and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice will be notified so that appropriate procedures may be established to protect such communications from review or use in any criminal prosecution, while preserving foreign intelligence information contained therein," the document states.
In practice, much of the decision-making appears to lie with NSA analysts, rather than the Fisa court or senior officials.
A transcript of a 2008 briefing on FAA from the NSA's general counsel sets out how much discretion NSA analysts possess when it comes to the specifics of targeting, and making decisions on who they believe is a non-US person. Referring to a situation where there has been a suggestion a target is within the US.
"Once again, the standard here is a reasonable belief that your target is outside the United States. What does that mean when you get information that might lead you to believe the contrary? It means you can't ignore it. You can't turn a blind eye to somebody saying: 'Hey, I think so and so is in the United States.' You can't ignore that. Does it mean you have to completely turn off collection the minute you hear that? No, it means you have to do some sort of investigation: 'Is that guy right? Is my target here?" he says.
"But, if everything else you have says 'no' (he talked yesterday, I saw him on TV yesterday, even, depending on the target, he was in Baghdad) you can still continue targeting but you have to keep that in mind. You can't put it aside. You have to investigate it and, once again, with that new information in mind, what is your reasonable belief about your target's location?"
The broad nature of the court's oversight role, and the discretion given to NSA analysts, sheds light on responses from the administration and internet companies to the Guardian's disclosure of the PRISM program. They have stated that the content of online communications is turned over to the NSA only pursuant to a court order. But except when a US citizen is specifically targeted, the court orders used by the NSA to obtain that information as part of Prism are these general FAA orders, not individualized warrants specific to any individual.
Once armed with these general orders, the NSA is empowered to compel telephone and internet companies to turn over to it the communications of any individual identified by the NSA. The Fisa court plays no role in the selection of those individuals, nor does it monitor who is selected by the NSA.
The NSA's ability to collect and retain the communications of people in the US, even without a warrant, has fuelled congressional demands for an estimate of how many Americans have been caught up in surveillance.
Two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall both members of the Senate intelligence committee have been seeking this information since 2011, but senior White House and intelligence officials have repeatedly insisted that the agency is unable to gather such statistics.

[Peter Lemkin]

Obama's crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.

Danny Dougherty/McClatchy Washington Bureau

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WASHINGTON Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans' phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.By Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Washington Bureau

President Barack Obama's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of "insider threat" give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.
Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.
"Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States," says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.
The Obama administration is expected to hasten the program's implementation as the government grapples with the fallout from the leaks of top secret documents by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who revealed the agency's secret telephone data collection program. The case is only the latest in a series of what the government condemns as betrayals by "trusted insiders" who have harmed national security.
"Leaks related to national security can put people at risk," Obama said on May 16 in defending criminal investigations into leaks. "They can put men and women in uniform that I've sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers, who are in various, dangerous situations that are easily compromised, at risk. . . . So I make no apologies, and I don't think the American people would expect me as commander in chief not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed."
As part of the initiative, Obama ordered greater protection for whistleblowers who use the proper internal channels to report official waste, fraud and abuse, but that's hardly comforting to some national security experts and current and former U.S. officials. They worry that the Insider Threat Program won't just discourage whistleblowing but will have other grave consequences for the public's right to know and national security.
The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for "indicators" that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
"It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, Hey, let's get people to snitch on their friends.' The only thing they haven't done here is reward it," said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. "I'm waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward."
The Defense Department anti-leak strategy obtained by McClatchy spells out a zero-tolerance policy. Security managers, it says, "must" reprimand or revoke the security clearances a career-killing penalty of workers who commit a single severe infraction or multiple lesser breaches "as an unavoidable negative personnel action."
Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. "Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting," the strategic plan says.
The Obama administration already was pursuing an unprecedented number of leak prosecutions, and some in Congress long one of the most prolific spillers of secrets favor tightening restrictions on reporters' access to federal agencies, making many U.S. officials reluctant to even disclose unclassified matters to the public.
The policy, which partly relies on behavior profiles, also could discourage creative thinking and fuel conformist "group think" of the kind that was blamed for the CIA's erroneous assessment that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a judgment that underpinned the 2003 U.S. invasion.
"The real danger is that you get a bland common denominator working in the government," warned Ilana Greenstein, a former CIA case officer who says she quit the agency after being falsely accused of being a security risk. "You don't get people speaking up when there's wrongdoing. You don't get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that's really dangerous for national security."
Obama launched the Insider Threat Program in October 2011 after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and sent them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. It also followed the 2009 killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, an attack that federal authorities failed to prevent even though they were monitoring his emails to an al Qaida-linked Islamic cleric.
An internal review launched after Manning's leaks found "wide disparities" in the abilities of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect security risks and determined that all needed improved defenses.
Obama's executive order formalizes broad practices that the intelligence agencies have followed for years to detect security threats and extends them to agencies that aren't involved in national security policy but can access classified networks. Across the government, new policies are being developed.
There are, however, signs of problems with the program. Even though it severely restricts the use of removable storage devices on classified networks, Snowden, the former NSA contractor who revealed the agency's telephone data collection operations, used a thumb drive to acquire the documents he leaked to two newspapers.
"Nothing that's been done in the past two years stopped Snowden, and so that fact alone casts a shadow over this whole endeavor," said Steven Aftergood, director of the non-profit Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "Whatever they've done is apparently inadequate."
U.S. history is replete with cases in which federal agencies missed signs that trusted officials and military officers were stealing secrets. The CIA, for example, failed for some time to uncover Aldrich Ames, a senior officer who was one of the most prolific Soviet spies in U.S. history, despite polygraphs, drunkenness, and sudden and unexplained wealth.
Stopping a spy or a leaker has become even more difficult as the government continues to accumulate information in vast computer databases and has increased the number of people granted access to classified material to nearly 5 million.
Administration officials say the program could help ensure that agencies catch a wide array of threats, especially if employees are properly trained in recognizing behavior that identifies potential security risks.
"If this is done correctly, an organization can get to a person who is having personal issues or problems that if not addressed by a variety of social means may lead that individual to violence, theft or espionage before it even gets to that point," said a senior Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.
Manning, for instance, reportedly was reprimanded for posting YouTube messages describing the interior of a classified intelligence facility where he worked. He also exhibited behavior that could have forewarned his superiors that he posed a security risk, officials said.
Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst sentenced in 1987 to life in prison for spying for Israel, wasn't investigated even though he'd failed polygraph tests and lied to his supervisors. He was caught only after a co-worker saw him leave a top-secret facility with classified documents.
"If the folks who are watching within an organization for that insider threat the lawyers, security officials and psychologists can figure out that an individual is having money problems or decreased work performance and that person may be starting to come into the window of being an insider threat, superiors can then approach them and try to remove that stress before they become a threat to the organization," the Pentagon official said.
The program, however, gives agencies such wide latitude in crafting their responses to insider threats that someone deemed a risk in one agency could be characterized as harmless in another. Even inside an agency, one manager's disgruntled employee might become another's threat to national security.
Obama in November approved "minimum standards" giving departments and agencies considerable leeway in developing their insider threat programs, leading to a potential hodgepodge of interpretations. He instructed them to not only root out leakers but people who might be prone to "violent acts against the government or the nation" and "potential espionage."
The Pentagon established its own sweeping definition of an insider threat as an employee with a clearance who "wittingly or unwittingly" harms "national security interests" through "unauthorized disclosure, data modification, espionage, terrorism, or kinetic actions resulting in loss or degradation of resources or capabilities."
"An argument can be made that the rape of military personnel represents an insider threat. Nobody has a model of what this insider threat stuff is supposed to look like," said the senior Pentagon official, explaining that inside the Defense Department "there are a lot of chiefs with their own agendas but no leadership."
The Department of Education, meanwhile, informs employees that co-workers going through "certain life experiences . . . might turn a trusted user into an insider threat." Those experiences, the department says in a computer training manual, include "stress, divorce, financial problems" or "frustrations with co-workers or the organization."
An online tutorial titled "Treason 101" teaches Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees to recognize the psychological profile of spies.
A Defense Security Service online pamphlet lists a wide range of "reportable" suspicious behaviors, including working outside of normal duty hours. While conceding that not every behavior "represents a spy in our midst," the pamphlet adds that "every situation needs to be examined to determine whether our nation's secrets are at risk."
The Defense Department, traditionally a leading source of media leaks, is still setting up its program, but it has taken numerous steps. They include creating a unit that reviews news reports every day for leaks of classified defense information and implementing new training courses to teach employees how to recognize security risks, including "high-risk" and "disruptive" behaviors among co-workers, according to Defense Department documents reviewed by McClatchy.
"It's about people's profiles, their approach to work, how they interact with management. Are they cheery? Are they looking at Salon.com or The Onion during their lunch break? This is about The Stepford Wives,'" said a second senior Pentagon official, referring to online publications and a 1975 movie about robotically docile housewives. The official said he wanted to remain anonymous to avoid being punished for criticizing the program.
The emphasis on certain behaviors reminded Greenstein of her employee orientation with the CIA, when she was told to be suspicious of unhappy co-workers.
"If someone was having a bad day, the message was watch out for them," she said.
Some federal agencies also are using the effort to protect a broader range of information. The Army orders its personnel to report unauthorized disclosures of unclassified information, including details concerning military facilities, activities and personnel.
The Peace Corps, which is in the midst of implementing its program, "takes very seriously the obligation to protect sensitive information," said an email from a Peace Corps official who insisted on anonymity but gave no reason for doing so.
Granting wide discretion is dangerous, some experts and officials warned, when federal agencies are already prone to overreach in their efforts to control information flow.
The Bush administration allegedly tried to silence two former government climate change experts from speaking publicly on the dangers of global warming. More recently, the FDA justified the monitoring of the personal email of its scientists and doctors as a way to detect leaks of unclassified information.
But R. Scott Oswald, a Washington attorney of the Employment Law Group, called the Obama administration "a friend to whistleblowers," saying it draws a distinction between legitimate whistleblowers who use internal systems to complain of wrongdoing vs. leakers, who illegally make classified information public.
There are numerous cases, however, of government workers who say they've been forced to go public because they've suffered retaliation after trying to complain about waste, fraud and abuse through internal channels or to Congress. Thomas Drake, a former senior NSA official, was indicted in 2010 under the Espionage Act after he disclosed millions of dollars in waste to a journalist. He'd tried for years to alert his superiors and Congress. The administration eventually dropped the charges against him.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, declined to answer how its insider threat program would accommodate a leak to the news media like the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that showed how successive administrations had misled the public and Congress on the war.
"The danger is that supervisors and managers will use the profiles for Disgruntled Employees' and Insider Threats' to go after legitimate whistleblowers," said the second Pentagon official. "The executive order says you can't offend the whistleblower laws. But all of the whistleblower laws are about retaliation. That doesn't mean you can't profile them before they're retaliated against."
Greenstein said she become the target of scrutiny from security officials after she began raising allegations of mismanagement in the CIA's operations in Baghdad. But she never leaked her complaints, which included an allegation that her security chief deleted details about safety risks from cables. Instead, she relied on the agency's internal process to make the allegations.
The CIA, however, tried to get the Justice Department to open a criminal case after Greenstein mentioned during a polygraph test that she was writing a book, which is permitted inside the agency as long as it goes through pre-publication review. The CIA then demanded to see her personal computers. When she got them back months later, all that she'd written had been deleted, Greenstein said.
"They clearly perceived me as an insider threat," said Greenstein, who has since rewritten the book and has received CIA permission to publish portions of it. "By saying I have a problem with this place and I want to make it better,' I was instantly turned into a security threat," she said. The CIA declined to comment.



Email: mtaylor@mcclatchydc.com, jlanday@mcclatchydc.com
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/19...rylink=cpy

[David Guyatt]

Meanwhile, insiders conti nue to sell classified weapons, materiel and information for personal gain, and because they are well placed, do so with apparent immunity from prosecution.

One rule for them, another for the rest of the citizenry.

The world has turned upside down - and now we look upwards to see if our shoe laces are tied properly.

[Magda Hassan]

U.S. charges Edward Snowden with espionage in leaks about NSA surveillance programs

By Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz, E-mail the writers

Federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.
Snowden was charged with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the case.





The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden's former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
Snowden flew to Hong Kong last month after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii with a collection of highly classified documents that he acquired while working at the agency as a systems analyst.
The documents, some of which have been published in The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper, detailed some of the most-secret surveillance operations undertaken by the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as classified legal memos and court orders underpinning the programs in the United States.
The 29-year-old intelligence analyst revealed himself June 9 as the leaker in an interview with the Guardian and said he went to Hong Kong because it provided him the "cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained."
Snowden subsequently disappeared from public view; it is thought that he is still in the Chinese territory. Hong Kong has its own legislative and legal systems but ultimately answers to Beijing, under the "one country, two systems" arrangement.
The leaks have sparked national and international debates about the secret powers of the NSA to infringe on the privacy of Americans and foreigners. Officials from President Obama down have said they welcome the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs and the safeguards they say are built into them. Skeptics, including some in Congress, have said the NSA has assumed the power to soak up data about Americans that was never intended under the law.
There was never any doubt that the Justice Department would seek to prosecute Snowden for one of the most significant national security leaks in the country's history. The Obama administration has shown a particular propensity to go after leakers and has launched more investigations that any previous administration. This White House is responsible for bringing six of the nine total indictments ever brought under the 1917 Espionage Act. Snowden will be the seventh individual when he is formally indicted.
Justice Department officials had already said that a criminal investigation of Snowden was underway and was being run out of the FBI's Washington field office in conjunction with lawyers from the department's National Security Division.


By filing a criminal complaint, prosecutors have a legal basis to make the request of the authorities in Hong Kong. Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States.
Snowden, however, can fight the extradition effort in the courts in Hong Kong. Any battle is likely to reach Hong Kong's highest court and could last many months, lawyers in the United States and Hong Kong said.





The United States has an extradition treaty with Hong Kong, and U.S. officials said cooperation with the Chinese territory, which enjoys some autonomy from Beijing, has been good in previous cases.
The treaty, however, has an exception for political offenses, and espionage has traditionally been treated as a political offense. Snowden's defense team in Hong Kong is likely to invoke part of the extradition treaty with the United States, which states that suspects will not be turned over to face criminal trial for offenses of a "political character."
Snowden could also remain in Hong Kong if the Chinese government decides that it is not in the defense or foreign policy interests of the government in Beijing to have him sent back to the United States for trial.
Snowden could also apply for asylum in Hong Kong or attempt to reach another jurisdiction and seek asylum there before the authorities in Hong Kong act.
The anti-secrecy group Wikileaks has held some discussions with officials in Iceland about providing asylum to Snowden. A businessman in Iceland has offered to fly Snowden on a chartered jet to his country if he is granted asylum there.
The chief executive of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said last week that the city's government would follow existing law if and when the U.S. government requested help.
"When the relevant mechanism is activated, the Hong Kong [Special Administrative Region] Government will handle the case of Mr. Snowden in accordance with the laws and established procedures of Hong Kong," Leung said in a statement.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nati...story.html

[Tracy Riddle]

Blackmail by Richard Raznikov

http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/06/2...-16146634/

But what the Snowden revelations brought to mind was Hoover and what he might've been able to do with this level of sophisticated surveillance. Then, yesterday, came a statement from Russell Tice, another former NSA employee, who told several on line radio journalists about what he personally saw in 2004.


"I had my hand literally on the paperwork," he told Peter B. Collins. "They went after members of Congress, the Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and armed services committees and the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms and they went after judges. They went after State Department officials… They went after U.S. international corporations, U.S. banking firms and financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Red Cross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…


"Don't tell me there's no abuse because I had this stuff in my hands, I looked at it, and in some cases I was literally involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. When I said to (Keith) Olbermann, my thing is high tech, the other thing is the dragnet… the terrestrial dragnet. Well, my specialty is outer space, I deal with satellites, everything that goes in and out of space, I did my spying, that's how I found out about this."

Question: this creates the potential for massive blackmail…

"Absolutely. I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. I haven't given you any names. This was in the summer of 2004. One of the papers I had in my hands was a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-something wanna-be Senator from Illinois, that's who they went after…


"I can give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw, the names and phone numbers of congress people and not only them, what looked like staff people, too, and not only their congressional offices, their home state offices. This thing is incredible what NSA's done. They turned themselves into a rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities on a monstrous scale, on steroids."


Tice had other names to offer besides Barack Obama, then a young candidate for U.S. Senate but already a rising star in the Democratic Party. The NSA, to Tice's personal knowledge, was spying on Senators Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Durbin. He says that the NSA is wiretapping everyone, that the captured material is stored in Utah, in the massive complex he says is already operational, contrary to what the government claims.

[Jan Klimkowski]

"I had my hand literally on the paperwork," he told Peter B. Collins. "They went after members of Congress, the Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and armed services committees and the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms and they went after judges. They went after State Department officials… They went after U.S. international corporations, U.S. banking firms and financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Red Cross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…

(snip)

Question: this creates the potential for massive blackmail…

"Absolutely. I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. I haven't given you any names. This was in the summer of 2004. One of the papers I had in my hands was a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-something wanna-be Senator from Illinois, that's who they went after…

Intelligence agencies have always used personal information for blackmail and leverage.

It's a key reason why our democracies are so undemocratic.

But Snowden was a private contractor directly employed by the multinational part of the military-multinational-intelligence complex.

It's not just the intelligence agencies who now have the dirt on our politicians and key policy formers. It's the private sector, driven entirely by the lust for profit and power. The private contractors have been given the keys to the castle.

The democratic model is totally, fatally, undermined.

[David Guyatt]

Blackmail by Richard Raznikov

Tice had other names to offer besides Barack Obama, then a young candidate for U.S. Senate but already a rising star in the Democratic Party. The NSA, to Tice's personal knowledge, was spying on Senators Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Durbin. He says that the NSA is wiretapping everyone, that the captured material is stored in Utah, in the massive complex he says is already operational, contrary to what the government claims.

Obama, Hillary...

All owned by the intelligence community.

[Dawn Meredith]

Thank you for posting on this Lauren. This is a great interview that expands on his earlier article on the Snowden leak......

http://tarpley.net/2013/06/18/the-glenn-...o-crumble/

Great analysis by Tarpley. I saw Naomi's piece too and though she raised good points.

Hawks suddenly becoming pro peace have always given me pause.

Dawn

[Keith Millea]

Published on Friday, June 21, 2013 by Common Dreams

'Worse than NSA': UK Spy Agency Amasses 'World's Communication'


New Guardian exclusive reveals secret database of phone and internet records that dwarfs previous revelations

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

(Image via The Guardian)

Always seemingly in lockstep with the United States, new reports reveal that the UK's spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has gained covert access to the "world's communications" and has amassed an infinite database, which they freely share with their US counterpart, the NSA.


"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."


This information, revealed in a Guardian exclusive published Friday, was gleaned from documents leaked to the news outlet by Snowden earlier this month.


The documents reveal a five-year-old government surveillance system that dwarfs all others in its scale and capacity to collect metadata on "the world's communications."


The spy agency's programs, appropriately called Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms

Exploitation, tap transatlantic fiber-optic cables that "carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic" by attaching "intercept probes" where the cables meet British soil before "carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in North America."


The sheer scale of the program trumps any other that has yet to come to light. As the report notes, the GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA."


In the US, officials have downplayed the value and scope of information that can be gleaned from such mass swathes of data. However, as Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner of the ACLU explained following earlier revelations of the NSA spy program:

Even without intercepting the content of communications, the government can use metadata to learn our most intimate secrets anything from whether we have a drinking problem to whether we're gay or straight. The suggestion that metadata is "no big deal" a view that, regrettably, is still reflected in the law is entirely out of step with the reality of modern communications.

"The public doesn't understand," adds mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau. "It's much more intrusive than content."

The UK spy agency collects 600 million "telephone events" each day, and with over 200 tapped cables carrying information at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, they are capturing the equivalent of "all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours."


Also, the amount of data they are able to collect is constantly growing, as more cables are tapped and storage capabilities continue to grow.


As the Guardian reports:

One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

Not unlike the United States' rational for the allegedly legal NSA surveillance system, the GCHQ justifies these programs by applying old laws to new technology. Under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the tapping of "defined targets" must be authorized by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.

However, as the Guardian explains, the GCHQ has taken advantage of "an obscure clause" which allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad.

In this case, they write, the "criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate."

Beginning in May 2012, 300 analysts from GCHQ and 250 from the NSA began the process of sifting through this "flood of data," and a reported 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors have access to the growing database.