This is why this matters: Harvard Profs OP-Ed in Guardian

This is why this should matter to every single person on Earth even if you "Have nothing to hide".

"The spate of new NSA disclosures substantially raises the stakes of this debate. We now know that the intelligence establishment systematically undermines oversight by lying to both Congress and the courts. We know that the NSA infiltrates internet standard-setting processes to security protocols that make surveillance harder. We know that the NSA uses persuasion, subterfuge, and legal coercion to distort software and hardware product design by commercial companies.

We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.

First, the lying. The National Intelligence University, based in Washington, DC, offers a certificate program called the denial and deception advanced studies program. That's not a farcical sci-fi dystopia; it's a real program about countering denial and deception by other countries. The repeated misrepresentations suggest that the intelligence establishment has come to see its civilian bosses as adversaries to be managed through denial and deception."

Additionally he says this..

"What did we actually know about what we got in exchange for undermining internet security, technology markets, internet social capital, and the American constitutional order? The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive. And we the people? Not so much. Court documents released this week show that after its first three years of operation, the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant".

www.theguardian.com...

Pretty Daming stuff in my opinion and what I have been saying more or less since before the Snowden leaks.

The NSA has not been able to provide any proof that this total information awareness program has stopped anything. They claim it has but have yet to offer a single shred of proof. Did it stop the Boston Bomings? Did it stop today's attack in DC? How about the Christmas Day underwear bomber who was a failed device away from killing hundreds of people.

I also could not post this in the posse comitatus forum with the new system although I have posted other NSA stories there. Feel free to move it mods.

reply to post by GArnold

...the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant".

Pretty succinct, case rested (if it could only be that easy).

The other question is, how many civil criminal cases have been created/assisted with the very same apparatus? More than three is my guess.

Anybody remember what the 4th amendment is?

reply to post by greencmp


Exactly my and His points. The only thing this system had done is trample our Fourth Admendment rights into the ground. It has already been reported the NSA has provided much information to the DEA to prosecute domestic drug offenses.

Hypothetically even if the Total Information System had stopped say 50 attacks. Is it really worth it? At what point are you willing to give up your freedom? Shouldn't you have the right to be "Secure in your effects" as the 4th promises?

"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.[1]"

I have to believe if the framers had done this post 1980 say they would have added "Secure in their computer systems and Internet activity"

en.m.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by GArnold

"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.[1]"

Oh yeah! That's it, thanks, we forgot.

greencmp

Anybody remember what the 4th amendment is?

edit on 16-9-2013 by greencmp because: (no reason given)

"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.[1]"

AND............

REMINDER: ..........

The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) is an amendment to the United States Constitution and part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted in response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, a type of general search warrant issued by the British Government and a major source of tension in pre-Revolutionary America. The Fourth Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison, along with the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, in response to Anti-Federalist objections to the new Constitution. Congress proposed the amendment to the states on September 28, 1789, and by December 15, 1791, the necessary three-quarters of the states had ratified it. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson announced the adoption of the amendment on March 1, 1792.

I am also reminded here when reading anything on the Bill of Rights etc., of what is often said about Latin.........its a dead language. Do you see the parallel- the simile? - if so what are you all going to do about it?

reply to post by YodHeVauHe


Thank you for providing the context on the 4th and the Bill of Rights. It is clear that the US has routinely discarded whatever Admenment they want during " times of war". Quite a few of Lincoln's decisions during the Civil War were at odds with the Bill of Rights. Same can be said of WW1, WW2 etc. What is alarming to me about this is the scope of the surveillance and the blatant disregard if the law... In addition to the lying and misrepresentation of what is truly occurring to the American Public.

None of Snowdens disclosures have been new to be honest. Bamford wrote a famous article about Bluffdale a few years ago in Wired and essentially exposed the system to a very accurate degree.

From his article.. Again I read it two or three years ago.

"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.”


www.wired.com...

Haunting last line. "Everybody is a target. Everybody with communication is a target".

The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive

Absolutely right, they are taking billions and billions of dollars to spy on us. Having been in military intelligence, I can tell you that these people will claim to love America and the constitution, but they are really like a religious cult that believes they can do anything and everything as long as someone makes a claim of "national interest", no matter how tenuous that claim may be.

They are basically neocons.