US Senate rejects compromise bill on surveillance reform

Washington: The US Senate has turned back legislation that would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of private telephone records, a secret program first disclosed to Americans by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

A procedural vote on the bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month  and is supported by the White House, failed 57-42. Sixty votes were necessary to proceed with its consideration.

The rejection of the compromise legislation was the latest turn in a complex standoff over NSA surveillance powers that has pitted Democrats, House Republican leaders, Senate Republican leaders and a GOP presidential candidate against one another as members of Congress eyed a holiday break this week.

If senators do not act before leaving Washington, the legal authority underpinning the NSA's bulk collection of private telephone records will expire at midnight on May 31.

The impasse continued late into Friday, after the Senate passed contentious trade legislation, then recessed for several hours to allow the clock to run out on a procedural roadblock to the surveillance legislation.

Read more @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-senate-rejects-compromise-bill-on-surveillance-reform-20150523-gh84b4.html

If the room was practically empty that is a good gauge on the type of people that have been voted in to look after the people.  If it was their wages that was being talked about the room would have been full. 

Rand Paul Will Hate the NSA Until You Love Him

Yes, the 10 hours and 30 minutes the senator spent speechifying on the Senate floor Wednesday against NSA spying wasn’t technically a filibuster. But that wasn’t the point.

From afar, it seemed as though Rand Paul were addressing a crowded stadium.

His voice boomed through the Senate chamber on Wednesday afternoon as he argued against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act during what he described as a filibuster. “We think collecting everyone’s phone records all the time without suspicions is sort of like a general warrant,” he said of himself and his allies on the issue, like fellow Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). “We think that the American people also believe this.”

Up close, the production felt much smaller than that.

The Kentucky senator was, in fact, addressing a nearly vacant room. He stood mostly alone, but often flanked on either side by an aide, behind a row of desks. Three binders of notes, highlighted in yellow and blue and bookmarked with Post-Its, were arrayed in front of him across three desks.

He fiddled with two pairs of eyeglasses, placing one pair in a drawer; he changed from leather Cole Haan dress shoes into gray running sneakers (keeping the dress shoes underneath the desk); he refused the glass of water in front of him, which was regularly refreshed by a staffer.

He yammered on and on, sometimes stopping to breathe and rest his voice by allowing a guest star, like Wyden or Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), to echo his anti-spying sentiment. Small groups of visitors filed in and out to peer from the balcony at the tiny spectacle beneath them.

Read more @ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/rand-paul-will-hate-the-nsa-until-you-love-him.html

 

Mike Huckabee on NSA: Want to snoop? Get a warrant

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, wading into a key debate before Congress, said Sunday the government should get a warrant before it snoops on email and phone calls or collects wide swaths of call data.

Mr. Huckabee said the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of phone data and far-reaching spying powers appear to override the “fundamental” balance of powers between governmental branches. The executive branch should have probable cause before it snoops on Americans, he told “Fox News Sunday.”

Plus, government reports say the secret bulk collection program disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hasn’t had a direct effect on protecting the homeland.

“If this is so effective, why hasn’t it been connected to the foiling of terrorist plots?” Mr. Huckabee asked Fox’s Chris Wallace.

Read more @ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/24/mike-huckabee-on-nsa-want-to-snoop-get-a-warrant/

 

Appeals Court ruling urges Congress to stop NSA’s mass scale surveillance

In American Civil Liberties Union v Clapper, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit addressed head-on whether the National Security Agency’s (NSA) secretive bulk collection of every American’s telephone metadata was legal.

The court’s answer? The program is not lawful.

The court did not just rule the program unlawful; in its 97-page decision, the court gave loud and clear cues to Congress to reform existing intelligence-gathering legislation to both protect citizens' privacy and still provide the government the necessary tools to gather critical information on terrorism.

Given the Fourth Amendment and our federal wiretapping legislation – both of which prohibit warrantless government surveillance of our electronic communications – a secretive collection of every American’s telephone call metadata unrelated to a targeted law enforcement investigation by the NSA would seem per se unlawful.

So how did something so seemingly simple and clear become so complicated?

The tension between national security and domestic security

The problem starts with the inherent tension between the executive branch’s power to protect national security on the one hand and to enforce domestic security on the other. The law regulates and restricts in very different ways the executive branch’s authority to engage in these two distinct activities.

Read more @ http://theconversation.com/appeals-court-ruling-urges-congress-to-stop-nsas-mass-scale-surveillance-41546

 

There could be big implications if Congress lets a hotly contested post-9/11 law die

The Patriot Act as we know it is in trouble.

Passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the act has been used to justify controversial national security programs — including the National Security Agency’s bulk collection and storage of Americans’ call records.

Before the act’s expiration on June 1, a coalition of Democrats and a few libertarian-minded Republicans are threatening to block renewal efforts unless the NSA’s dragnet spying program is significantly curtailed.

If Congress fails to reauthorize the act, the NSA would be forced to shutter the controversial program.

The NSA has already begun winding down the program. On Wednesday, the Justice Department circulated a memo warning lawmakers that the NSA had begun shutting down the program in preparation for the law’s expiration on June 1.

Read more @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-will-happen-if-the-patriot-act-isnt-renewed-2015-5

 

Oversight Report on FBI’s Use of Patriot Act Highlights Need for Intelligence Reform at Crucial Moment

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) yesterday released another report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act between 2007 and 2009. The report was long delayed due to declassification and redaction issues, but the timing is appropriate considering that the Senate is spending the waning hours of its legislative session considering the impending expiration of Section 215. 

That’s because the OIG report heightens the case for meaningful reform of the intelligence community by undermining many of the flimsy defenses offered by defenders of the status quo. Above all, the report demonstrates that secrecy and lack of oversight in the administration of surveillance laws is perhaps as significant as outright misuse.

Section 215 is most famously the authority that the National Security Agency claims allows it to conduct mass collection of Americans’ telephone records. A federal appeals court recently ruled that this interpretation was “unprecedented and unwarranted” and that the NSA’s program was illegal. However, the FBI is actually the agency that administers the law, presenting applications for the collection of information to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on behalf of NSA, as well as the FBI itself.

Read more @ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/oversight-report-fbis-use-patriot-act-highlights-need-intelligence-reform-crucial

I don’t know what planet that this Judge lives on…..??  I am thinking if he has to read 70 pages of information each time he has a case, and he says he had 40 cases a week, then its human nature to cut corners…. And lightly skim over things. And I am betting also that he had no idea about technology and what it can do.

Leading the secret FISA court: Q&A with Judge Reggie Walton

Washington (CNN)For years, federal Judge Reggie Walton served on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which repeatedly approved the U.S. government's requests to collect telephone metadata on millions of Americans.

Walton also served as the FISA court's presiding judge. And he was tapped to lead the court just months before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden unleashed an era of intense public scrutiny and attention toward the court.

He left the FISA court last year after a 7-year stint.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of CNN's interview with Walton, the court's only former presiding judge who served during and after the Snowden leaks.

CNN: How many cases did you preside over while you were on the FISA court? And how demanding was the job?

Reggie Walton: I can't really calculate how many cases it was. Over the course of a week you would probably hear 40 cases.

It's very demanding. Information that is submitted by the government is 50, 60, 70 pages or more. And obviously you have to read more information to familiarize yourself with what the government is requesting.

CNN: What was your top concern as the FISA Court's chief judge? National security or civil liberties?

Walton: I think it's a combination of both, which makes the job very demanding.

Read more @ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/politics/nsa-surveillance-fisa-judge-reggie-walton/ 

Remember this article?  

Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process

Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise

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

After reading a few news articles on how much different people get for backing the spying…. Its hard to trust anyone who is backing it…..  the question is in the back of your mind all the time when you read articles like this….. "how much are they getting?"

Fight over NSA snooping, Patriot Act goes down to wire

Senators on Friday raced their own holiday-imposed deadline for preserving key Patriot Act powers, with Democrats accusing Republican leaders of trying to force a choice between having to back the NSA’s controversial bulk collection powers or else letting other wiretapping and lone-wolf terrorism tools expire.

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican trying to force the choice, said the blame instead lies with an Obama administration ready to scrap the National Security Agency’s phone-snooping program without having a viable backup in place.

“This is beyond troubling,” Mr. McConnell said, reading out President Obama’s own words last year defending the NSA program’s capabilities as “critical” to the fight against terrorists, and wondering what changed between then and now, when Mr. Obama has called on Congress to scrap the Patriot Act’s bulk collection powers, which would end the NSA program.

Mr. Obama could end the program himself, but has refused so far to do so, instead demanding Capitol Hill do it through legislation. House lawmakers, on a bipartisan basis, have agreed, passing the USA Freedom Act, which would prohibit government bulk data collection. That bill passed 338-88 with the blessing of House Speaker John A. Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Read more @ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/22/fight-over-nsa-snooping-patriot-act-goes-down-wire/?page=all 

 

I mentioned in the first or second thread on this subject that they would stall for time to give them time to build up the spying in other countries….. and it seems to be the case.  Australia, NZ, Canada, Iceland and Europe have taken up the reins so they can still do whatever they want to do.

 

Catherine Rampell: Big Brother finds home in Europe

FONTAINEBLEAU, France — From this side of the Atlantic, developments in the government surveillance debate look a little disorienting.

Over in Washington, supposedly the great innovator in “1984”-style surveillance, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., just spoke for 11 hours against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. A week earlier, the House overwhelmingly voted to limit the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection, which might force the agency to shut down, at least temporarily, its most controversial surveillance programs. And earlier this month, a federal appeals court unanimously declared much of the NSA’s work to be illegal.

The United States, in other words, seems to be in the process of modestly scaling back its surveillance state. But here in France — and in other European countries that have so fastidiously guarded privacy rights and so roundly condemned U.S. violations of those rights — the surveillance state is growing.

Big Brother, meet Grand Frere.

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA were met with furor in the European Union two years ago. How outrageous yet how very American it seemed that the Yanks had such little regard for the privacy of millions swept into their digital dragnets.

After all, in the European Union, unlike in the United States, privacy is an explicit human right. Its inclusion in the European Convention on Human Rights was partly motivated by Europe’s own harrowing experiences with trench-coated secret police, but in practice it has disproportionately imprinted itself upon the jurisprudence applied to private companies. Compared with the United States, Europe generally has more muscular laws regarding what information companies can track, use and retain, as evidenced by, for example, the many cookie alerts you see when surfing the Web here.

Peculiarly, though, over the years there has been relatively little regulation surrounding what data European governments should be allowed to collect and what they could do with that data.

Until now. And the answer appears to be: Perhaps even more than what the big, bad United States can do.

Read more @ http://lacrossetribune.com/news/opinion/catherine-rampell-big-brother-finds-home-in-europe/article_ecd5c6c8-a886-5b88-ad05-55eb8b5e06c0.html 

 

 

America’s Allies Want Their Own NSA Alternatives

Countries that for years have relied heavily on U.S. intelligence are quickly building up their own capabilities.

PARIS  — Fearful of an expanding extremist threat, countries that for years have relied heavily on U.S. intelligence are quickly building up their own capabilities with new technology, new laws and — in at least one case — a searing debate on how much the American government should be allowed to spy on their own citizens.

Responding to a jihadi movement that is successfully recruiting people from around the world, France and Canada are both passing laws that would dramatically ramp up their intelligence apparatus. In France, lawmakers are on the verge of approving a bill that would let the government install “black boxes” to collect metadata from every major phone and Internet company.

Canada’s measures were rushed through after a two separate attacks in October 2014 on Canadian soldiers — including one that ended when the gunman stormed Parliament and was shot to death by guards and police. France’s law went into high gear after the January terror attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 20 dead, including the gunmen.

Analysts say it’s not so much a question of diminishing cooperation with the U.S. — the revelations of Edward Snowden have ultimately done little to harm relationships between allies — as a push to increase domestic capacities ill-equipped to face the rising threat of Islamic State and other jihadi groups.

Read more @ http://www.mintpressnews.com/americas-allies-want-their-own-nsa-alternatives/205824/

 

For US allies, paradigm shift in intelligence collection

PARIS (AP) " Fearful of an expanding extremist threat, countries that for years have relied heavily on U.S. intelligence are quickly building up their own capabilities with new technology, new laws and " in at least one case " a searing debate on how much the American government should be allowed to spy on their own citizens.

Responding to a jihadi movement that is successfully recruiting people from around the world, France and Canada are both passing laws that would dramatically ramp up their surveillance apparatus. In France, lawmakers are on the verge of approving a bill that would let the government install "black boxes" to collect metadata from every major phone and Internet company.

Canada's measures were rushed through after a two separate attacks in October 2014 on Canadian soldiers " including one that ended when the gunman stormed Parliament and was shot to death by guards and police. France's law went into high gear after the January terror attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 20 dead, including the gunmen.

Analysts say it's not so much a question of diminishing cooperation with the U.S. " the revelations of Edward Snowden have ultimately done little to harm relationships between allies " as a push to increase domestic capacities ill-equipped to face the rising threat of Islamic State and other jihadi groups.

Read more @ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11452105 

 

Edward Snowden talks ethics of whistleblowing

Edward Snowden, former NSA infrastructure analyst turned whistleblower, spoke on May 15 to Cubberley Auditorium to discuss the philosophical tensions of whistleblowing and government surveillance. The 2015 Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker, Snowden spoke via video conference from Moscow.

Professors of philosophy John Perry and Kenneth Taylor moderated the discussion, part of which also served as a recording of “Philosophy Talk,” a nationally-syndicated radio program which grapples with problems in philosophy and how philosophy relates to our everyday lives.

After brief introductions by Perry and Taylor, Snowden addressed the dilemmas in whistleblowing and his thoughts on his situation. Taylor asked whether he sees himself as a hero or a traitor, considering the various depictions presented by the government and media.

“This is a really common question that’s asked a lot,” he said. “I think it’s got one of the least interesting answers. I don’t think about myself or how I will be perceived. It’s not about me. It’s about us. I’m not a hero. I’m not a traitor. I’m an ordinary American like anyone else in the room. I’m just trying to do the best that I can.”

Snowden, who currently resides in Russia under asylum, proceeded to discuss the cost-benefit analysis that whistleblowers must consider before leaking information.

“I certainly paid for it,” he said. “I lived in Hawaii, had a wonderful girlfriend, a home, a happy family, a successful career. To walk away from that it does require a real commitment to something…I think the driving principle is that you have to have a greater commitment to justice than a fear of the law.”

Read more @ http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/05/18/edward-snowden-talks-ethics-of-whistleblowing/ 


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