All the spying never stopped terrorism before Snowden made his revelations…. So how can it be harder now, if they never caught anyone with it before?

 

DHS Secretary: Snowden Spiked Encryption Demand, Made Terrorism Fight Harder

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said this morning that Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks have made it harder for the agency to fight terrorism.

Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance, he said, was “one of the drivers toward the demands for more and more encryption in the marketplace.”

“That has made it harder for us to detect crime and it has made it harder for us to detect potential terrorist activity. And this is not just a federal matter. I hear from district attorneys about their inability to track criminal activity now because of encryption,” Johnson said. ‘And so we have to find a solution to this and we’re thinking about this actively right now.”

ISIS, for example, has been encouraging followers to switch to Tor browsers to block their browsing habits and location.

Read more @ http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/05/15/dhs-secretary-snowden-spiked-encryption-demand-made-terrorism-fight-harder/

 

Salon did an article last year on who is collecting big money from the NSA spying. The article is in another thread.  Its not the same people in this article either…. So goodness knows how many have their hands in the cookie jar.

 

NSA’s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors

The Intercept has identified several former government and military officials whose voices have shaped the public discourse around government spying and surveillance issues but whose financial ties to NSA contractors have received little attention. These pundits have played a key role in the public debate as the White House and the agency itself have struggled to defend the most controversial spying programs revealed by Snowden’s documents.

Read more @ http://www.mintpressnews.com/nsas-loudest-defenders-have-financial-ties-to-nsa-contractors/205690/

 

A Long-Awaited Reform to the Patriot Act

A bipartisan bill passed by the House on Wednesday would end the NSA’s bulk-data-collection program

Fourteen years after the Patriot Act gave sweeping spy powers to the government in its war against terrorism, a consensus is finally emerging in Congress that the government needs to be reined in—at least a bit. The next two weeks could determine whether that consensus will yield a new law.

In a bipartisan vote of 338-88, the House on Wednesday afternoon passed the USA Freedom Act, which seeks to restrain the nation’s surveillance state while extending other key parts of the 2001 Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the month. At its core, the House measure ends the NSA’s bulk collection program first exposed two years ago by Edward Snowden, and requires the government to be more transparent about the data it seeks from citizens. The vote comes just a week after a federal appeals court ruled that the Patriot Act’s controversial Section 215 did not authorize the bulk collection program, which allowed the NSA to access domestic telephone metadata. The ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t end the program, which the Freedom Act would.

Read more @ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/a-long-awaited-reform-to-the-usa-patriot-act/393197/

 

Patriot Act’s most controversial section fades to black

Section 215 of the Patriot Act will not survive another month. The most controversial piece of the post-9/11 law that broadly expanded the federal government’s surveillance powers is set to expire June 1, and the House of Representatives on Wednesday gave its overwhelming approval to a far less sweeping replacement. On a 338-to-88 vote, Republicans and Democrats registered broad support for the USA Freedom Act, which will end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of “metadata” from millions of Americans’ phone records.

The legislation faces some opposition in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to extend the Patriot Act with no changes. That won’t happen. Other Republican senators, including at least two who are running for president, want Section 215 scrapped or curtailed, and the political tides are with them.

Some ardent civil libertarians opposed the Patriot Act from the outset, insisting, somewhat wildly, that it would leave the Bill of Rights in tatters and turn the president into a dictator. Most Americans knew better. Following the terrorist attacks, it seemed prudent to expand the government’s counterintelligence capabilities, and to change rules that had prevented investigators from “connecting the dots” that could have alerted them to the jihadists’ plans. The hysterical alarums about dissenters being rounded up and America turning into a fascist police state gained little traction. For all the controversy they fueled, the law’s key provisions — including Section 215 — were extended in 2005, 2010, and 2011.

Read more @ http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/05/17/patriot-act-most-controversial-section-fades-black/0I2HYMkUHx67d4s4KMSmJJ/story.html

 

Long Island Reps Back Bill to End NSA Bulk Collection

The U.S. House of Representatives this week voted overwhelmingly to reign in the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone data—a measure that received full support from Long Island’s Congressional delegation.

All five of LI’s Representatives backed the so-called USA Freedom Act, including staunch NSA defender Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford). Joining King was lone local congressional colleague from the same party, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), as well as Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-Queens), Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-Garden City) and Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington).

“It was the strongest NSA legislation that can pass the House,” King said in a statement. “Also, as a practical matter, the NSA should still be at least 90 percent as effective under the Freedom Act as it is under current law.”

King has been steadfast in his support of the surveillance agency ever since the disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden sparked debate over the program nearly two years ago.

Read more @ http://www.longislandpress.com/2015/05/16/long-island-reps-back-bill-to-end-nsa-bulk-collection/

 

What's the hang-up with collecting phone data?

Congress is trying to decide whether to change the way spy agencies collect bulk phone data on Americans. Earlier this week, the House decided to end government collection of our phone records.

We wondered, what if you did a cost-benefit analysis of all that metadata? Is it worth all the trouble? We’re talking about huge amounts of data here. 

The National Security Agency stores phone company billing information for calls made and received in the U.S. — which numbers called other numbers and when. So what does that cost?  Well, let’s just say in this case, talk is not cheap.

John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State and the libertarian Cato Institute, says it's in excess of $100 million a year.

Mueller got that number by estimating what the phone companies spend to gather and store their billing records, and adding in some extra for the cost of NSA analysis. 

That’s really hard to measure, though, because it’s classified.

“You get sort of a range," Mueller says. "It’s not trillions of dollars, by any means, and so you have fairly substantial money being spent on it."

OK, now the benefit part of our cost-benefit analysis.  A presidential commission has looked into that.

“There’s no benefit,” says Richard Clarke, who worked as a counter-terrorism adviser in the White House and was on the commission. He says all the phone record metadata wasn’t instrumental in preventing any terrorist attacks.

Read more @ http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/whats-hang-collecting-phone-data

 

Dangerous labels

The identification of potential terrorists by the examination of metadata regarding their movements and contacts can be dangerously imprecise — as has been discovered by the bureau chief of an international TV station who is based in Islamabad. Metadata is the word used to describe a collation of small elements to build a big picture. This will include location (of the subject), who they phone and who phones them, the timing and length of calls and the content of text messages. All of this is within the capacity of the American National Security Agency (NSA). According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the aforementioned bureau chief was identified as a member of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, which earned the journalist a place on the American terrorist watch list with all the implications that go with that. It is worth pointing out here that many drone strikes are carried out on the basis of metadata rather than human intelligence and much metadata analysis is done by computer software rather than by people, a reality that opens any number of chilling prospects.

Read more @ http://tribune.com.pk/story/887073/dangerous-labels/

 

Journalists are not terrorists

The U.S. National Security Agency placed an Al Jazeera journalist on a terrorist watch list on the basis of contacts he made with sources, according to an Intercept report published last week. The story should alarm the public about government threats to journalists and misuses of raw intelligence data.

Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, was identified as a member of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood by an NSA software program called Skynet that analyzes communication metadata such as phone contacts and location. On the basis of whom Zaidan telephoned, who called him and where the calls took place, Skynet labeled him a member of both organizations. The Intercept reported these findings on May 8 based on analysis of one of the numerous documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

One of those documents, an NSA PowerPoint slide listing Zaidan’s imagined affiliations, would be ridiculous if it weren’t so serious. This is how America’s intelligence apparatus with its massive funding, cutting-edge computers and armies of big-brained analysts identifies enemies of the state? Is it any wonder that so many civilians have been accidentally killed in drone attacks?

Read more @ http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/journalists-are-not-terrorists.html


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~