8 ms·

Additional FISA Documents Declassified

77 points by Varcht 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- deaconblues 13y ago
  Strikes me as a smooth blend of both. But the segment of the public that inspired this move can see through the translucency and won't be satisfied until they stop giving us scraps and start inviting us to the table, so to speak.
- pvnick 13y ago
  >I look at it actively -- as a starting point to motivate more whistleblowing, as a ratchet to push for more release, as a tool to promote more openness in government. I agree, that would be the ideal outcome of this trend of whistleblowers and the subsequent reactions. But the government will fight tooth and nail every step of the way. Julian Assange wrote a very cool essay about the role of information flow in an authoritarian conspiracy and how if the different nodes in the graph can't trust each other with information then the conspiracy breaks down and, presumably, truth and transparency replaces it [1]. I'm cautiously optimistic. [1] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
  - adamonduty 13y ago
    Beyond Snowden, what is this "trend of whistleblowers"? Why haven't we seen others come out in similar ways? Or have I missed something?
    - bmelton 13y ago
      Daniel (Chelsea) Manning, David Weber, Gina Grey, the recent Secret Service harassment whistleblowers, etc. Few of them have the press that Snowden did, but Snowden isn't an isolated whistleblower. That said, seeing the lives that Manning and he have been relegated to post-whistle, I'd be surprised if the current administration hasn't scared off a good bit of would-be whistle-blowers from doing so in the future.
      - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
        Manning was a pre-Snowden whistleblower/leaker.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        It isn't clear to me that he meant "trend of whistle-blowers" to mean "whistle-blowers inspired exclusively by Snowden". Both Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who previously went by Bradley, not Daniel) are a part of the presumed trend.
    - Amadou 13y ago
      Why haven't we seen others come out in similar ways? According to an attorney for the Government Accountability Project, they've been going there. I like her line that "Courage is contagious." http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leakers-followed-snowdens-footsteps-whistleblower-lawyer-says/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leake...
- rst 13y ago
  This isn't a reaction to Snowden so much as the EFF's ongoing FOIA lawsuit explicitly seeking release of the documents, which are still pretty heavily redacted. (Among the blackouts: the name of an official that briefed FISA court judges, the number of years that the Bush warrantless wiretap program had proceeded without judicial sanction, and solid pages of blackout apparently characterizing what it collected.) See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-release-more-nsa-documents-and-fisa-court-opinions-response-eff https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-rel... on the lawsuit. Clapper may claim instead that the release was the result of a sudden dedication to openness, but he did also claim before Congress that there was no ongoing widespread surveillance of Americans at all.
  - toufka 13y ago
    Do keep in mind that Snowden's documents have provided much more solid legal ground upon which the EFF can gain standing. The EFF has had a great deal of difficulty getting even into the courts because they couldn't show actual documentable evidence of much prior to these releases. Snowden's release provided a beachhead from which EFF can finally now inch forward through the courts.
dublinben 13y ago
http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ Really? I didn't realize that our intelligence services were using Tumblr as an official communications channel now.
- ihsw 13y ago
  It beats the pants off of maintaining your own Wordpress installation, which is likely the next best thing.
- bradleysmith 13y ago
  >Created at the direction of the President of the United States, IC ON THE RECORD provides immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the U.S. Intelligence Community. from the about us column. You could probably credit Obama's social media team, or maybe the man himself. Interesting.
  - nashashmi 13y ago
    If you haven't noticed, Obama is big on taking advice from those around him. The people who surround him are mostly young and new age. So tumblr is the way to go. Obama himself is a speaker, a talker, a rephraser. And a very articulate one. His intelligence (or lack thereof) has never truly been revealed because he never does the thinking.
- opendais 13y ago
  Does anyone else read that as 'I con the record'?
- mattlutze 13y ago
  It Just Works. Good enough for me, especially if it was something they needed to throw up in a day vs. waiting months of decision-making from managers and authorizing IT resources to build a public site.
mcphilip 13y ago
I love how key definitions of terms are redacted for purposes of national security. For instance, the definition of the term "associated" is redacted in the training guides for establishing an RAS (reasonable articulable suspicion) used to justify targeting of communication metadata.
- MarkHarmon 13y ago
  Yeah, it's things like that make you wonder how much is redacted to preserve some director's ass.
MarkHarmon 13y ago
Some of the comments in the pdf files are kind of funny. http://www.odni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDOVSC1205_L6A_storyboard_v18_Final-Sealed.pdf http://www.odni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDOVSC1205_L6A... Comment [a1]: Graphic of 2 terrorists sending email to each other, show email indicating threat and containing a number without country code
pvnick 13y ago
The information released today includes a number of internal NSA documents, training slides and internal guidance, which demonstrate the care with which NSA’s foreign intelligence collection pursuant to Section 501 is run, managed, and overseen. In other words, this selective declassification is not about being transparent and open. It's propaganda designed to take some of the flak off the administration. Not that there's anything inherently wrong or surprising about that since it's the kind of thing we've come to expect from our politicians. It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him.
- ConceptJunkie 13y ago
  > It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him. If enough people felt this way, things could be a lot better. I can forgive someone who believed the rhetoric the first time, even though a lot of us didn't. It's a lesson we all have to learn, and if the lesson is learned, the mistakes aren't so bad. Unfortunately, a majority of voters didn't think this was enough to prevent them from re-electing him in 2012, nor I fear, from electing another person just like him in 2016.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    It's not like the other realistic choice in 2012 would have been any better about this stuff. The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      Not that I have any clue how to even start. Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas. White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point: [spoiler alert] Instead of the terrorists coming from the Middle East, they come from the military industrial complex and secret service.
hugogee 13y ago
"The information could be used only for counterterrorism purposes." Am i understanding correctly that all instances where parrallel reconstruction was employed were in fact terrorist cases?
- rubbingalcohol 13y ago
  Terrorism is anything the government doesn't like. In all seriousness, how would we realistically ever find out which criminal cases were hinged upon parallel construction of evidence? The whole point is to conceal from judges and prosecutors (not to mention defendants) the true nature of the evidence-gathering techniques used. This completely flies in the face of due process of law, and I doubt anyone in government would willing own up to specific examples.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    This is true. There were a few anti-nuke protestors arrested about a year ago. A catholic nun and some other folks committed to pacifism. They were able to breach the security perimeter of a nuclear facility and erect some home-made banners promoting pacifism. What happened to the contractor that was supposed to be securing the site? Nothing. https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7 https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7 They're being charged as terrorists under the full power of the law.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zts 13y ago
Don't forget why these documents are being declassified. We have the EFF to thank. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-release-more-nsa-documents-and-fisa-court-opinions-response-eff https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-rel...

77 points by Varcht 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deaconblues 13y ago
Strikes me as a smooth blend of both. But the segment of the public that inspired this move can see through the translucency and won't be satisfied until they stop giving us scraps and start inviting us to the table, so to speak.
pvnick 13y ago
>I look at it actively -- as a starting point to motivate more whistleblowing, as a ratchet to push for more release, as a tool to promote more openness in government. I agree, that would be the ideal outcome of this trend of whistleblowers and the subsequent reactions. But the government will fight tooth and nail every step of the way. Julian Assange wrote a very cool essay about the role of information flow in an authoritarian conspiracy and how if the different nodes in the graph can't trust each other with information then the conspiracy breaks down and, presumably, truth and transparency replaces it [1]. I'm cautiously optimistic. [1] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
- adamonduty 13y ago
  Beyond Snowden, what is this "trend of whistleblowers"? Why haven't we seen others come out in similar ways? Or have I missed something?
  - bmelton 13y ago
    Daniel (Chelsea) Manning, David Weber, Gina Grey, the recent Secret Service harassment whistleblowers, etc. Few of them have the press that Snowden did, but Snowden isn't an isolated whistleblower. That said, seeing the lives that Manning and he have been relegated to post-whistle, I'd be surprised if the current administration hasn't scared off a good bit of would-be whistle-blowers from doing so in the future.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Manning was a pre-Snowden whistleblower/leaker.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        It isn't clear to me that he meant "trend of whistle-blowers" to mean "whistle-blowers inspired exclusively by Snowden". Both Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who previously went by Bradley, not Daniel) are a part of the presumed trend.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    Why haven't we seen others come out in similar ways? According to an attorney for the Government Accountability Project, they've been going there. I like her line that "Courage is contagious." http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leakers-followed-snowdens-footsteps-whistleblower-lawyer-says/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leake...
rst 13y ago
This isn't a reaction to Snowden so much as the EFF's ongoing FOIA lawsuit explicitly seeking release of the documents, which are still pretty heavily redacted. (Among the blackouts: the name of an official that briefed FISA court judges, the number of years that the Bush warrantless wiretap program had proceeded without judicial sanction, and solid pages of blackout apparently characterizing what it collected.) See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-release-more-nsa-documents-and-fisa-court-opinions-response-eff https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-rel... on the lawsuit. Clapper may claim instead that the release was the result of a sudden dedication to openness, but he did also claim before Congress that there was no ongoing widespread surveillance of Americans at all.
- toufka 13y ago
  Do keep in mind that Snowden's documents have provided much more solid legal ground upon which the EFF can gain standing. The EFF has had a great deal of difficulty getting even into the courts because they couldn't show actual documentable evidence of much prior to these releases. Snowden's release provided a beachhead from which EFF can finally now inch forward through the courts.

dublinben 13y ago

http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ Really? I didn't realize that our intelligence services were using Tumblr as an official communications channel now.

ihsw 13y ago
It beats the pants off of maintaining your own Wordpress installation, which is likely the next best thing.
bradleysmith 13y ago
>Created at the direction of the President of the United States, IC ON THE RECORD provides immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the U.S. Intelligence Community. from the about us column. You could probably credit Obama's social media team, or maybe the man himself. Interesting.
- nashashmi 13y ago
  If you haven't noticed, Obama is big on taking advice from those around him. The people who surround him are mostly young and new age. So tumblr is the way to go. Obama himself is a speaker, a talker, a rephraser. And a very articulate one. His intelligence (or lack thereof) has never truly been revealed because he never does the thinking.
opendais 13y ago
Does anyone else read that as 'I con the record'?
mattlutze 13y ago
It Just Works. Good enough for me, especially if it was something they needed to throw up in a day vs. waiting months of decision-making from managers and authorizing IT resources to build a public site.

mcphilip 13y ago

I love how key definitions of terms are redacted for purposes of national security. For instance, the definition of the term "associated" is redacted in the training guides for establishing an RAS (reasonable articulable suspicion) used to justify targeting of communication metadata.

MarkHarmon 13y ago
Yeah, it's things like that make you wonder how much is redacted to preserve some director's ass.

MarkHarmon 13y ago

Some of the comments in the pdf files are kind of funny. http://www.odni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDOVSC1205_L6A_storyboard_v18_Final-Sealed.pdf http://www.odni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDOVSC1205_L6A... Comment [a1]: Graphic of 2 terrorists sending email to each other, show email indicating threat and containing a number without country code

pvnick 13y ago

The information released today includes a number of internal NSA documents, training slides and internal guidance, which demonstrate the care with which NSA’s foreign intelligence collection pursuant to Section 501 is run, managed, and overseen. In other words, this selective declassification is not about being transparent and open. It's propaganda designed to take some of the flak off the administration. Not that there's anything inherently wrong or surprising about that since it's the kind of thing we've come to expect from our politicians. It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him.

ConceptJunkie 13y ago
> It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him. If enough people felt this way, things could be a lot better. I can forgive someone who believed the rhetoric the first time, even though a lot of us didn't. It's a lesson we all have to learn, and if the lesson is learned, the mistakes aren't so bad. Unfortunately, a majority of voters didn't think this was enough to prevent them from re-electing him in 2012, nor I fear, from electing another person just like him in 2016.
- mikeash 13y ago
  It's not like the other realistic choice in 2012 would have been any better about this stuff. The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Not that I have any clue how to even start. Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas. White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point: [spoiler alert] Instead of the terrorists coming from the Middle East, they come from the military industrial complex and secret service.

hugogee 13y ago

"The information could be used only for counterterrorism purposes." Am i understanding correctly that all instances where parrallel reconstruction was employed were in fact terrorist cases?

rubbingalcohol 13y ago
Terrorism is anything the government doesn't like. In all seriousness, how would we realistically ever find out which criminal cases were hinged upon parallel construction of evidence? The whole point is to conceal from judges and prosecutors (not to mention defendants) the true nature of the evidence-gathering techniques used. This completely flies in the face of due process of law, and I doubt anyone in government would willing own up to specific examples.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  This is true. There were a few anti-nuke protestors arrested about a year ago. A catholic nun and some other folks committed to pacifism. They were able to breach the security perimeter of a nuclear facility and erect some home-made banners promoting pacifism. What happened to the contractor that was supposed to be securing the site? Nothing. https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7 https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7 They're being charged as terrorists under the full power of the law.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

zts 13y ago

Don't forget why these documents are being declassified. We have the EFF to thank. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-release-more-nsa-documents-and-fisa-court-opinions-response-eff https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-rel...