US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

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The NSA Deserves a Permanent Shutdown

By Norman Solomon [/TD]
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To the people in control of the Executive Branch, violating ourcivil liberties is an essential government service. So -- to ensuretotal fulfillment of Big Brother's vast responsibilities -- theNational Security Agency is insulated from any fiscaldisruption.
The NSA's surveillance programs are exempt from a governmentshutdown. With typical understatement, an unnamedofficial told TheHill that "a shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSAoperations."
At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of"core NSA operations" is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, apermanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; weshould strive to make it achievable.
NSA documents, revealed by intrepid whistleblower EdwardSnowden, make clear what's at stake. In aword: democracy.
Wielded under the authority of the president, the NSA is themain surveillance tool of the U.S. government. For a dozen years,it has functioned to wreck our civil liberties. It's a tool thatshould not exist.


In this century, the institutional momentum of the NSA -- nowfueled by a $10.8 billion annualbudget -- has been moving so fast in such a wrongdirection that the agency seems unsalvageable from the standpointof civil liberties. Its core is lethal to democracy.
A big step toward shutting down the National Security Agencywould be to mobilize political pressure for closure ofthe new NSA complex that has beenunder construction in Bluffdale, Utah: a gargantuan repository for ostensibly privatecommunications.
During a PBS "NewsHour" interview that aired on August 1 , NSAwhistleblower William Binney pointed out that the Bluffdalefacility has a "massive amount of storage that could store allthese recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberopticnetworks of the world." He added: "I mean, you could store 100years of the world's communications here. That's for contentstorage. That's not for metadata."
The NSA's vacuum-cleaner collection of metadata is highlyintrusive, providing government snoops with vast information aboutpeople's lives. That's bad enough. But the NSA, using the latestdigital technology, is able to squirrel away the content oftelephone, e-mail and text communications -- in effect, "TiVo-ing"it all, available for later retrieval.
"Metadata, if you were doing it and putting it into the systemswe built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world,"Binney explained. "That's all the space you need. You don't need100,000 square feet of space that they have in Bluffdale to dothat. You need that kind of storage for content."
Already the NSA's Bluffdale complex in a remote area of Utah --seven times the size of the Pentagon -- is serving as an archiverepository for humungous quantities of "private" conversations thatthe agency has recorded and digitized.
Organizing sufficient political power to shut down the entireNational Security Agency may or may not be possible. But in anyevent, we should demand closure of the agency's mega-Orwelliancenter in Bluffdale. If you'd like to e-mailthat message to your senators and representative in Congress, clickhere.
"The U.S. government has gone further than any previousgovernment " in setting up machinery that satisfies certaintendencies that are in the genetic code of totalitarianism,"Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation as thisfall began. "One is the ambition to invade personal privacy withoutcheck or possibility of individual protection. This was impossiblein the era of mere phone wiretapping, before the recent explosionof electronic communications -- before the cellphones that disclosethe whereabouts of their owners, the personal computers with theirmasses of personal data and easily penetrated defenses, the e-mailsthat flow through readily tapped cables and servers, thebiometrics, the street-corner surveillance cameras."
"But now," Schell continued, "to borrow the name of anintelligence program from the Bush years, "Total InformationAwareness' is technologically within reach. The Bush and Obamaadministrations have taken giant strides in this direction."
Those giant strides have stomped all over the Fourth Amendment,leaving it gasping for oxygen. That amendment now reads like aprofound articulation of opposition to present-day governmentsurveillance -- a declaration of principle that balks at thelockstep of perpetual war mentality and rote surrender of preciouscivil liberties. To acceptance of the NSA and what it stands for,we must say and say and say: No way. No way. Noway.

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Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill Working On New NSA Revelations

AP | By By JENNY BARCHFIELD Posted: 09/28/2013 8:46 pm EDT






















RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) Two American journalists known for their investigations of the United States' government said Saturday they've teamed up to report on the National Security Agency's role in what one called a "U.S. assassination program."
The journalists provided no evidence of the purported U.S. program at the news conference, nor details of who it targeted.
Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and the New York Times best-selling author of "Dirty Wars," said he will be working with Glenn Greenwald, the Rio-based journalist who has written stories about U.S. surveillance programs based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
"The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don't want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S. assassination program," said Scahill, speaking to moviegoers in Rio de Janeiro, where the documentary based on his book made its Latin American debut at the Rio Film Festival.
"There are so many stories that are yet to be published that we hope will produce 'actionable intelligence,' or information that ordinary citizens across the world can use to try to fight for change, to try to confront those in power," said Scahill.
"Dirty Wars" the film, directed by Richard Rowley, traces Scahill's investigations into the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The movie, which won a prize for cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, follows Scahill as he hopscotches around the globe, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, talking to the families of people killed in the U.S. strikes.
Neither Scahill nor Greenwald, who also appeared at the film festival's question and answer panel, provided many details about their joint project.


Greenwald has been making waves since the first in a series of stories on the NSA spying program appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper in June. Last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff postponed a scheduled state dinner with Obama after television reports to which Greenwald had contributed revealed that American spy programs had aggressively targeted the Brazilian government and private citizens.
Rousseff railed against the U.S. surveillance during her address to the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week.
Both Scahill and Greenwald applauded Rousseff's reactions to the revelations, but they warned that U.S. spying could be replaced espionage by another government if care isn't taken.
"The really important thing to realize is the desire for surveillance is not a uniquely American attribute," said Greenwald. "America has just devoted way more money and way more resources than anyone else to spying on the world.