Edward Snowden & the NSA

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NSA/PRISM/Snowden news roundup

The Guardian has published a helpful “Online privacy and PRISM news and teaching resources round up.” It includes many of the Guardian articles I’ve been linking, plus teaching materials (anyone have Dick Cheney’s email?) and a lot more.

Snowden’s latest revelations in the Guardian make me reevaluate my recent quip about the Brits not wanting to get involved. Snowden disclosed that during the 2009 G20 summit in London, British agents were monitoring the computers and intercepting the phone calls of foreign officials and even set up an internet café so they could read their email. This is getting to look more and more like an episode of MI5, the BBC high-tech spy series that kept public TV viewers on the edge of their seats for several years. Snowden’s and the Guardian‘s timing is pretty good; the Brits are hosting a G8 summit Monday.

An Observer/Opinium poll of 1,942 Brits was released yesterday:

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The Brandon Mayfield Case

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency....

You don’t have to have done something wrong; you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. Then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone into the context of a wrongdoer.   —Edward Snowden

Lest you doubt Edward Snowden’s explanation of how the NSA’s dragnet might ensnare the innocent, Gail Collins’ column in today’s New York Times, “The Other Side of the Story” cites the Kafkaesque example of Brandon Mayfield of Portland, WA:

Based on a database mismatch of a suspicious fingerprint on a plastic bag tied to the Madrid bombing in Spain, where Mayfield had never set foot, agents obtained a secret warrant, broke into and searched his home. His 12-year-old daughter was terrified; she noticed someone had been in her room and had messed with her computer. The family became paranoid—for good reason. FBI agents walked into Mayfield’s office one day, handcuffed and took him away. He spent weeks in jail, imagining the worst. Spanish authorities, doubtful of the US fingerprint match, found the culprit who was the real match, and Mayfield was released.

What could possibly be more compelling than the fact that no one in the family had been to Spain? Well, the sophisticated government database that mismatched his fingerprint, correctly showed that Mayfield, who grew up in Kansas, after graduating from college, law school and serving in the Army, married an Egyptian immigrant and converted to Islam. He eventually got a rare FBI apology and $2 million for his trouble. “But you never quite get over these things,” Mayfield said. “It was a harrowing ordeal. It was terrifying.”

For more on the Brandon Mayfield case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield

http://www.justicedenied.org/issue/issue_25/brandon_mayfield.html

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NSA/Snowden links:

Here are a couple links to more info:

…a New York Times piece about Ed Snowden’s daring adventures in Hong Kong and what we might call the Chinese gambit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/world/asia/ex-nsa-contractors-disclosures-could-complicate-his-fate.html?nl=afternoonupdate&emc=edit_au_20130614

…and the week-old Guardian story detailing the NSA PRISM program, which goes much further than the metadata surveillance described in Snowden’s first revelations. NSA began directly accessing Microsoft servers in 2007 and has expanded the program to include all of the major Internet service providers—Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Apple and probably whatever servers this connection we’re sharing right now is going through:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data#start-of-comments

PrismPRISM slide crop

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Confused?

The Guradian yesterday released a survey by Public Policy Polling which indicates that Ameircans may be more concerned about the National Security Agencies digital dragnet than polling results reported earlier suggest. PPP polls are generally reliable and target voters, which may explain some of the variations in attitudes. Of course different questions were being answered, too.

Congress oversight poll.

Two-thirds of the voters surveyed want NSA surveillance activities reviewed; 56 percent want greater congressional oversight. Sixty percent want the government to open up about its data collection programs to understand what’s going on; 61 percent welcome fresh debate about the balance between security and privacy.

PPP also found a major (58%) concern about the role of private contractors’ access to state secrets. Voters are pretty evenly split on whether they approve of the government’s collection of their personal phone and internet data.

Clearly, Mr. Snowden has stirred the pot. The Guardian reported:

The poll suggests that his stated ambition has, at least for now, been achieved: some 90% of those surveyed said they had heard about the recent news involving the NSA’s collecting and storing of Verizon phone records and gaining access to data from major internet companies…

Other reports, in the Guardian and elsewhere, show Snowden playing a skillful yet very dangerous game. Some have questioned his choice of Hong Kong to make his stand. He seems to have the US government in a Catch 22: If he is charged and extradited, Hong Kong police must arrest him, seize his files and computers; and hand them over to the Chinese government, which the US may want to avoid.

If the Brits were to get involved, it would make one heck of an MI5 episode! But it looks like the Brits do definitely not want to be involved. The Home Office has alerted the world’s airlines that Mr. Snowden is persona non grata; dropping him on British soil will cost—£2,000 + cost of housing and/or disposing of Snowden. The Brits don’t want to become entangled in another secret documents leak scandal. Last year, facing extradition to Sweden WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London,

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in the minority again

I should not have been surprised yesterday, when CBS released a poll showing that 59 percent of Americans think the government has struck the right balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties or that the government has not gone far enough, while only 36 percent say the NSA has overreached.

CBS pollThe Pew Research Center & Washington Post just released a poll showing similar attitudes:

Public opinion hasn’t changed much in the seven years since USA Today reported that the government:

has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth,” attributing that information to “people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Two days later, on May 7, 2006, the Washington Post reported that the NSA practice was acceptable to 63 percent of those polled and unacceptable to 35 percent.

Gee, I’m in the minority—again. I kinda feel like I did when I quit paying the 10 percent federal excise tax on my phone in 1968. The tax was thought to be supporting the war in Vietnam. Along with turning in my draft card at an anti-war rally, it was a feeble protest. The IRS attached my bank account and recovered the tax. I closed the bank account, bought and converted a school bus, boarded my family, some friends and disappeared from the system until reemerging some years later…. But that’s another story.

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The right of the people

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If these words no longer apply, we should go through the process of amending them. In an opinion piece published in the Guardian and on his blog, Dan Ellsberg describes the NSA operations Ed Snowden disclosed as an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. —Hannah Arendt

Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution….
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Turnkey tyranny

 

Edward Snowden [Guradian image]

Those words concluded Ed Snowden’s interview with the Guardian after he disclosed the National Security Agency’s communications dragnet:

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know at length that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

In the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only gonna get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change,. . .a new leader will be elected; they’ll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the danger we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat: “We need more authority. We need more power.” And there’ll be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It’ll be turnkey tyranny.

Those last two words rang a bell. Last week, when the story broke, I was more outraged than surprised; I knew there was something familiar about Snowden’s revelations. In March, 2012, I read an article in Wired magazine about the Utah Data Center then being completed at Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City. The article revealed in detail not only the functions of the data center but also a lot about the NSA surveillance programs it would facilitate, the programs about which Snowden has sounded an alarm:

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Later in the story:

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

I had forgotten until rereading the article how much detail it contains, which Snowden’s revelations confirm. I encourage you to read it: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/ 

English: Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Daniel Ellsberg, whom I mentioned in my previous post, has spoken up, calling Snowden’s revelations the most significant disclosure in the nation’s history:

I was overjoyed that finally an official with high or a former official with high access, good knowledge of the abusive system that he was revealing was ready to tell the truth at whatever cost to his own future safety, or his career, ready to give up his career, risk even prison to inform the American people.

What he was looking at and what he told us about was the form of behavior, the practice of policy that’s blatantly unconstitutional. I respect his judgment of having withheld most of what he knows, as an information specialist, on the grounds that its secrecy is legitimate and that the benefit to the American people of knowing it would be outweighed by possible dangers. What he has chosen, on the other hand, to put out, again confirms very good judgment. …There has been no more significant disclosure in the history of our country. And I’ll include the Pentagon Papers in that. . . .

I fear for our rights. I fear for our democracy, and I think others should too. And I don’t think, actually, that we are governed by people in Congress, the courts or the White House who have sufficient concern for the requirements of maintaining a democracy.

I am really glad the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit to stop these blatantly unconstitutional programs. However, I fear that Ellsberg’s assessment is true; Congress and the White House have created a monster that is raging out of control. Can they rein it in? Can, will We (the People)?

It is not looking good: CBS has just released a poll showing that 46 percent of Americans think the government has struck the right balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties, 36 percent say the NSA has overreached, and 13 percent say the government has not gon far enough. CBS poll This, my friends, is disturbing news.