(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Declan McCullagh, at CNET:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
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.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”
The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week’s disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)…
Much more detail at the link.
Frankensteinbeck
It’s not a secret law. It’s called the Patriot Act. When Bush pulled this shit against the law, congress made it legal so that he wasn’t guilty of any crime. Yes, I definitely think the Patriot Act needs to go.
Howard Beale IV
LGF is all over this one, nutpicking it to death in much the same way they did to Greenwald when inconsistencies showed up in his reporting. At least they updated the thread with the actual exchange in question:
.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Mmmmm. I feel so safe now. I just need a government cam in the shitter to make me feel safer.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Howard Beale IV: Unpossible!
Steeplejack
Serious constitutional problems? No shit.
The other zesty thing in the mix is that apparently these “NSA analysts” could be contractors working for Booz Allen or who knows who. If that’s the case, how soon until it comes out that someone was eavesdropping on an ex-spouse, etc.?
But, yeah, the real problem is the Patriot Act and FISA and the way they were whisked into law to the smell of urine-soaked underwear.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Howard Beale IV: Seems to me it’s a lot less clear than the CNET story makes it out to be, but that’s what hearings are for, and it’s the executive’s responsibility to clarify. The burden isn’t, shouldn’t be, on Nadler to frame his question just so.
Also, too, from Reuters by way of Kevin Drum:
srv
As the extent of Obama’s indiscretions become undeniable, you people will wish for the days of Poindexter and Yoo.
SHEEPL!
? Martin
@Howard Beale IV: Ok, so reading that exchange, it sounds like the metadata comes from the blanket warrant (which protects jack shit – it’s basically Verizon et al covering their ass). From the metadata you can identifying information via a National Security letter. This is a bit more than a reverse lookup (which any person can do). And then to listen you need a specific FISA warrant.
Nadler seems to think he heard something different previously, but he can’t seem to resolve the two statements. So did he misunderstand the first response, or was he misinformed the first time or the second time? This doesn’t seem clear enough to draw the conclusions that CNET is drawing. But Mueller’s explanation is how I’ve read previously that it works (been a few years, though), so I’m somewhat inclined to think that’s how it works.
mk3872
For C’s sake, Anne, you really are going to take an unsubstantiated nerd from CNET’s take on the Nadler / FBI exchange as “truth” ?? No one has commented on the story yet and it is clearly BS: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/15/nsa-phone-calls-warrant_n_3448299.html.
That is NOT reporting and not something you should take seriously until it is actually CHECKED first.
mk3872
@? Martin: Exactly. This nerd from CNET drew his own conclusion from what HE thought he heard out of the exchange and writes up a full story about it.
NO reporting, no checking, no comments or quotes from anyone.
Now fear-mongering paranoid Big Gubmit haters like Anne here take this kind of stuff seriously. Pathetic.
Little Boots
I wonder, if we were to create a new bill of rights, today, what we would keep and what we would lose.
? Martin
@Steeplejack: FISA was created in the 70s in response to Nixon’s spying on Americans. After Congress fully shut down the domestic spying, they decided they needed a way to reopen that door for foreign spying, and FISA was created.
It was merely supercharged after 2001.
Howard Beale IV
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I just moseyed over to MJ-seems to me that NUCLEON is what was being used when CNN talked to a former FBI counterterrorism agent during the Bostom Marathon Bombing:
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
I worry that the control key on AL’s keyboard will get stuck someday and she’ll be rendered incapable of blogging.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Little Boots: My guess is that the whole thing would get the heave-ho, with the possible exception of the second. The first, fourth and fifth, in particular, would be burnt to a crisp.
? Martin
@Little Boots: We’d lose everything. We wouldn’t get 2/3 consensus on any of it.
Little Boots
maybe a bit of the first, definitely the second, third and fourth gone, fifth narrowed to no torture, maybe, but what else? not sure.
karen
Hell, did anyone REALLY think this wasn’t happening all along?
Do you really think that if we had a different President that it wouldn’t be going on? Even with a Dem? or Hillary?
When they passed the Patriot Act, all bets were off. Don’t just blame Obama, blame every single fucking one of them in Congress who agreed to pass this, ESPECIALLY THE DEMS.
I don’t understand why this is such a shock. That doesn’t minimize the horror I feel or how intrusive this is. But I’m a pragmatic realist and it’s happening whether we like it or not until Congress nullifies it.
I do wonder however how many of the “terrorists” they claim to have stopped were domestic terrorists and white supremacy groups and if they got less jail time than international terrorists.
Carolinus
@Howard Beale IV:
Come on, you have to admit the CNET article is ridiculously inflammatory, based on next to nothing, no matter how you interpret the exchange. How does Nadler, saying that the impression he got from the private briefing was different than what Mueller was saying, and can you get back to me with a clarification, become that insane headline? No agency admitted anything. There was just an extremely ambiguous conversation. IMO Nadler is almost certainly talking about requiring a warrant when escalating from phone number to the actual actual name tied to the phone.
Little Boots
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
think you’re largely right.
? Martin
@Little Boots: We wouldn’t get the 2nd. The confederates would demand it be clarified to be unlimited in scope, the coasts would demand it be clarified to be limited in scope.
Narcissus
@Little Boots: You’d get the Ten Commandments.
mk3872
Ugh, great, another thread full of fear, paranoia and big old bad Big Gubmit spying.
Geez, Anne, couldn’t you at least wait to verify this friggin’ BS story! CNET is just pining for click-thrus … They didn’t even bother to do any reporting to ask Nadler, the FBI or NSA to comment!
Nadler was talking about metadata not listening to phone calls or reading emails!!
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42138_CNET_Says_NSA_Admits_Listening_to_US_Phone_Calls_-_But_Thats_Not_What_the_Video_Shows
Little Boots
I think there’s still some consensus about not establishing a national religion, although it’s definitley problemeatic in many places. but mostly, people just don’t care about the restrictions.
? Martin
@karen:
Effectively none. The whole apparatus is designed around foreign threats. That’s what the ‘F’ in FISA stands for, after all. The NSA and CIA aren’t even supposed to be dealing with such threats. Can the FBI access this data? Almost certainly, but they almost certainly can’t use FISA to get to it. They’d have to go through the usual channels.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
PS: Anne Laurie, you misspelled the name of the Paulbot who lifted this story from the Larouchies.
Joseph Nobles
Speaking of what was going on under another president, Gellman at the Post was able to access a classified history of STELLARWIND under Bush the lesser. I can’t even believe the things I’m seeing there:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html
Addington then called Hayden, who was NSA Director at the time, and said, will you keep doing this without the signature of the Attorney General? And Hayden said YES.
And then Bush got the word of the impending revolt during an election year and put the kibosh on it all. Until three months later, when the FISA court saw its way clear to authorizing the collection.
Oh, there’s kaboom left in this story.
Howard Beale IV
@? Martin: The issue here not tthat he NSA can retrieve the actual conversation, for it appears they clearly are. As Clemente indiacted in his CNN interview, it appears that the NSA has the ability to do that, but it takes time to recover the actual conversation from the streams of data at the key points where the NSA has set up beam spiltters to pipe the traffic into the Puzzle Palace for logging and processing through NUCLEON. Voice traffic is actually the least bandwidth intensive of any of the streaming packets, so as long as the NSA has their hooks into all the necessary hubs, it would indeed be possible to record all voice traffic into a large rolling buffer, where specific sources and targets would be selected for archival, and the rest age off after a window of time-say, 60-90 days. That way, when an event happens, all traffic is captured during the event and then the specific points are identifed and the threads get chased.
? Martin
@Little Boots: No, freedom of/from religion would be out in at least 1/3 of the states because of Sharia law boogedy-boogedy. Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee have either passed or are considering anti-sharia laws. It’s been introduced in about 20 other states. You can probably guess the list…
mk3872
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy: Nice catch, LWG … This CNET nerd is a classic Paulbot Big Gubmit fear-mongerer.
This entire “story” is their own Paul-esque interpretation of a conversation.
That’s it. Full Stop. No reporting. No Checking. No waiting for comment.
He has simply determined that HE knows what Nadler was saying about a secret briefing.
Ridiculous.
mk3872
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy: Wow, remind me to stop reading CNET after they hired this gasbag. Good grief, scary.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
@mk3872: Can’t take the credit: Twitter is excellent for crowd-sourcing.
Howard Beale IV
@? Martin: But when it comes down to brass tacks, it appears that beyond a shadow of a doubt that the NSA is indeed recording all voice traffic.
Which, to me, means its time to get a Technicians’ class FCC license and start using encrypted packets that aren’t part of the current commercial telco infrastructure if you want to not have your communications monitored.
Little Boots
@? Martin:
but they’d have to pick one, and that would be interesting.
I know there’s places they’d say, just Baptist, but are there states that could do so.
mk3872
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy: It is refreshing to see some people smart enough to check first. On the other hand, some BJ bloggers can’t seem to take the time to investigate a bit first and keep spreading this kind of baloney.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@mk3872: When I saw the title here, I knew exactly what it was going to be about. If you hadn’t posted the LGF link, I would have.
ETA: I have noticed on Daily Kos that linking to LGF on these issues gets you a “little green footballs, of course.”
mk3872
Hey Cole! Your blog is being taken over by bloggers who like spreading unsubstantiated crap written by Paulite Libertards!! Hope your happy now …
Little Boots
@mk3872:
oh, don’t bother.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
You’re welcome, AL.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
@mk3872: He already tweeted a link to this turd, gloating that he would be “savaged” for sharing it.
Carolinus
@Howard Beale IV:
That’s wrong, but it’s definitely a good example of Greenwald-style BS reporting:
http://jeremyduns.net/2013/06/14/some-thoughts-on-the-reporting-of-prism/
BillinGlendaleCA
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Gotta keep the 2nd, it was sent from God.
mk3872
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy: Idiots. It’s amazing how people can get spun-up so easily and quickly. Someone needs to take a pill.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mk3872: Wow. If the Huffington Post is telling you to step back and take a deep breath….
JGabriel
Howard Beale IV:
This is pure speculation, but: I’ve been wondering ever since the story broke if, in fact, the main purpose of collecting so much metadata was because it served as the index for everything the NSA was recording.
I mean, if the NSA is recording everything, then whenever they need to listen to a call in an investigation or for intelligence gathering , then the metadata seems like the best way to locate the stuff they’re lookling for.
I’m probably wrong, but it does seem like the most obvious use for the metadata. And the president told us no one was listening to our calls, but I haven’t yet read of anyone saying they’re not being recorded.
.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
@Carolinus:
It’s very generous of Mr. Clemente to presume incompetence rather than malice.
mk3872
@Carolinus: Rule #1 in Glennwaldo-land: don’t let technology or misinterpretation of a source get in the way of your agenda.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel: No, actually the metada could be used to create a graph showing who is conversing with who without tapping into the phone network. Somehow, I really doubt the government is recording phone calls without recording source and destination information at the same time, especially if you understand how the phone systems work.
Howard Beale IV
@mk3872: Two isues here: one is whether or not the NSA can listen in real-time-obviously, the can-but the more fundamental question is whether they can backstep and fetch a conversation in the past. Clemente’s statement on CNN all but admits that.
Little Boots
@Howard Beale IV:
you’re missing the real question: does anyone gibe a shit? probably not.
Carolinus
@Howard Beale IV:
Clemente has been asked about that interview and he most certainly does not admit that:
http://jeremyduns.net/2013/06/14/some-thoughts-on-the-reporting-of-prism/
? Martin
@Howard Beale IV: I’m sure they are recording all of the voice data. If the average call is 5 minutes (probably less) then you’re looking at less than 2MB per call. 8 calls per day per person (4 conversations as there’s always 2 people) is 16MB per person * 250 million people is 4PB per day. That can be stored in 4 standard 19″ racks. And that’s with a mid-range voice codec. 3 months worth of conversations would fit in a mid-sized datacenter. So, not a trivial undertaking, but quite do-able.
This is the same as the metadata. It gets captured but isn’t accessed until that warrant is issued. It the same latency of information problem I described the other day. The phone companies have been recording and storing this for some time. It’s a requirement for VOIP deployments, and if you have a VOIP system at work, they almost certainly have all of your calls logged for a period of 30 days. Again, nothing really new here, not even particularly secret. They don’t need to split the signal – they just copy the call logs from the phone company.
Look, analog data was a bitch, but digital is easy as all get-out. Everything gets stored, and everything stored gets backed up (or did you think everything going across the free Google Voice service wasn’t getting computer transcribed and dumped into AdSense?). If you put it in digital form, it exists somewhere, possibly permanently. Now, that said, doing meaningful things with it is an entirely different matter. That’s not easy at all, not as the intel agencies define meaningful. So almost all of it is just sitting there being ignored.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, and I’m going to slather this thread with some of my Fevered Musings™ It’s too bad I’m posting this in the middle of the night rather than in the early evening, when much of the hot and heavy reading and writing goes on, but maybe at least a few people will see it. So here I go:
We need to hash out, as a society, just what it is we want. I think that’s at the root of all of this. 12 years ago, some thugs killed 4000 Americans right here in the U.S., and it shook us up. A lot. As it should have. But in the 12 years since, we haven’t really given any serious thought to how we’re going to live with terrorism, and we need to do that, since it isn’t going to go away. We don’t want to face the fact that sooner or later, somebody is going to try to pull off another attack as bad as the Trade Tower attack, and there will be times when nobody can stop it.
I think that that’s what we don’t want to talk about. Nothing that we do will ever keep us safe, at least if by “safe” we mean nobody will ever hurt us again the way they did in 2001. All we can do is make us safer.
Now, to be truthful here, I don’t fault President Obama for using everything he has at hand to try to stave off terrorist attacks. I don’t fault the Congress for this. I don’t like it, but I can’t really blame them. They are in the wheelhouse, steering the ship. They don’t want anything happening while they’re running the country. There are obvious reasons: The President won’t run for anything again, but he doesn’t want some smoking hole and 5 or 10,000 dead Americans to his name. Congressmen and senators want to hold their seats, and smokng holes don’t help them do that.
And there are some less obvious reasons, too: I don’t think anybody, whether office holder or not, whether Republican or Democrat, conservtive or liberal or anything in between, wants that haunting them until they die. Nobody wants to go through life having to swat away the nagging feeling that, “If only I had done something more, all those people might still be alive today.” So they use whatever they have to work against that. If they have the means and at least some approximation of legal cover to wiretap or read mail or even kill bad people abroad with a drone without having to try the bad people incourt first, then they’re going to do that. I think we have to all agree on that and get it out of the way before we can get on to anything else.
And what we have to get on to is this: How much uncertainty are we as a society willing to live with? Nobody’s asked us this, no politicians, no pundits, and I don’t think we’ve asaked ourselves, either. But we have to answer it or we’re always stuck here, feeling queasy about all the government snooping, but unsure whether we should try to stop it, since we don’t want anything to happen.
Now nobody’s asked me, but my answer is, we need to just grow up and deal with the fact that there are terrorists in the world, there have always been–I assume–terrorists, and there will always be terrorists. We can’t get rid of them all, since the only way to do that is to wipe out all people everywhere, and I don’t think that even Dick Cheney or Marc Thiessen or John Yoo or Charles Krauthammer, even in their darkest moods, want to do that. And if there are always going to be terrorists, there will always be some terrorism. That’s just true. We can’t even guess at each plot, let alone learn about it for sure, let alone stop it.
And as long as there’s going to be terrorism, we need to grow up and deal with it and learn to live with it. We can do a lot to lessen it, though, mostly by changing our own policies as a country. For all their blathering, they don’t “hate us for our freedoms”. Those guys 12 years ago could have hit Canada. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. Or even the Bahamas or Barbados or who knows how many other countries. It might have even been easier to hit smaller countries. And those I listed, along with scores more, have, more or less, the same “freedoms” that we do, but the terrorists don’t hate them for their freedoms.
How much huger would an attack that killed 4000 people been to, say, Iceland? And they have the same freedoms we do; only no radical Muslim terrorists care about Iceland. I don’t know; maybe there are random cranks among international radical Islamic terrorists with hardons for Iceland, but if there are, even the other terrorists aren’t going to care what they want and will most likely just look on them as irritating assholes. I mean, how in the hell are you going to change what happens in the Middle East by hitting Iceland?
So we have to acknowledge that they don’t hate us for our freedoms; they hate us for what our policies are and what we’re doing to Muslims and Muslim countries around the world, or at least what they think our policies are and what we’re doing to Muslims and Muslim countries around the world.
This means that if we want to greatly lessen the threat of Islamic terrorists hitting the U.S., whether here or abroad, then we need to stop doing what we’re doing in the Middle East. I know Rush Limbaugh would call this “appeasement”, but it isn’t; it’s only common sense. Now I don’t know how far we can pull ourselves out of the Middle East; I know there are “vital national interests” at stake there, and for all I know, some of those might even be real.
But that’s irrelevant. The only thing that means anything for us as a society, as we make our minds up how to deal with terrorism is that pulling away from the Middle East is the only way to greatly lessen threats of terrorism against us. Whether pulling out is something we can do is another question.
Now, I also know that unless we voters make it clear that we want the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East, and begin consistently voting out politicians who don’t work toward that end, nothing will change. And that isn’t going to happen. Voters will not all of a sudden begin consistently voting out congressmen who don’t work to get our “national interests” out of the Middle East. There are too many other things that mean more when we vote.
So, practically speaking, in the short run, we can’t greatly lessen the threat of terrorism against the U.S. All we can do is piddle and poke around at the edges, working to marginally lessen the threat. And that’s what politicians are doing. Poring over our telephone records make us marginally safer. If the N.S.A. began reading our mail, that would make us marginally safer, too. Killing people in Afghanistan with drones most likely makes us marginally safer, at least in the short run.
The trouble with fighting this stuff is that it’s literally true. Going through telephone records and e-mails does most likely make us safer, even if only marginally and only in the short run. And I think that’s part of the problem. We don’t, as a society, know how to tell what makes us much safer from what makes us marginally safer. All we hear are words like “terrorism”, “terrorists”, “threat”, “attack” and “safe” and “safer”, and we lose all perspective.
We need to choose what we want as a society, what we want a lot (not having the N.S.A. poking around in our lives) and what we kind of want, but could live without (absolute, categorical saftey from all terrorism, always). It’s easy to blame President Obama for doing this, and I wish he weren’t, but if he just stopped all this spying and dronerunning and yanked the U.S. out of the Middle East altogether, he’d lose all support, at least in Congress, and he’d get nothing for the next 3 years and a half. It’s easy to blame Congress, but it’s made up of 535 people, and if any one of them stood up and argued seriously for what I outlined above, they’d either go down hard in the next election or, if they could somehow weather that (the way somebody like Rand Paul maybe could), the junior senator from Kentucky would get a mighty stern talking to from the senior senator from Kentucky, as well as a shitload of other big wheels and Important Movers and Shakers in Washington and New York. So any help from Congress along these lines would be unlikely and quixotic.
And what that means is that it’s up to us, as, I guess it always is in the end, to choose what kind of country we want to live in. This isn’t going to happen this year or next. American policy in the Middle East will be the same after the 2014 election as it is now. But if Americans think this through, and learn to tell what makes us a lot safer from what only makes us marginally, almost meaninglessly safer, then we’ll at least be on the right road.
JGabriel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I’m sure, if all or most calls are recorded, that the source and destination and length are recorded at the same time. But they may have decided that it was just easier to use the metadata from the phone companies instead of extracting that information in real time to create a separate database of it for indexing. Why reinvent the the wheel when you can just buy one or mandate that it must be given to you for free?
And clearly it can be useful just to analyze the data for patterns on it own, but I suspect that application may have been just gravy — something they thought of doing only after they had already collected enough data to make it useful.
Anyway, like I said, I’m just speculating.
Little Boots
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
pompous but true.
JGabriel
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Of course they do, if they’re Republicans and enjoy fear mongering for political gain.
Waitaminnit. (scans above sentence, again)
Yep, I think that’s probably redundant.
Uriel
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy:
Pffft! Details, details. Why should we cling to such common things as facts, when Annie Laurie has a bracing narrative to push!
After all, what really makes real things real?
JGabriel
? Martin:
Yep. From the CNET story:
With a budget of $10 billion, assuming that’s correct, $27 million is drop in the bucket.
Kristin
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy: So, basically preemptively calling his readers/Twitter followers OBOTS!!1!1? How Greenwaldian.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel:
Especially since the Supreme Court said 30 years ago that this was not private information.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Why is it that the people who act like they’re so against what the NSA may be doing are the ones who also most hope they’re actually doing it?
mdblanche
How could anybody ever doubt a reporter with a history of playing it straight like Mr. McCullagh has?
? Martin
@JGabriel:
If you assume that Mullers statements above are correct, the authorization they need to access each piece is different. The metadata is a lower bar than the content. So taking these are separate is sensible. Plus, the voice recording today is much easier than it was a decade ago. A decade ago they could store a year’s worth of metadata with trivial effort, but a months of voice was extremely hard – almost impossibly hard. Today it’s non-trivial but doable. So the metadata infrastructure would have been built in 2001. The voice infrastructure would have been theorized and implemented in part, but probably wasn’t fully feasible until more recently.
? Martin
@JGabriel:
It costs more than $27M, but not a ton more, and yeah, the whole facility soup to nuts would be $1B. We know what that looks like, all of the big cloud players have several of them.
mdblanche
@Howard Beale IV: Does anybody know if Mueller ever did clarify the conflict?
? Martin
@mdblanche: That exchange was 3 days ago. It’s too early to get an answer to that.
mdblanche
@? Martin: I do hope we get an answer eventually. I’d say it makes a big difference in how much of a story this is.
? Martin
@mdblanche: I’m pretty sure we will. Among other things, it sounds like the WH is looking at declassifying the outlying structure of it. And the NSA is working out deals with the internet companies to disclose the volume and scope of the subpoenas. So things appear to be loosening up somewhat.
I’m not sure if the phone companies are given the chance to open up if they would. Unlike the internet companies, they really, really just don’t give a fuck. They’ve been treating us like shit forever, and there’s not much point pretending they give a fuck now.
piratedan
@? Martin:all of our representatives are currently busy on the line with other calls, just remember that your call is important to us and someone will be with you shortly
Cygil
@mk3872: Hey Cole! Your blog is being taken over by bloggers who like spreading unsubstantiated crap written by Paulite Libertards!! Hope your happy now …
Wait. Why do you all guys use /exactly the same talking points./ It’s almost like you’re being controlled or handled in some way.
A Humble Lurker
Never let facts (or lack thereof) get in the way of a great story, huh?
Carolinus
@Cygil:
It’s the contrails, man. It’s always the contrails. Or could be the fluoride…
Probably both.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Carolinus: Contrails or entrails?
Susanne
Apparently not. See convincing tweet and link from Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs)
Xenos
The whole discussion is muddled beyond belief.
Do they mean that they “can” listen, or tap into calls, any time they want to? That is hardly news. It is just done out of central offices rather than physically tapping into lines like the guys on the original version of ‘Mission Impossible’.
Do they mean that they “can” listen to calls if they want to, so long as they can not use those calls as evidence in court? That is not news, either, because that is what the FISA court system does, creating a paper trail so that abusive practices can be address after the fact, with some sort of confidentiality that can still be maintained in the prosecution of terrorism cases.
Does it mean government workers “can” listen to calls, in the sense that they are allowed to do whatever they want to? Don’t think so…
MomSense
The first problem with the CNET story is that the headline says the NSA admits. We don’t know which agency was testifying in the closed door classified briefing. Nadler doesn’t say so right off the bat the story is misleading.
Carolinus
@Xenos:
Which makes the definitive claims & headline by c|net hackery of the highest order. “Ambiguous disputed point pending clarification” isnt’t a headline that gets you on drudge, where as making up that the NSA copped to something did.
MomSense
@Cygil:
No one else here wants to admit it but the big problem is that the NSA program is not just collection. They are actually beaming talking points directly from dear leader into our brains through our “smart” phones. The term Obots started as an insult but it is actually true.
Snarla
Assuming Anne Laurie’s next story will be a link to The Blaze.
Todd
@mk3872:
A paid pundit (albeit in nerdsville) spun an opinion, thus to Anne, it is important and worthy.
Ash Can
Hey BJ FPers, LGF is just embarrassing you at this point. For your own sake, either step up your game or drop the subject altogether.
Baud
Seems like the only other shoe that’s dropping relates to the credibility of the media.
Ramalama
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): Have you not heard of the 1% doctrine? Neocons attempting to wipe terrorism (against the US) off the face of … America.
I think back to the dark years and you know what? No one got in trouble when 9/11 hit us. Bush got re-elected. Nuttier types of conservatives now have great minority power in the House. They’re getting a lot of what they want. Their party suffered yes but their policies are coming along nicely, thank you.
Comrade Jake
Julian Sanchez posted something about this last night that also cast it as a big nothingburger:
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-on-analysts-getting-call-and-e-mail-content/
dm
@mk3872: I lost all respect I had for Declan McCulloch’s “reporting” when he fabricated the story that “Al Gore claimed he invented the internet”.
Roberta in MN
So Nadler can give out classified meeting information and conversation. What the hell is wrong with Congress. They all voted for this. Sick of it all.
Cacti
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy:
Baseless, teabagger-esque conspiracy theories that this was a “false flag operation” yesterday. Cribbing from the Paulites and Larouchies today.
There’s no sewer that our Anne Laurie Beck won’t dredge these days.
NickT
So, someone got very excited about something they thought they might have heard, but it turns out that they basically didn’t hear what they thought they might have heard.
And so the internet moves forward, spreading rumor, rage, despair and copious amounts of unintended comedy in its virtual wake.
ChrisNYC
@NickT: True. Except there are two other forces at play, I think. Firebaggers/paulians/greenwaldians are (hate this word but it fits) butthurt that the Snowden story has issues, so there’s some thrashing around to rehab it. And, it appears from Twitter last night that the search is on to catch Obama in a lie (or, in a pinch, just make a lie up) on NSA. Because, impeachment.
NickT
@ChrisNYC:
True, but these days those two factors are just cost of doing business online. I am going say that this latest inglorious moment is a case of front page in haste, be fact-checked to death at leisure.
And then I am going to have a cup of damn fine coffee and enjoy a walk to the store in the hope that the broad masses are at church/hungover/hungover at church.
Mandalay
@Ann_Laurie
Your link states this:
So Nadler compares information he received from undislosed NSA officials with information he received from the Director of the FBI, and then says there is “a conflict” and calls the head of the FBI a liar. Apples and oranges.
A great drama queen performance from Nadler.
Mueller should have told him to fuck off.
Emma
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): I was going to go into my usual rant but you’ve said it better. Thank you.
When I read the byline of the story I immediately went to listen for myself. McCulloch is the kind of “journalist” I despise — Peggy Noonan without the alcoholic delusions. And I came away seriously confused. Nadler is saying he heard something, Mueller is saying no that’s not right, that was a different question, Nadler says no it wasn’t, Mueller says I’ll verify the info because that’s not how the process works. (paraphrasing).
So no, Mueller is not “admitting” anything, and the story, which should read “Congress is confused about what’s going on under the law they themselves passed, maybe they should do their job better” became “NSA admits to spying without a warrant.”
And Al Gore invented the Internet, don’t you know.
ChrisNYC
@NickT: That is a wise use of your liberty.
Emma
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22925892
I’m starting to thing AL is trolling her own site.
ChrisNYC
Just for the cluster**** lulz, Nadler doesn’t mention NSA doing the briefing. And, it sort of seems like Mueller himself did the briefing, since Mueller says he doesn’t think it’s the same question asked at the briefing and the hearing so he must have been at the briefing.
Ryan C
@Steeplejack: Targeting an individual for collection without authorization is highly HIGHLY illegal. NSA employees who did something like that would be in the deepest of shit.
But, yes, all of our secrets are in the hands of private companies. Private companies that are in close with senators. You think the leak to ruin Valerie Plame’s career was troubling. Just wait till someone crosses interests aligned with Booze Allen or Palantir or Blackwater.
Sleep tight!
Ryan C
@NickT: grow up. This isn’t all about which sports team is winning.
Mike in NC
The National Security State came into being in 1949, and isn’t going away anytime soon. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time, right?
Maude
@Mike in NC:
1947. National Security Act of 1947, signed by President Truman.
NickT
@Ryan C:
Thank you for that incoherent moment of self-soiling rage. You may now return to licking the ass of your local glibertarian wannabe.
NickT
@Ryan C:
Thank you for that incoherent moment of self-soiling rage. You may now return to licking the ass of your local glibertarian wannabe.
Mike in NC
@Maude: Thanks. Too lazy and hungover to Google…
Rex Everything
Sounds perfectly legal. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
Mandalay
@ChrisNYC:
What a load of speculative nonsense.
Mueller said to Nadler “I am not certain that it’s the answer to the same question“. Exactly what someone would say if they weren’t at the previous briefing.
And if Mueller had given Nadler two different stories then surely Nadler would have directly accused him of that, but he didn’t. It seems pretty obvious that Mueller did not give Nadler the information at the previous secret briefing.
Kathleen
An example of McCullagh’s objective reporting:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/10/39301
Mandalay
@Emma:
This. I am not sure which is worse: the garbage article linked to in the FP, or the slimy performances from Nadler and Sensenbrenner.
I also watched the video of Mueller’s testimony, and the article does not accurately reflect the conversation between Nadler and Mueller at all.
Nadler states that Mueller’s testimony conformed with his own understanding of the situation (around 47:00), and concluded that “someone was incorrect”. But if you only read the CNet article you would never know that; you would gave the opposite impression.
AnonPhenom
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
GG is still yucky.
A stopped clock…
Freedom ain’t free!
and Al Gore is fat.
Rex Everything
Seriously, what is up Charles Johnson’s ass? For over a week now he’s been peddling this kind of horseshit:
WTF is this shit? “If you read this, you’ll notice that it says what it says. Not only that, it says what it says it says.” Seriously. The McCullagh article says Nadler disclosed something he was previously told by an official. The transcript depicts *sinister chord* Nadler disclosing something he was previously told by an official. “OMG ratfuckery!”
A huge portion of the BJ commentariat is aping this LGF technique right here. Someone should think up a name for the technique. It’s the latest in donk fanboy evasion.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:
Are you high? He did no such thing; that’s ridiculous.
Emma
@Rex Everything: I see him as a good counterbalance for all the OMGTHEGOVERNMENTISCOMINGTOGETYOUSEEITOLDYOUSO posters. Truth, as usual, tries hard to do nuance, but nobody listens.
Rex Everything
@Emma:
And precisely no one has claimed that Mueller is admitting anything.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
@Cygil: When several people are saying the same or similar things, it could be because the things they are saying are facts.
Or there could be a massive conspiracy involving paid agents of Soros.
Occam’s Razor is the cure for paranoia.
Nunya
With so many commenters seemingly so invested in Greenwald being wrong about everything always, this place is becoming kind of a drag to visit. He just doesn’t matter that much.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:
Yeah, right. Why didn’t he, do you suppose?
Maybe because “we were just told the opposite, so there’s a conflict?” =/= “You’re a liar!!”?
Just maybe?
Emma
@Rex Everything: Really? Do some more looking through the Intertubes.
Emma
@Nunya: Tell that to the people who seem to derail the conversation into “why does everyone here hate Greenwald?” flamewars.
Rex Everything
@Emma: This post is about McCullagh’s article. Charles Johnson and acolytes are pretending McCullagh’s article implicates Mueller, so they can debunk that. It’s a load of crap.
Maybe someone somewhere on the Internet is saying what Johnson pretends McCullagh is saying. So what? Johnson is still peddling a load of crap.
LAC
@Carolinus: see? why do I risk destroying my beautiful post wedding party hangover to read this shit. “Other shoe drops” -really?
Emma
@Rex Everything: Sorry. I misread you. I didn’t realize we were going to jump on Johnson’s bones. The story which he discusses is in fact problematic, as pointed out, among others, Julian Sanchez and Kevin Drum. Perhaps we could discuss their comments instead
Mandalay
@Rex Everything:
Nadler asked Mueller a very precise question about the procedure the FBI follow to allow them to listen to a specific phone conversation. After Mueller had replied Nadler said to Mueller: “what you just said is incorrect“.
Given the question that was asked, how is that not calling him a liar?
But also see post #105, since showman Nadler speaks out of both sides of his mouth.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay
Nadler:
“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. Other words what you just said is incorrect.”
Obviously he means “according to this other testimony, according to this other official, you’re incorrect.” I mean it’s painfully obvious. Given the context, it can only mean that. If there are 2 contradictory account at least one must be incorrect.
And for Christ’s sake, even if it somehow, some way didn’t mean that, the flat statement “you’re incorrect” is not the same as “you’re a liar.” Also painfully obvious.
Mandalay
@Rex Everything:
Not “obviously” at all. There is a world of difference between saying “your testimony conflicts with another testimony”, and making the direct accusation “your testimony is incorrect”. Nadler did the latter, not the former.
Nadler explicitly told Mueller that the reply he had just given was “incorrect”. He said “what YOU just said is incorrect“. He directly accused Mueller of giving false testimony.
Nadler was sloppy and fucked up in his phrasing sure, but he is not supposed to do that. Plead that Nadler “meant” something else all you like, but what he said is there on video. I suggest you watch it.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:OK, let’s take a look at #105:
Again, ridiculous. Having only read the CNet article, I concluded exactly what you said I “would never know,” and I think that’s what any reasonable person would conclude based on the CNet article. “Someone was incorrect” is obviously Nadler’s point. “You’re a liar” is a Herculean, a Gargantaun, a motherfucking Brobdignagian stretch.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:
It’s not a fucking accusation. Jesus fucking Christ.
Davis X. Machina
@Nunya: It matters.
George W. Bush did essentially desert the Texas AIr National Guard.
The record was filleted to cover his dereliction.
The command structure played along, probably under orders.
All of this was uncovered by citizen-journalists-before-the-word existed like Martin Heldt and Maia Cowen.
Then Rove’s machine fed falsified documents to Dan Rather proving the same thing.
Bingo! Bush never was AWOL, because the high-profile messenger was burnt. The correct, factual story died when the vehicle for delivering it was discredited.
The same thing is happening here.
The credibility of of the messenger is going to get destroyed, and the story will die as a result.
Mandalay
@Rex Everything:
Let’s play it your way…. Nadler was clearly showboating and making judgements during Mueller’s testimony. He was clearly not acting impartially by arguing along the lines “if what someone else told me in a secret briefing is true then what you just said is incorrect”. Why persobnalize the alleged discrepancy? WTF was the point of saying that if not to discredit Mueller? Mueller can’t respond because Nadler can’t say what the discrepancy is. Nadler had an agenda and was acting irresponsibly.
Nadler’s approach was no different in nature to the nonsense we see from Republicans in the congressional hearing on Benghazi.
None of this means that Nadler does not have legitimate concerns. But he did act like a grade A asshole during that testimony.
Rex Everything
@Emma:
Drum and Sanchez are open and honest about their questions relative to this story. Johnson is a crap peddlar.
Johnson says, e.g., that it’s not about listening to phone calls. Johnson: “this entire discussion was about metadata. They explicitly say this several times, using the word ‘metadata.’ And metadata is not ‘listening to phone calls,’ it’s the equivalent of looking at a telephone bill.”
Here’s the massive-contempt-for-his-readership part: Johnson then quotes Nadler saying “If you wanted to listen to the phone —?” being told they’d need a warrant for that, and then responding “We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day.”
I mean, does he think no one will notice?
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:
It’s just a way of putting it. A very natural way, when you’re talking to a person and not some abstracted “discrepancy.” This is the way human beings communicate with each other.
Patricia Kayden
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes. If we the people don’t like the Patriot Act and everything that comes with it, we should be putting pressure on our Congress people to overturn it or revise the overzealous parts.
Patricia Kayden
@srv: I won’t. I have no idea what you are talking about. If you miss Pointdexter and Woo, you should have gotten McCain or Romney elected. You didn’t. Too bad for you.
Mandalay
@Rex Everything:
But Nadler had no business telling Mueller that his testimony was incorrect, or even suggesting that it might be incorrect, based on allegedly conflicting testimony in a secret briefing.
All Nadler needed to say (if anything) was that he needed to look into the matter further since he had received conflicting testimonies. He had no business even suggesting that Mueller’s testimony was incorrect without providing substantiation. And as I pointed out in post 105 that is what eventually happened. But you wouldn’t know that by reading the CNet article.
To be clear, I would trust Mueller as far as I could throw him. But I’d still trust him more than Nadler.
Rex Everything
@Mandalay:
Come on! Watch the damn exchange. Nadler says ACCORDING TO THIS, you’re incorrect. He also says I don’t doubt your sincerity or your understanding of the law. EXPLICITLY STATING that he’s not accusing Mueller of any dishonesty. He further states that that had been his, Nadler’s, understanding of the law as well. So I guess he’s calling himself a liar here? He then says SOMEONE’s incorrect, which was obviously the point all along. There is no HINT of calling Mueller a liar. The idea of Mueller being offended that his honesty was called into question is preposterous.
All Johnson can really accuse CNet of is an overzealous headline. But he knows what a yawn that would be.
Mike Lamb
@Rex Everything: It’s not a natural way of putting it at all. It’s a way of putting it so Nadler can get as close as possible to calling him a liar while still having some plausible deniability. I definitely wouldn’t say he called Mueller a liar. But Nadler certainly didn’t take a neutral approach to the “discrepancy” and it’s implied that Mueller isn’t being honest.
Rex Everything
@Mike Lamb: Right. “I don’t doubt that’s your interpretation of the law” plus “That was my understanding, too” plus “according to this other department’s testimony, we’re incorrect” plus “well, someone’s incorrect” … it all adds up to “YOUR PANTS ARE ON FIRE.”
Seriously, you guys’ mindset is somewhere on the 9/11 Truthers — fake moon landing spectrum. You’re far from the extreme end, but you’re there.
Self-Righteous Little White Guy
Oh look, someone actually asked Jerry Nadler about this story:
Mandalay
@Rex Everything:
As I posted earler, I did watch the video after I realized that CNet was being economical with the truth.
He had no business saying that unless he knew that Mueller was lying, (and it turned out that Nadler was in total agreement with Mueller FFS!). Nadler isn’t there to prosecute Mueller.
Right, and as I had already stated in post 105, Nadler was all over the place.
If Nadler truly was in total agreement with Mueller all along then why on earth did Nadler choose to say “…what YOU just said is incorrect“ rather than “…what I was told at the secret briefing is incorrect”? Nadler had an agenda.
Well Nadler certainly contradicted himself. I think Nadler realized he had crossed the line with Mueller, and then decided to give Mueller a tongue bath at the end of the conversation in the hope that Mueller will forgive and forget.
I really dislike fucktards like Nadler who think that congressional testimony – something which is incredibly important to the nation – only exists so that members of Congress can strut around like peacocks and show off. What Nadler did has a corrosive effect; It would be understandable if Mueller decides to be much less forthcoming when dealing with showboating windbags like Nadler in future.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
With the quality of reporting that Journalists can’t quite seem to wrap their head around technical aspects of computers and data, I think I need to invest in a shoe company for all of these shoes we’re gonna be dropping for no reason.
Mandalay
@Self-Righteous Little White Guy:
Ha! So what has happened to Nadler’s infamous allegation that he was told in a secret briefing “you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that…“? Is that no longer true?
Nadler is a giant asshole.
Mandalay
@Mike Lamb:
This. Nadler was pushing his agenda.
Ted & Hellen
@Patricia Kayden:
Yes. AND ALSO condemning the president for using powers he could, based on principled leadership (Ha! I know!), choose NOT to use.
Xenos
TPM claims to have a statement from Nadler disavowing the CNET article.
The half life of this scandal could turn out to be quite short.
Just Some Fuckhead
Someone clearly got to Nadler. Probably the Chicago Mafia.
fuckwit
I find this totally unremarkable. I’ve been a sysadmin off and on for decades now, and worked on “big data” projects more recently. “Big data” has been all the rage for some few years now– that means spying on everything you do, correlating every bit of data together about you, usually for the purposes of selling you shit. That the gummint decided it could get into the game too is completely unsurprising– they’re way behind corporations anyway.
But as a sysadmin, I’ve known for decades that privacy is a myth: email isn’t safe, and phone calls aren’t safe, and cellular phone calls aren’t safe. For a while early in the Bush era, and just before the Patriot Act, I caught the paranoia virus and started using PGP for all my email, Tor for all my browsing, strong encryption for my disks, etc etc. I used to follow Bruce Schneier, hell, I used to even be on McCullough’s private mailing list before he started writing for Wired. After a while it got exhausting and now I just don’t give a shit anymore. In recent months I’ve played with encryption again, as part of working on a finance-related project, but overall, meh.
I used to work at a company where the IT guys would snoop everyone’s emails, and the phone system was rigged so that the founder/CEO could listen in on everyone’s phone calls (he was real piece of work– the board eventually canned him and brought in an angel of death to turn the place around). Also, the voicemails were accessible to HR. At the time I had a very kinky girlfriend, and got more than a few looks from people who really shouldn’t have known she was leaving me messages saying the thing she was saying. My boss more or less refused to look at me for 6 months (until he got packaged out, with a strict confidentiality compact as part of his severance, which he came as close as he could to violating even by “hinting strongly” to me that such a compact existed– that company had a weird paranoid streak).
I mean, fucking Google Voice WILL NOT LET YOU DELETE VOICEMAILS. I mean really? What are they doing with all that stuff?
Privacy is, as McNealy pointed out decades ago, over. It’s simply too easy to obtain and correlate all this data, and Moore’s Law continues to accelerate this process. As that article points out, it’s not even expensive anymore.
Not that I approve of any of this; it’s simply reality. To paraphrase and extend the old saying: reality is that which fails to go away even if you don’t believe in it– or believe it is even possible, or that it is right.
I’d say if you are serious about this: run linux, don’t use any social networks, run Tor, turn off javascript, use GPG for all mail, use OTR for your IM transmissions, encrypt your hard disk, use two-factor auth for everything, and then, really, what the hell have you gained?
You can’t go through all this bullshit just to make your self private or secure– it’s too much of a pain in the ass–, and you can’t stop anyone from getting their hands on the technology to violate your privacy– it’s too easy and too cheap now. I think legislating this stuff away is futile, though I’d support any workable ideas to do so, if they existed, which I doubt. This is the new reality.
A Humble Lurker
@Ted & Hellen:
Because nothing’s delegated to the CIA, or the NSA because the President can handle it all, right? Every detail of every apparatus everyday while still being able to do everything else a President is supposed to do.
Dingus.
Mandalay
@fuckwit:
Sure – many people here have said the same thing, and so far the specifics that Snowden has released have hardly been earth shattering.. But the new developments are that:
– Snowden has caused the media to revisit the issue with a more cynical perspective than in the past.
– The media spotlight has provoked politicians to revisit the issue, and some are squirming a little.
Much as it may gall some folks here, I don’t think Congress would be having hearings on this right now were it not for Snowden.
Few would disagree. Any push will only be for better oversight and increased accountability from the government and the Administration. But if that actually happens I think Snowden can fairly claim credit.
Mandalay
@Xenos:
The real scandal is that an asshole like Nadler can make an outrageous claim, then hide behind the curtain of secrecy when he gets called on his bullshit.
Lancelot Link
Jerry Nadler has since denied that the CNET story is accurate.
Desmond
So this turned out to be completely inaccurate, would an update in the initial blog post be too much to ask for?