Article

2013-09-08 -Land of the Free

O Reversed NSA Restrictions in 2011

The better to spy on bad guys who might be talking to American co-conspirators. But nobody else. The most open and transparent administration, eh?
The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA's authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration's assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term "target" that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government's approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans' privacy later.
Depending on what sort of people they are and the kind of privacy they deserve.
The court's expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a "back-door search loophole" that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court's authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
Nobody else thought this was questionable? Nobody wanted to leak this little tidbit? Maybe the only way to be a whistle-blower is like Snowden?
"The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrant-less searches of individual Americans' communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners," Wyden said in a statement to The WaPo. "Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant."
Excuse me, the what requires a warrant?

Posted by Bobby 2013-09-08 11:01|| || Front Page|| [11133 views ] Top

#1 Now the truth comes out. All the Democratic spin that "Bush started it" is now blown to smithereens.

While Bush was president there were restrictions in place on domestic spying by the NSA. Obama is the one who transformed the NSA and retargeted it -in his first term.

Heaven help us between now and 2017.

Posted by Frozen Al 2013-09-08 13:04|| 2013-09-08 13:04|| Front Page Top

#2 The NSA knows what's on your smart phone too.

Posted by Frozen Al 2013-09-08 13:24|| 2013-09-08 13:24|| Front Page Top

#3 Strange Chrome browser behavior.

Chrome has been behaving badly for me on certain sites lately. In particular facebook, BBC News and Rantburg.

I tracked it down to various Akamai TCP connections hanging that cause the whole browser to hang...

So... I used the linux command "netstat -ptan" to see which sites were hanging and then "/sbin/route add -host {site-ip} reject" to reject making connections to these Akamai sites. Then restarted Chrome and it didn't hang on those particular sites. It later hung on others and they were all Akamai sites!

I then exited Chrome and visited the same sites with IceWeasel - a FireFox derivative browser. Wow! Chrome had about 20 TCP connections up all the time and IceWeasel had NONE!. IceWeasel didn't hang on anything! Why is Chrome keeping up all these connections? For the non-technical a TCP connection is like a phone call. The UDP that IceWeasel is using is like a text message.

Most of the Chrome TCP connections were going directly to Google. About 6 were going to various Akamai sites.

I am tempted to fire off Chrome with a packet sniffer in the background and see what it's really doing and what "conversations" are taking place on all those TCP connections to Google and Akamai.

Posted by 3dc 2013-09-08 16:03|| 2013-09-08 16:03|| Front Page Top

#4 ....3dc....

Posted by Uncle Phester 2013-09-08 16:26|| 2013-09-08 16:26|| Front Page Top

#5 Being a techno-peasant, I didn't understand a bit of what 3dc said, but I did read it to mean that whatever is going on under the Chrome hood ain't good.
I do understand from the art. that Bambi is a lying crapweasel and we can next look for him to say that he didn't win that permission (to reverse NSA restrictions), the world did....

Posted by USN, Ret. 2013-09-08 16:37|| 2013-09-08 16:37|| Front Page Top

#6 It's most likely some of the built-in "features" of Chrome, made to be used with google products and sites. Just because you don't use them doesn't mean they're not active. Yes, it SHOULD mean that, but privacy is for the Elites.

Posted by Charles 2013-09-08 18:03|| 2013-09-08 18:03|| Front Page Top

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