Are you three hops from a terrorist? The NSA wants to know.

From Techcrunch.com, "How Obama Can Say “We Don’t Have A Domestic Spying Program” Without Lying," 

While the NSA is supposed to focus on foreign suspects, they can monitor any individual who corresponds (is “connected”) with terrorists. According to the NSA, surveillance programs sweep American communications up to 3 ‘hops’ from any suspect (a friend of a friend of a friend is 3 ‘hops’ in a network). 

Most Americans are three degrees away from hundreds of thousands or even millions of other citizens. If I have 100 friends, and they each have 100 friends, I’m 2 degrees from 10,100 people (assuming there’s no overlapping friendships).

The NSA and the administration and the apologists in Congress (McCain, King, Feinstein etc.) have consistently been proven to be shading the truth at best and lying at worst about the intrusiveness of the NSA's activities.

Bill

Thomas Sowell on "Busybody Politics"

Full story is here.

ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies.

Well said.

See also F. Hayek's Nobel Prize Lecture, "The Pretence of Knowledge." which includes this:

While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.

Bill

I Find the Actions of the NSA, and it Defenders, Despicable

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/glenn-greenwald-low-level-nsa-analysts-have-powerful-and-invasive-search-tool/


Glenn Greenwald: Low-Level NSA Analysts Have ‘Powerful and Invasive’ Search Tool
Jul 28, 2013 10:17am

Today on “This Week,” Glenn Greenwald – the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs – claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years,” Greenwald told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things.  It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”

Greenwald explained that while there are “legal constraints” on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court , these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.

“There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans,” Greenwald said. “You can’t target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents.”

“And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst,” he added.

But the top Republican on the  Senate Intelligence Committee told Stephanopoulos he would be shocked if such programs existed.

“It wouldn’t just surprise me, it would shock me,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, said on “This Week” Sunday.

Chambliss said he recently spent time with NSA officials and was assured that the programs Greenwald describes have been exaggerated.

“I was back out at NSA just last week, spent a couple hours out there with high and low level NSA officials,” Chambliss said. “And what I have been assured of is that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without a court order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any e-mail.”

Chambliss said that any monitoring of emails is purely “accidental.”

“In fact, we don’t monitor emails. That’s what kind of assures me is that what the reporting is is not correct. Because no emails are monitored now,” Chambliss said. “They used to be, but that stopped two or three years ago. So I feel confident that there may have been some abuse, but if it was it was pure accidental.”

But Greenwald said the existence of these analyst search programs are in line with the claims of Edward Snowden, who first leaked details of the NSA’s surveillance programs last month.

“It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool, exactly of the type that Mr. Snowden described,” Greenwald said.

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and House Intelligence leaders have previously downplayed Snowden’s access to NSA data. Greenwald said the revelation of this search capability deserves a response from NSA officials when they testify before Congress again this week.

“NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I just said,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald, who will join via video-link a separate bipartisan congressional group hearing from critics of the NSA’s surveillance programs on Wednesday, called on lawmakers to push for more information about the NSA’s practices.

“The real issue here is that what the NSA does is done in complete secrecy. Nobody really monitors who they are eavesdropping on,” Greenwald said. “So the question of abuse is one that the Congress ought to be investigating much more aggressively.”

Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked information about two sweeping intelligence programs, has previously warned that they are open to abuse by those with access. In a video interview with The Guardian , he said, “Any analyst at any time can target anyone… I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”

Snowden has been holed up in a Moscow airport for weeks. He is currently attempting to secure temporary asylum in Russia on the grounds that he would be tortured or face the death penalty if he returned to the United States.

Attorney General Eric Holder responded to Snowden’s appeal last week , writing in a letter to the Russian government, “These claims are entirely without merit.”


Today, Greenwald told Stephanopoulos that Snowden’s petition is still pending, but the former NSA contractor prefers that the focus be elsewhere.

“I think he’s content with having nothing happen so the focus isn’t on him, but is on the substance of the revelations that he came forward to shine light on,” Greenwald said.


Grey Korhonen contributed to this report.

Why Does the NSA Need MetaData? To Kill People.

Eli,

What does the NSA do with the metadata it collects? It looks for patterns, it matches those patterns with patterns of what it has determined as terrorist behavior, then it targets people to kill.

Bill

I Am Not A Terrorist

Eli,

I am not a terrorist, and I don't want my government treating me like I am. But that is what it is doing when it collects the meta data from my phone calls and vacuums the servers of Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. for my credit card transactions and gathers the digital detritus of my life.

It is disingenuous to the extreme to argue this is OK since no one is "listening" to my conversations. Voice communication is only a fraction of the communications we engage in and even more importantly someone can tell a lot about my life by looking at the digital exhaust I leave behind.

Why does the NSA need MY metadata. I am not a terrorist. Stop treating me like one.

Bill

The Corrosive Impact of Money on Politics?

Eli,

How corrosive is money on politics? This from the Washington Post today on a woman interrupting Michelle Obama at a fundraiser,

Some have said that the first lady wasn’t a proper target because she is not an elected official. However, time and again, the first lady has come to our community and asked us to “max out” on our contributions to the DNC. In fact, she had just made the same request of several hundred LGBT attendees, days after Senate Democrats had refused to include same-sex binational couples in their immigration reform bill. Despite the Democratic Party happily cashing LGBT checks, I have not seen the Obama administration “max out” on the myriad ways that the government could protect the LGBT community.

To be clear, I have no objections to any of this. Protesting a fund raiser is fine with me, as is asking donors for money, as is giving money to politicians in order to fund campaigns, as is giving money to politicians with the expectations they will vote a certain way. Clearly that's what this woman had in mind.

I've done the same. I contributed to the Scott Brown campaign when he advertised himself as the 41st vote against ObamaCare. And I stopped contributing when he voted for Dodd-Frank.

I often hear about the corrosive impact of money on politics. I don't see it. I see people, like myself, and like this woman, having an opinion on public policy and trying their best to influence it. Isn't that what representative democracy is all about?

Yet we twist ourselves into knots on who can give and how much and what they can say and when, and end up with the atrocity of the IRS attempting to silence political speech.

Bill

A Pox on Comprehensive Legislation

Eli,

This is from Ben Domenech's "The Transom," on the NSA's data capture program:

And why are we at this point? Because, in some sense, Congress never understood what it was authorizing in the first place when it came to the Protect America Act, which swept through Congress with bipartisan support. http://vlt.tc/wbe  “In reality, the PAA represented a sweeping change to American surveillance law. Before conducting surveillance, the PAA only required executive branch officials to “certify” that there were “reasonable procedures” in place for ensuring that surveillance “concerns” persons located outside the United States and that the foreign intelligence is a “significant purpose” of the program. A single certification could cover a broad program intercepting the communications of numerous individuals. And there was no requirement for judicial review of individual surveillance targets within a “certified” program. Civil liberties groups warned that the PAA’s vague requirements and lack of oversight would give the government a green light to seek indiscriminate access to the private communications of Americans. They predicted that the government would claim that they needed unfettered access to domestic communications to be sure they had gotten all relevant information about suspected terrorists.” 

I maintain Congress never really understood the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), nor Dodd-Frank, and probably doesn't understand the comprehensive immigration reform bill. It seems that much of the comprehensive legislation is more of a guideline for the regulatory state to fill in the details.

The result is the atrocity of the IRS targeting political speech,  HHS forcing the Catholic Church to violate its principles, hundreds of new regulations on banks, brokerages, and publicly traded companies and of course the NSA's collection of meta data on our phone calls and postings to the cloud.

Not to worry we are told, it's for our own good. Obama defends it saying this has caught terrorists, ignoring the point it violates our civil liberties. Comic relief can alway be found from the Burns and Allen of the Senate, McCain and Feinstein, who lecture us not to worry since the program has been ongoing for seven years.

The proponents of big government have a big challenge, in my opinion. Tell me again why I should favor these big programs when they appear to run amok in frightening ways.

Bill