US Government Internet Spying

WHAT WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT U.S. INTERNET SPYING : Details about the US government's secret phone call and email sweep continue to be revealed, while President Obama, anxious to calm American outrage over the US spying on them, as they see it, defended the counterterrorism methods on Friday and said Americans need to "make some choices" in balancing privacy and security. Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of declassifying details of the programs to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government. He stressed Saturday that the previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a US citizen. Clapper was obviously angered by the revelation of the intelligence-gathering program, calling it reckless. "Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a 'playbook' of how to avoid detection," he said in a prepared statement. But the President's response and Clapper's public disclosures are a response to the national malaise, as well as Obama's sensitivity to any suggestion that he is trampling on the civil liberties of Americans. Clapper declassified some details of the NSA phone records collection program that obtains from phone companies on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of its customers' calls. Clapper said that under the court-supervised program, only a small fraction of the records collected are ever examined because most are unrelated to any possible terrorism activity. His statement and declassification Saturday also addressed the Internet retrieval program, code-named PRISM, that allows NSA and the FBI to tap directly into the servers of major US Internet companies, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL. Unlike the phone call sweep program, PRISM allows the government to seize actual conversations: emails, video chats, instant messages and more. Clapper said the program, engaged in under the USA Patriot Act, has been in place since 2008, under the George W. Bush administration, and "has proven vital to keeping the nation and our allies safe. They are important tools for the protection of the nation's security," he said. Clapper revealed that PRISM activity requires approval from a FISA Court judge and is conducted with the knowledge of the provider that supplies information when legally required to do so. PRISM seeks foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. It cannot intentionally target any US citizen or any person known to be in the US. Using data related to a US person is prohibited unless it is "necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance, is evidence of a crime, or indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm." The Washington Post and Guardian citation of classified slides and other PRISM documents in their published reports that named major companies whose data has been obtained has thus been corroborated by Clapper. The newspaper reports also indicate that PRISM has opened a door for NSA to tap directly on the companies' data centers whenever the government chooses. The Guardian obtained top-secret documents detailing an NSA tool, called Boundless Informant, that maps the information it collects from computer and telephone networks by country. The paper said the documents show that NSA collected almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March, which the paper says raises questions about the truth of NSA statements that it cannot determine how many Americans may be accidentally included in its computer surveillance. NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel said Saturday that "current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication." She said it may be possible to determine that a communication "traversed a particular path within the Internet," but added that "it is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address." Emmel said communications are filtered both by automated processes and NSA staff to make sure Americans' privacy is respected. "This is not just our judgment, but that of the relevant inspectors general, who have also reported this," she said. The revelations have divided Congress and led civil liberties advocates and some constitutional scholars to accuse Obama of crossing a constitutionally-prohibited line in the name of rooting out terror threats. Experts both inside and outside the government predict that potential attackers will find other ways to communicate now that they know that their phone and Internet records may be targeted. An al-Qaida affiliated website warned its readers on Saturday not to send through the Internet details of militant activities in three long articles on what it called "America's greatest and unprecedented scandal" of spying on its own citizens and people in other countries. Former Representative Pete Hoekstra, who served on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade, said "the bad folks' antennas go back up and they become more cautious for a period of time." And he added that the government will develop more sophisticated ways to dig into these data. It becomes a techies game, and we will try to come up with new tools to cut through the clutter," he said. Hoekstra said he approved the phone surveillance program but did not know about PRISM online spying. ~~~~~ Dear readers, this is a lot to absorb. Think about it. If you are an American citizen, you may want to consider whether your government has created an Orwellian 1984 mechanism that could watch you and perhaps control your life. Of all the information to sift through in today's blog, the hardest to believe is the statement of Judith Emmel, NSA spojespetson, who said : "...it may be possible to determine that a communication 'traversed a particular path within the Internet,...it is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address.' " If this statement is accurate, why is the government risking its credibility to trawl the Internet? We will consider this and other personal liberty questions another day.