14 ms·

NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

834 points by declan 13y ago

LoganCale 13y ago
So did Obama blatantly lie to us in his statement, or is he not aware what's going on? I have to think, if they admitted it to Congress, Obama had to know.
- javert 13y ago
  Either way, he's failed in his duty.
- tptacek 13y ago
  He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
  - uptown 13y ago
    “The National Security Agency does not listen to Americans’ phone calls and it is not reading Americans’ emails. None of these programs allow that,” -Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-committee-leaders-defend-nsa-surveillance/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-co...
    - tptacek 13y ago
      It is possible for that to be true, too: that to the best of anyone's knowledge, even though NSA retains the capability to listen to arbitrary calls, it has used that capability only in instances where they are reasonably certain that the calls weren't from Americans. (Although half the site seems to think I'm an NSA supporter, here I'll again make it clear that the telco access NSA seems to have is an extremely bad thing.)
      - uptown 13y ago
        How about this one ... keyword: "in the United States" which I guess means that it's either a lie, or they capture data outside the United States. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=youtu.be
  - spikels 13y ago
    This really is becoming like 1984. First we had a president arguing about the meaning of "is". Next we get the the DIA lying to Congress say "No" when the truth was "Yes" and then when caught explaining he answered in the "least untruthful manner". Now when our president says [1]: "nobody is listening to your telephone calls" "if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge" "nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls" "do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court" It actually means this [2]: "If the NSA wants 'to listen to the phone,' an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required" [1] http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-248480/ http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2... [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...
gojomo 13y ago
Gallup should do a new poll: "Do you support or oppose NSA analysts being able to decide, on their own suspicion, to listen to domestic calls, before any warrants for those specific calls are issued? Please state your answer slowly and clearly for the NSA recording devices."
return0 13y ago
On a related note, it seems that journalists are listening in all kinds of "secret briefings" of the US government.
sneak 13y ago
Thank you Mr. Snowden. Here it comes. Strap in!
jlgreco 13y ago
> "Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."" I wonder if this will temper the shrill cries of "this is all partisan!". Probably not.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  As an extreme left-wing Democrat who opposes any attempt by government to acquire non-public information without a warrant, I must ask, what "shrill cries" are those?
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    As one extreme left-wing nut to another, let me suggest that you enter the word "partisan" in the search box below, sort by date, then start clicking back through the past few days.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Having now done so, I think your definition of "shrill" and mine are entirely unrelated, as are our definitions of the word "all". I see annoyance with some clearly partisan statements and actions. I see people talking about the pathetic, even laughably bad polls done on the subject, and badly misinterpreting the statistics. And, of course, there's the idiot who decided that if half of Democrats support an action, that must mean all Democrats are mindless Obama supporters. But I see no one suggesting that all outrage about this is partisan, much less shrilly.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        I suppose you are more charitable than I am.
spikels 13y ago
Wait - what? Isn't it our leaders consistent position that "listening" without a specific warrant is wrong? Now I am really confused.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Well, clearly they thought that they could keep you in the dark about the fact that what they can do without a warrant actually extends this far. Obama's credibility is at an all time low.
- a3n 13y ago
  This is just an unusually stark demonstration of how it really works: One party stakes out a set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a portion of the population, and then actually do WTF ever they want. Another party stakes out a different set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a different portion of the population, and then do WTF ever they want to do. What both parties want to do is often surprisingly the same. We let them know what we want to be told, and then they cleverly tell it to us.
- mpyne 13y ago
  That's their position, yes, and was even the position Mueller gave in the unclassified briefing right before the Senator told him there was a conflict in what was said. I suspect that in the classified briefing the Senator was told something to the effect that phone calls are recorded without a warrant, possibly even that an analyst could flag someone's phone number to be recorded. Presumably whoever was giving the brief failed to make clear that the analyst would need a warrant to listen to the call, as I didn't see in the linked article a direct mention that the analyst could listen, only "tap in". IMHO this would still run afoul of wiretapping law but certainly the difference between "collect" and "analyze" is an area where NSA has been pushing the boundaries between what is "search and seizure" and what is everything else, so it is at least consistent with their other information collection programs.
ScottBurson 13y ago
Note to author: you misspelled Brewster Kahle's name.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
My guess: they realize they are up shit creek because Snowden is about to leak further details of that too. And they hope to soften the blow.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  Doesn't seem like they will get very far trying to paddle out without flinging shit elsewhere…
tptacek 13y ago
So that's not good. You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists. But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail.
- MWil 13y ago
  THE MAN in the middle
  - tptacek 13y ago
    A huge portion of all Google Mail connections can't be MITM'd even if NSA has an SSL CA banked, because Google baked the identity of their public key into their browser (using public key pinning). File that under "things you don't do if your goal is to cooperate with NSA surveillance", by the way.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - marshray 13y ago
      It would be possible to backdoor the SSL offload devices such that passively intercepted connections were decryptable. The revelations of the past week seem to put this category of idea back on the map.
- sneak 13y ago
  A copy of Google's SSL private keys, provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy, would suffice if they'd already tapped all the transit fibers (though not gmail-to-gmail).
deleted 13y ago
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drcode 13y ago
This will play out exactly like the waterboarding thing: 1. The journalists probably already warned the administration about this stuff a couple of months ago. 2. In the near future, the wh press secretary releases a statement about how this is already old news and how the prez already put a halt to this back in February (or whatever) which explains how all the recent statements by wh and Google etc can be truthful. 3. NSA spooks spend the next 5 years whining internally how they can't do their jobs anymore because of all the bothersome warrants. 4. The next top secret program is started in 2018 that does away with all the "cumbersome" oversight.
lessnonymous 13y ago
Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?
- burntsushi 13y ago
  I'm also quite curious about this. The article doesn't even seem to acknowledge the fact that Nadler disclosed supposedly classified information. The only thing I can surmise is that a "classified briefing" may contain unclassified information: Rep. Nadler's disclosure that NSA analysts can listen to calls without court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday that included FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness. Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual." Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked. "I don't think so," Mueller replied. "Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
- khuey 13y ago
  Nadler is a U.S. Congressman, Snowden is an IT grunt?
- marshray 13y ago
  Because he's a lawyer cross-examining a witness. Video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 From TFA: Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual." Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked. "I don't think so," Mueller replied. "Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
uptown 13y ago
Shia LaBeouf claims to have listened to a phone call he'd made years prior, replayed to him by an FBI agent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw Former FBI Agent Denies He Gave Shia LaBeouf a Recording of an Old Phone Call: http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Agent-Denies-He-Gave-Shia-LaBeouf-a-Recording-of-an-Old-Phone-Call http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Age... If you're going to make up a story - why would you come up with the whole 'two years ago' twist? It's a details that makes no sense to fabricate unless it actually happened.
marcamillion 13y ago
I am confused by this particular piece of disclosure. Who is disclosing it? CNET or Rep. Darrel? If Rep. Darrel said it....y do they need comment? If he isn't disclosing it, how did CNET come by this statement? This is quite confusing.
- burntsushi 13y ago
  This cleared it up for me: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 * * - Originally posted by marshray. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886860
  - marcamillion 13y ago
    Wow....thanks for this. That is just.....why was this not picked up from before?
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material. Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked. Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
  Part of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.
  - Homunculiheaded 13y ago
    It's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
    - kunai 13y ago
      Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
aspensmonster 13y ago
>"That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed. " So the numbers we recently got from Facebook and Microsoft don't mean anything.
- tptacek 13y ago
  No, I don't think it means that. As I understand it ('declan could correct me), a court order isn't required to issue a collection directive under FISA, but one is required to enforce such an order.
MattyRad 13y ago
"Nobody is listening to your phone calls." Oh, I presume that Obama was just addressing every American whose phone calls had not been listened to. This is outrageous, baffling. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama did just outright lie about it, right?
zmmmmm 13y ago
There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here. The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article). But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening. This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.
- moxie 13y ago
  Here is the video clip from General Alexander's congressional testimony three days ago, where he stated this was not happening: http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s It's not clear to me whether they were sworn in for this hearing or not, but if this new report is true, then this seems to be at least the second documented case of an exposed lie about the scope of surveillance during congressional testimony. The first, of course, being Clapper's "not wittingly:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY
  - cpleppert 13y ago
    He might be interpreting the claim as being that Snowden could do that, which is, of course, false.
    - gojomo 13y ago
      I don't follow your "of course, false". Maybe Snowden really could obtain wiretaps of federal judges and the President, either because he was given the discretionary permission to do so in the course of an investigation, or they were available to him with a little trivial privilege-escalation. Alexander might have meant Snowden wasn't supposed to have that capability. Or that Snowden had it but wasn't supposed to use it that way, so he "couldn't" do it under the law (but could in practice). It's hard to say; the testimony has often used obfuscatory weasel words and conveniently shifting definitions, and the avuncular grandparents in the Senate aren't exactly vigorous in their cross-examination.
rafski 13y ago
If "anything you say will be used against you", does it mean everyone is under arrest, we just don't know it yet?
deleted 13y ago
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coldtea 13y ago
Here's two more classics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment And, strange enough: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...
dlinder 13y ago
There seems to be some suggestion of confusion on the Representative's part about call content vs Subscriber Information, actual video here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-claims-he-was-told-government-could-listen http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-cl... So this might not be the "gotcha" it first appears.
coldcode 13y ago
1984 is not a how-to manual.
mpyne 13y ago
See? Now this is a problem. I don't see how you can interpret Court precedent and statutory law regarding telephone wiretapping to mean anything other than that you can't intercept that without a warrant. I remember the other day saying that the "warrant canary" was far too cute to make it past a judge. This might be an even "cuter" argument... should it ever make it in front of a judge (I suspect NSA doesn't actually care about that, given that they're not generally trying to bring cases to court anyways as they'd have to give up their top secret methods on purpose).
deleted 13y ago
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shmerl 13y ago
Didn't we expect this coming?
larsonf 13y ago
There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be: Tabloids. If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it. Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place. So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.
teawithcarl 13y ago
IMPORTANT - regarding the 2-min video CNET bases its story on. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
aptwebapps 13y ago
You can argue about metadata and the third party doctrine, but this is completing against the Fourth Amendment. Unless you're going to say that phone conversations should not be considered 'papers and effects'. Or unless the phone companies themselves are recording the calls and keeping them around, which seems highly unlikely.
landini 13y ago
So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information. Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment. The Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
landini 13y ago
So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information. Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment. As the Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
tarellel 13y ago
Big surprise to America here. It's just a shame a large majority of people don't care because they say "they're just protecting our freedom" that's a big double stack of bullshit!
tarellel 13y ago
Big surprise to America here. It's just a shame a large majority of people don't care because they say "they're just protecting our freedom" that's a big double stack of bullshit!
eli 13y ago
Declan, there seems to be skepticism[0] about this story in some quarters. Could you address the concern that Jerry Nadler is simply confused about what he heard? [0] https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 & https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 for example
bizkeep223 13y ago
I suggest watching the CSPAN video.I think they are talking about metadata. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
linuxhansl 13y ago
In school I learned that we have the three powers - the legislative, judicial, and executive - are separated so that they keep each other in balance. If any two of these are held in the same hands there are no restrictions. (if you can make laws and preside over trials you make bring anyone to jail, or if you can preside over trials and execute the sentence) That's why (IMHO) individual wiretaps with a warrant are fine. Somebody had to make a law, a judge had to weigh the facts and issue a warrant, and an FBI agent/cop/etc executes the actual tap. In this case the NSA analyst is both the judge and the executor violating these checks and balances. Now maybe there might be temporary warrants for wider range of individuals, even t
hugogee 13y ago
Here we have a great tool at our diposal(internet) and all we can do is use it to bitch, moan and compare notes. Surprisingly, politicians feel they can do as they please. Its a shame we cannot organize and do something about it. I wonder what effect(s) striking for a week would have? Typically solutions are of equal proportion to the problem at hand. But its so inconvenient-i know. A less affected Hong Kong has held a rally but here those most impacted-nothing. Ughh im tired of reading this shit. We deserve everything we get. Or we could take this as a challenge to see how many people we can get to strike. So much talent here... How will it end?
Uhhrrr 13y ago
So, if I wanted to listen in on some phone calls, would the best course of action be to bribe one of these thousands of analysts, blackmail them, threaten them, or steal their laptop? Asking for a friend in a foreign intelligence service.
spikels 13y ago
Why are we only hearing about this now? From the House Judiciary Committee meeting on THURSDAY where Nadler questions FBI Director Mueller: NADLER: You wanted to listen to the phone? MUELLER: Then you have to get a special — a particularized order from... NADLER: Particularized... MUELLER: ... the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual. NADLER: Now is the answer you just gave me classified... MUELLER: Is what? NADLER: The answer you just gave me classified in any way? MUELLER: I don't think so. NADLER: OK, then I can ask the — then I can say the following: We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that, and you didn't need a new warrant. In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict... MUELLER: I'm not certain that it's the same answer to the same question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... NADLER: Well, I asked the question both times, and I think it's the same question. So maybe you'd better go back and check, because someone was incorrect. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141
jsilence 13y ago
I wonder what happened if the US put the estimated 10$ billion NSA budget into solar and other renewables and withdrew from all the countries where they are (to bring peace and democracy).
realrocker 13y ago
Ok Off topic. Why are there no street protests in U.S? Or no one cares?
w_t_payne 13y ago
The chain of command relies on trust, trust that officials will tell the truth to those who oversee them. It seems to me that the chain of command is broken. NSA officials lied to the public. They lied to Congress. If the allegations of procedural abuse are true, they have lied to and deceived every single mechanism that has been set up to oversee and control their operation. They have gone rogue. If this supposition is true, their actions go beyond simple criminality. This is treachery; treason and mutiny against the people of the United States. Let us raise the hue and cry! Traitors! Traitors in our midst!
auxibee 13y ago
they should be taken to court
fastfade 13y ago
it's too late America - the frog is cooked. thanks for being so engaged.
jsmeaton 13y ago
A friend of mine recently suggested that thousands of people around the world get on the phones once every week and just say words like "bomb" and "president" and "terrorist". If the US really is vacuuming up the actual audio (perhaps based on live keyword/phrase analysis) it would either send their systems into overdrive or at least make it harder for these analysts to get the real information they'd be looking for. Suddenly doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
dodyg 13y ago
In the name of protecting you: - Your government has launched a war under false premises - Your government already ignores Habeas Corpus(read gitmo) - Your government already reserves the right to kill you without judicial consent - Your government can already prevent you from flying without allowing much recourse for rectifying errors - Your government is spying on your data and phone calls Whatever happened to "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave"
D9u 13y ago
...the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year... Ah, so that's why China has overtaken the USA in the computing power race... Wasting money on spying instead of building better computers. All who support these abuses of our Bill of Rights should be ashamed of themselves.
NIL8 13y ago
Most people don't realize that the NSA is about ten times larger than the CIA. This allows them to aggregate data on a scale that is unprecedented. Being such a large organization, they still don't have the manpower to process so much data. Thus, the solution is to acquire and store this data for future use. I would imagine that even they don't know exactly what they have.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
You know spys... a bunch of bitchy little girls...
teawithcarl 13y ago
Nadler denies the CNET story -- OOPS. https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/346304794970968064 https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/346304794970968064 -- just tweeted by Trevor Timm (Sunday, noon).
orokusaki 13y ago
Please, somebody - who knows the URL (or the HN post) wherein the guy (IIRC, a lawyer) states the 10 things the government will do to reduce the fallout from this? I'm totally freaked out because the guy was right, down to the last step, so far. One of them was, "They'll admit to something not as bad" (as a method of deflection - and think about it, most people view "listening" as something that won't affect them directly, unless the NSA hired about 250k more employees just for this task), one of them was that the government will say they were within the law (which is contradictory, of course) - happened here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/16/u-s-government-denies-reports-that-nsa-analysts-can-listen-to-domestic-calls-without-legal-authorization/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/16/u-s-government-denies-repor... and 2 more of the steps happened in the past few days. I want to find that article, so I can spread it to everyone know I know (about 10 people :) Thanks orokusaki

834 points by declan 13y ago

So did Obama blatantly lie to us in his statement, or is he not aware what's going on? I have to think, if they admitted it to Congress, Obama had to know.

javert 13y ago
Either way, he's failed in his duty.
tptacek 13y ago
He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
- uptown 13y ago
  “The National Security Agency does not listen to Americans’ phone calls and it is not reading Americans’ emails. None of these programs allow that,” -Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-committee-leaders-defend-nsa-surveillance/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-co...
  - tptacek 13y ago
    It is possible for that to be true, too: that to the best of anyone's knowledge, even though NSA retains the capability to listen to arbitrary calls, it has used that capability only in instances where they are reasonably certain that the calls weren't from Americans. (Although half the site seems to think I'm an NSA supporter, here I'll again make it clear that the telco access NSA seems to have is an extremely bad thing.)
    - uptown 13y ago
      How about this one ... keyword: "in the United States" which I guess means that it's either a lie, or they capture data outside the United States. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=youtu.be
- spikels 13y ago
  This really is becoming like 1984. First we had a president arguing about the meaning of "is". Next we get the the DIA lying to Congress say "No" when the truth was "Yes" and then when caught explaining he answered in the "least untruthful manner". Now when our president says [1]: "nobody is listening to your telephone calls" "if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge" "nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls" "do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court" It actually means this [2]: "If the NSA wants 'to listen to the phone,' an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required" [1] http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-248480/ http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2... [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...

gojomo 13y ago

Gallup should do a new poll: "Do you support or oppose NSA analysts being able to decide, on their own suspicion, to listen to domestic calls, before any warrants for those specific calls are issued? Please state your answer slowly and clearly for the NSA recording devices."

return0 13y ago

On a related note, it seems that journalists are listening in all kinds of "secret briefings" of the US government.

sneak 13y ago

Thank you Mr. Snowden. Here it comes. Strap in!

jlgreco 13y ago

> "Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."" I wonder if this will temper the shrill cries of "this is all partisan!". Probably not.

nknighthb 13y ago
As an extreme left-wing Democrat who opposes any attempt by government to acquire non-public information without a warrant, I must ask, what "shrill cries" are those?
- jlgreco 13y ago
  As one extreme left-wing nut to another, let me suggest that you enter the word "partisan" in the search box below, sort by date, then start clicking back through the past few days.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Having now done so, I think your definition of "shrill" and mine are entirely unrelated, as are our definitions of the word "all". I see annoyance with some clearly partisan statements and actions. I see people talking about the pathetic, even laughably bad polls done on the subject, and badly misinterpreting the statistics. And, of course, there's the idiot who decided that if half of Democrats support an action, that must mean all Democrats are mindless Obama supporters. But I see no one suggesting that all outrage about this is partisan, much less shrilly.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I suppose you are more charitable than I am.

spikels 13y ago

Wait - what? Isn't it our leaders consistent position that "listening" without a specific warrant is wrong? Now I am really confused.

jordanthoms 13y ago
Well, clearly they thought that they could keep you in the dark about the fact that what they can do without a warrant actually extends this far. Obama's credibility is at an all time low.
a3n 13y ago
This is just an unusually stark demonstration of how it really works: One party stakes out a set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a portion of the population, and then actually do WTF ever they want. Another party stakes out a different set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a different portion of the population, and then do WTF ever they want to do. What both parties want to do is often surprisingly the same. We let them know what we want to be told, and then they cleverly tell it to us.
mpyne 13y ago
That's their position, yes, and was even the position Mueller gave in the unclassified briefing right before the Senator told him there was a conflict in what was said. I suspect that in the classified briefing the Senator was told something to the effect that phone calls are recorded without a warrant, possibly even that an analyst could flag someone's phone number to be recorded. Presumably whoever was giving the brief failed to make clear that the analyst would need a warrant to listen to the call, as I didn't see in the linked article a direct mention that the analyst could listen, only "tap in". IMHO this would still run afoul of wiretapping law but certainly the difference between "collect" and "analyze" is an area where NSA has been pushing the boundaries between what is "search and seizure" and what is everything else, so it is at least consistent with their other information collection programs.

ScottBurson 13y ago

Note to author: you misspelled Brewster Kahle's name.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

My guess: they realize they are up shit creek because Snowden is about to leak further details of that too. And they hope to soften the blow.

cinquemb 13y ago
Doesn't seem like they will get very far trying to paddle out without flinging shit elsewhere…

tptacek 13y ago

So that's not good. You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists. But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail.

MWil 13y ago
THE MAN in the middle
- tptacek 13y ago
  A huge portion of all Google Mail connections can't be MITM'd even if NSA has an SSL CA banked, because Google baked the identity of their public key into their browser (using public key pinning). File that under "things you don't do if your goal is to cooperate with NSA surveillance", by the way.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - marshray 13y ago
    It would be possible to backdoor the SSL offload devices such that passively intercepted connections were decryptable. The revelations of the past week seem to put this category of idea back on the map.
sneak 13y ago
A copy of Google's SSL private keys, provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy, would suffice if they'd already tapped all the transit fibers (though not gmail-to-gmail).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

drcode 13y ago

This will play out exactly like the waterboarding thing: 1. The journalists probably already warned the administration about this stuff a couple of months ago. 2. In the near future, the wh press secretary releases a statement about how this is already old news and how the prez already put a halt to this back in February (or whatever) which explains how all the recent statements by wh and Google etc can be truthful. 3. NSA spooks spend the next 5 years whining internally how they can't do their jobs anymore because of all the bothersome warrants. 4. The next top secret program is started in 2018 that does away with all the "cumbersome" oversight.

lessnonymous 13y ago

Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?

burntsushi 13y ago
I'm also quite curious about this. The article doesn't even seem to acknowledge the fact that Nadler disclosed supposedly classified information. The only thing I can surmise is that a "classified briefing" may contain unclassified information: Rep. Nadler's disclosure that NSA analysts can listen to calls without court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday that included FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness. Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual." Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked. "I don't think so," Mueller replied. "Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
khuey 13y ago
Nadler is a U.S. Congressman, Snowden is an IT grunt?
marshray 13y ago
Because he's a lawyer cross-examining a witness. Video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 From TFA: Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual." Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked. "I don't think so," Mueller replied. "Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."

uptown 13y ago

Shia LaBeouf claims to have listened to a phone call he'd made years prior, replayed to him by an FBI agent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw Former FBI Agent Denies He Gave Shia LaBeouf a Recording of an Old Phone Call: http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Agent-Denies-He-Gave-Shia-LaBeouf-a-Recording-of-an-Old-Phone-Call http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Age... If you're going to make up a story - why would you come up with the whole 'two years ago' twist? It's a details that makes no sense to fabricate unless it actually happened.

marcamillion 13y ago

I am confused by this particular piece of disclosure. Who is disclosing it? CNET or Rep. Darrel? If Rep. Darrel said it....y do they need comment? If he isn't disclosing it, how did CNET come by this statement? This is quite confusing.

burntsushi 13y ago
This cleared it up for me: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 * * - Originally posted by marshray. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886860
- marcamillion 13y ago
  Wow....thanks for this. That is just.....why was this not picked up from before?
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure.
deleted 13y ago
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DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material. Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked. Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.

Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
Part of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.
- Homunculiheaded 13y ago
  It's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
  - kunai 13y ago
    Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

aspensmonster 13y ago

>"That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed. " So the numbers we recently got from Facebook and Microsoft don't mean anything.

tptacek 13y ago
No, I don't think it means that. As I understand it ('declan could correct me), a court order isn't required to issue a collection directive under FISA, but one is required to enforce such an order.

MattyRad 13y ago

"Nobody is listening to your phone calls." Oh, I presume that Obama was just addressing every American whose phone calls had not been listened to. This is outrageous, baffling. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama did just outright lie about it, right?

zmmmmm 13y ago

There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here. The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article). But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening. This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.

moxie 13y ago
Here is the video clip from General Alexander's congressional testimony three days ago, where he stated this was not happening: http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s It's not clear to me whether they were sworn in for this hearing or not, but if this new report is true, then this seems to be at least the second documented case of an exposed lie about the scope of surveillance during congressional testimony. The first, of course, being Clapper's "not wittingly:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY
- cpleppert 13y ago
  He might be interpreting the claim as being that Snowden could do that, which is, of course, false.
  - gojomo 13y ago
    I don't follow your "of course, false". Maybe Snowden really could obtain wiretaps of federal judges and the President, either because he was given the discretionary permission to do so in the course of an investigation, or they were available to him with a little trivial privilege-escalation. Alexander might have meant Snowden wasn't supposed to have that capability. Or that Snowden had it but wasn't supposed to use it that way, so he "couldn't" do it under the law (but could in practice). It's hard to say; the testimony has often used obfuscatory weasel words and conveniently shifting definitions, and the avuncular grandparents in the Senate aren't exactly vigorous in their cross-examination.

rafski 13y ago

If "anything you say will be used against you", does it mean everyone is under arrest, we just don't know it yet?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 13y ago

Here's two more classics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment And, strange enough: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...

dlinder 13y ago

There seems to be some suggestion of confusion on the Representative's part about call content vs Subscriber Information, actual video here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-claims-he-was-told-government-could-listen http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-cl... So this might not be the "gotcha" it first appears.

coldcode 13y ago

1984 is not a how-to manual.

mpyne 13y ago

See? Now this is a problem. I don't see how you can interpret Court precedent and statutory law regarding telephone wiretapping to mean anything other than that you can't intercept that without a warrant. I remember the other day saying that the "warrant canary" was far too cute to make it past a judge. This might be an even "cuter" argument... should it ever make it in front of a judge (I suspect NSA doesn't actually care about that, given that they're not generally trying to bring cases to court anyways as they'd have to give up their top secret methods on purpose).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 13y ago

Didn't we expect this coming?

larsonf 13y ago

There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be: Tabloids. If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it. Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place. So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.

teawithcarl 13y ago

IMPORTANT - regarding the 2-min video CNET bases its story on. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...

aptwebapps 13y ago

You can argue about metadata and the third party doctrine, but this is completing against the Fourth Amendment. Unless you're going to say that phone conversations should not be considered 'papers and effects'. Or unless the phone companies themselves are recording the calls and keeping them around, which seems highly unlikely.

landini 13y ago

So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information. Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment. The Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.

landini 13y ago

So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information. Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment. As the Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.

tarellel 13y ago

Big surprise to America here. It's just a shame a large majority of people don't care because they say "they're just protecting our freedom" that's a big double stack of bullshit!

tarellel 13y ago

Big surprise to America here. It's just a shame a large majority of people don't care because they say "they're just protecting our freedom" that's a big double stack of bullshit!

eli 13y ago

Declan, there seems to be skepticism[0] about this story in some quarters. Could you address the concern that Jerry Nadler is simply confused about what he heard? [0] https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 & https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 for example

bizkeep223 13y ago

I suggest watching the CSPAN video.I think they are talking about metadata. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...

linuxhansl 13y ago

In school I learned that we have the three powers - the legislative, judicial, and executive - are separated so that they keep each other in balance. If any two of these are held in the same hands there are no restrictions. (if you can make laws and preside over trials you make bring anyone to jail, or if you can preside over trials and execute the sentence) That's why (IMHO) individual wiretaps with a warrant are fine. Somebody had to make a law, a judge had to weigh the facts and issue a warrant, and an FBI agent/cop/etc executes the actual tap. In this case the NSA analyst is both the judge and the executor violating these checks and balances. Now maybe there might be temporary warrants for wider range of individuals, even t

hugogee 13y ago

Here we have a great tool at our diposal(internet) and all we can do is use it to bitch, moan and compare notes. Surprisingly, politicians feel they can do as they please. Its a shame we cannot organize and do something about it. I wonder what effect(s) striking for a week would have? Typically solutions are of equal proportion to the problem at hand. But its so inconvenient-i know. A less affected Hong Kong has held a rally but here those most impacted-nothing. Ughh im tired of reading this shit. We deserve everything we get. Or we could take this as a challenge to see how many people we can get to strike. So much talent here... How will it end?

Uhhrrr 13y ago

So, if I wanted to listen in on some phone calls, would the best course of action be to bribe one of these thousands of analysts, blackmail them, threaten them, or steal their laptop? Asking for a friend in a foreign intelligence service.

spikels 13y ago

Why are we only hearing about this now? From the House Judiciary Committee meeting on THURSDAY where Nadler questions FBI Director Mueller: NADLER: You wanted to listen to the phone? MUELLER: Then you have to get a special — a particularized order from... NADLER: Particularized... MUELLER: ... the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual. NADLER: Now is the answer you just gave me classified... MUELLER: Is what? NADLER: The answer you just gave me classified in any way? MUELLER: I don't think so. NADLER: OK, then I can ask the — then I can say the following: We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that, and you didn't need a new warrant. In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict... MUELLER: I'm not certain that it's the same answer to the same question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... NADLER: Well, I asked the question both times, and I think it's the same question. So maybe you'd better go back and check, because someone was incorrect. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141

jsilence 13y ago

I wonder what happened if the US put the estimated 10$ billion NSA budget into solar and other renewables and withdrew from all the countries where they are (to bring peace and democracy).

realrocker 13y ago

Ok Off topic. Why are there no street protests in U.S? Or no one cares?

w_t_payne 13y ago

The chain of command relies on trust, trust that officials will tell the truth to those who oversee them. It seems to me that the chain of command is broken. NSA officials lied to the public. They lied to Congress. If the allegations of procedural abuse are true, they have lied to and deceived every single mechanism that has been set up to oversee and control their operation. They have gone rogue. If this supposition is true, their actions go beyond simple criminality. This is treachery; treason and mutiny against the people of the United States. Let us raise the hue and cry! Traitors! Traitors in our midst!

auxibee 13y ago

they should be taken to court

fastfade 13y ago

it's too late America - the frog is cooked. thanks for being so engaged.

jsmeaton 13y ago

A friend of mine recently suggested that thousands of people around the world get on the phones once every week and just say words like "bomb" and "president" and "terrorist". If the US really is vacuuming up the actual audio (perhaps based on live keyword/phrase analysis) it would either send their systems into overdrive or at least make it harder for these analysts to get the real information they'd be looking for. Suddenly doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.

dodyg 13y ago

In the name of protecting you: - Your government has launched a war under false premises - Your government already ignores Habeas Corpus(read gitmo) - Your government already reserves the right to kill you without judicial consent - Your government can already prevent you from flying without allowing much recourse for rectifying errors - Your government is spying on your data and phone calls Whatever happened to "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave"

D9u 13y ago

...the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year... Ah, so that's why China has overtaken the USA in the computing power race... Wasting money on spying instead of building better computers. All who support these abuses of our Bill of Rights should be ashamed of themselves.

NIL8 13y ago

Most people don't realize that the NSA is about ten times larger than the CIA. This allows them to aggregate data on a scale that is unprecedented. Being such a large organization, they still don't have the manpower to process so much data. Thus, the solution is to acquire and store this data for future use. I would imagine that even they don't know exactly what they have.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

You know spys... a bunch of bitchy little girls...

teawithcarl 13y ago

Nadler denies the CNET story -- OOPS. https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/346304794970968064 https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/346304794970968064 -- just tweeted by Trevor Timm (Sunday, noon).

orokusaki 13y ago

Please, somebody - who knows the URL (or the HN post) wherein the guy (IIRC, a lawyer) states the 10 things the government will do to reduce the fallout from this? I'm totally freaked out because the guy was right, down to the last step, so far. One of them was, "They'll admit to something not as bad" (as a method of deflection - and think about it, most people view "listening" as something that won't affect them directly, unless the NSA hired about 250k more employees just for this task), one of them was that the government will say they were within the law (which is contradictory, of course) - happened here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/16/u-s-government-denies-reports-that-nsa-analysts-can-listen-to-domestic-calls-without-legal-authorization/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/16/u-s-government-denies-repor... and 2 more of the steps happened in the past few days. I want to find that article, so I can spread it to everyone know I know (about 10 people :) Thanks orokusaki