Declassified files detail blatant violations, abuse of NSA

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Declassified files detail blatant violations, abuse of NSA domestic spying program
Published time: September 10, 2013 21:30


Tags
Court, Crime, Hacking, Information Technology, Intelligence, Internet, Law, Scandal, Security

For years the National Security Agency has been violating restrictions and misusing the US domestic spying program that collected private data from US citizens, newly released declassified documents show.

The new information from Intelligence Community Documents Regarding Collection under Section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) shows that the government on a daily basis spied on Americans’ telephone numbers, calling patterns as well as users IP addresses during the surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The documents show that between 2006 and 2009 the NSA violated the court restrictions by spying on telephone calls and lying to judges about how the data was deployed. The spying agency crossed referenced a selected list of some 16,000 phone numbers against databases which contained millions of records, thus violating the law, two senior intelligence officials told Bloomberg.

The metadata program which started in 2006 enabled the NSA to gather more information about a specific number that the agency claimed could be linked to terrorist activity. The agency also kept an alert list that was cross-referenced with new numbers to consider whether they should be added to a list of "reasonable articulable suspicion."

The NSA gathered the bulk phone records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which requires private companies to turn over evidence that is relevant to a terrorism investigation. However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA must have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” to run that number against a larger database. Only about 2,000 numbers on the list in 2009 met that legal condition, according to sources.

The released documents according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper relate to “compliance incidents that were discovered by the NSA, reported to the FISC and the Congress, and resolved four years ago.”

According to the documents, the US District Judge Reggie Walton who oversaw a secret US spy court wrote he was "deeply troubled" in March 2009 after discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records without “articulable suspicion.”

In some cases the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone records by email to as many as 189 analysts, while only 53 were approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to see them, a Justice Department lawyer reported later in 2009.

The NSA notified the court of the violations only in January 2009, the documents show. In turn, the court asked the spying agency to seek approval for each case before running the query on an individual number. In September 2009 these procedures were revised and the court allowed the surveillance program to remain.

"Upon discovery of these incidents, which were promptly reported to the FISC, the Court, in 2009, issued an order requiring the NSA to seek court approval to query the telephony metadata on a case-by-case basis, except when necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement.

Clapper also stated that the NSA was not trying to lie or mislead the court and that the problem with reporting the incidents was in a “lack of a shared understanding among various NSA components about how certain aspects of the complex architecture supporting the program functioned.” These gaps in understanding led to “unintentional misrepresentations in the way the collection was described to the FISC.”

The magnitude of the metadata collection program was first revealed in June by Edward Snowden, when he leaked documents from Verizon Communications Inc. which showed that the company shared its data with the NSA. In August, the Obama administration acknowledged the phone metadata program.

Tuesday’s disclosures were released in response to a court case in which the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department in 2011 for records of data collection under the USA Patriot Act.


"The documents released today are a testament to the Government's strong commitment to detecting, correcting, and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes,” Clapper said.

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Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo file motions to reveal NSA data requests
Published time: September 10, 2013 20:55

Reuters / Jason Reed


Tags
Hacking, Human rights, Intelligence, Internet, Snowden, USA

Facebook and Yahoo, have joined Google and Microsoft in addressing the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to legally allow them to make public the data requests received from the NSA as part of the infamous PRISM program.

Microsoft and Google filed motions to the FISA court in August, but the proceedings were delayed at the US government’s request to allow time to negotiate. Since then no common ground has been found between the state and the tech giants.

On Monday, Google updated its request, asking for the company to be “allowed to publish detailed statistics about the types (if any) of national security requests we receive under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including Section 702.”

“Given the important public policy issues at stake, we have also asked the court to hold its hearing in open rather than behind closed doors. It's time for more transparency," Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, and the director of public policy and government affairs, Pablo Chavez, wrote in a blog post.

The company’s stance is that “the levels of secrecy that have built up around national security requests undermine the basic freedoms that are at the heart of a democratic society."

Microsoft also amended its petition on September 9 as it earlier pledged to work with Google in their bid to release Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) request information.

Meanwhile, the battle for transparency was joined by Facebook and Yahoo!, who also decided to file their claims to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The US government hasn’t done enough to “adequately address” the public concerns about “whether their information is safe and secure with internet companies,” says Facebook's vice president and general council, Colin Stretch.

"We believe there’s more information that the public deserves to know, and that would help foster an informed debate about whether government security programs adequately balance privacy interests when attempting to keep the public safe," he said.

In its petition, Facebook asked to publish the total number of orders it receives relating to physical searches, business records and wiretap orders, as well as the total number of users, who had their messages and other personal content released to the NSA.

Yahoo filed a petition similar to Google's as the company named specific FISA orders, on which it wanted to publish more details.

The company says it has been unable to engage fully in the debate about whether the government has “properly used its powers”, because it has imposed a restraint on Yahoo's freedom of speech.

"We believe that the US government's important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive," Ron Bell, general counsel for Yahoo, Is cited by the Guardian.

"Ultimately, withholding such information breeds mistrust and suspicion – both of the United States and of companies that must comply with government legal directives," he added.

Google and Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo have been allegedly been involved in giving the National Security Agency access to customer data under the program known as Prism. The Internet giants are now determined to correct “false claims” and reports about what they have provided to the government.

Yahoo spokeswoman Suzanne Philion explained in an e-mail to AP that "these actions stem from a common interest in ensuring that we can provide the most accurate information to the public about the national security requests we receive from the US government."

In the wake of the first NSA disclosures by the agency’s former contractor Edward Snowden, lawmakers in the US and abroad have debated whether or not the secretive surveillance programs, such as Prism, strike the proper balance between privacy and security.

President Barack Obama and his administration has made numerous claims that those operations exist with significant oversight to prevent any abuses, including constitutional violations, but other documents released by Snowden in the wake of the first disclosures have shown that the NSA has accidentally collected personal correspondence of Americans at least thousands of times annually.

According to their latest report, the federal government is spending millions to find a way to keep those companies collecting data that invades the privacy of those outside the US.

According to the latest Snowden leak, released earlier this month, the NSA and its British counterpart have circumvented the encryption methods used to secure emails, chats and essentially most Internet traffic that was previously thought to be protected from prying eyes.

The price tag for such an endeavour, the Guardian reported, is around a quarter-of-a-billion dollars each year for just the US, and involves not just intricate code-breaking, but maintaining partnerships with the tech companies that provide seemingly secure online communications.

“The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that Internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments,” James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald reported.

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The director of US national intelligence, James Clapper, has responded by saying the government would simply not be doing its job if it did not use legally dubious techniques to track down communications.

“Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cyber-criminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities,” read the statement issued on September 6.