(Jew'd) US Senate Approves Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Senate Approves Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers

    By David Kravets
    12.28.12
    11:15 AM

    Follow @dmkravets

Whistleblower Mark Klein provided this photo of a secret room in a San Francisco AT&T switching center, which he claimed housed data-mining equipment that enables the government to spy on electronic communications.

The Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the President George W. Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans' phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted "to acquire foreign intelligence information."

The House approved the measure in September. President Barack Obama, who said the spy powers were a national security priority, is expected to quickly sign the package before the law Congress codified in 2008 expires in the coming days. Over the past two days, the Senate debated and voted down a handful of amendments in what was seen as largely political theater to get Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to lift a procedural hold on the FISA Amendments Act legislation that barred lawmakers from voting on the package.

In the end, the identical package the House passed 301-118 swept through the Senate on a 73-23 vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately blasted the vote.

"The Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years," said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU's legislative counsel.

Amendments senators refused to enact included extending the measure for just three years, another one requiring the government to account for how many times Americans' communications have been intercepted, and one by Wyden prohibiting U.S. spy agencies from reviewing the communications of Americans ensnared in the program.

"The amendment I fought to include would have helped bring the constitutional principles of security and liberty back into balance and intend to work with my colleagues to see that the liberties of individual Americans are maintained," Wyden said immediately after the vote.

The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court's rulings are not public.

The government has also interpreted the law to mean that as long as the real target is al-Qaeda, the government can wiretap purely domestic e-mails and phone calls without getting a warrant from a judge. That's according to David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department.

In short, Kris said the FISA Amendments Act gives the government nearly carte blanche spying powers.

Kris, who headed the Justice Department's National Security Division between 2009 and 20011, writes in the revised 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions:

For example, an authorization targeting 'al Qaeda' — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans' privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice.

After Obama signs the legislation Friday, the spy powers won't expire until December 31, 2017.

The law is the subject of a Supreme Court challenge. The Obama administration argues that the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of other groups suing don't have the legal standing to even bring a challenge.

A federal judge agreed, ruling the ACLU, Amnesty International, Global Fund for Women, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association, The Nation magazine, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union and other plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case because they could not demonstrate that they were subject to the warrantless eavesdropping.

The groups appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that they often work with overseas dissidents who might be targets of the National Security Agency program. Instead of speaking with those people on the phone or through e-mails, the groups asserted that they have had to make expensive overseas trips in a bid to maintain attorney-client confidentiality. The plaintiffs, some of them journalists, also claim the 2008 legislation chills their speech, and violates their Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

Without ruling on the merits of the case, the appeals court agreed with the plaintiffs last year that they have ample reason to fear the surveillance program, and thus have legal standing to pursue their claim.

The case, argued last month, is pending an opinion from the Supreme Court.

Homepage Photo: wallyg / Flickr
David Kravets

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/1 ... mendments/

[Amanda]

Wayne Madsen Report December 28-31, 2012 -- Senate delivers fatal end-of-term blow to Constitution
 
In one of the final acts of the 112th Congress, the U.S. Senate dealt a fatal blow to the U.S. Constitution by passing President Obama's National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, which contains the same illegal detention of U.S. citizens as its 2012 predecessor, and defeating amendments to and enacting Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith's House Resolution 5949, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2012. HR 5949 keeps the warrantless surveillance authority imposed by the Bush-Cheney administration under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 -- the National Security Agency's operation STELLAR WIND -- in place. With the Obama administration forcing through the reauthorization of STELLAR WIND, illegal wiretapping by NSA of American citizens' phone calls, emails, faxes, telexes, social networking instant messages (IMs) and short message services (SMSs), Voice-Over-IP (VOIP), and files contained in cloud storage can now be called Obama's illegal surveillance program.

 Obama was required by NSA to seek STELLAR WIND's reauthorization because NSA requires congressional cover for the launching of the most massive eavesdropping and storage program in the history of the world. NSA will soon be storing every form of electronic communication sent and received by U.S. citizens at its $1.5 billion Utah Data Center located within the Camp Williams Utah National Guard base near Bluffdale, Utah. The NSA will be combining its signals intelligence functions as NSA/Central Security Service with its computer intelligence and information functions as part of its U.S. Cyber Command responsibilities under the aegis of a program known as the Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center that will deploy the NSA's follow-on to its follow-on to its post-9/11 data mining program, the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD). With its new powers granted by Congress, NSA has become the most intrusive intelligence agency in the world today.
 
A few senators attempted to seek amendments to the HR 5949, but no no avail. A substitution to the House bill offered by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and the Senate President pro tem, failed with a vote of 38 for to 52 against with 10 not voting. Other amendments introduced by Senators Ran Paul (R-KY), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) were rejected by the Senate. The Paul amendment would have ensured that Fourth Amendments rights were protected under the re-authorization, Merkley's amendment would have required the Attorney General to disclose Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court significant  interpretations of the eavesdropping statute, and the Wyden amendment would have required an privacy impact report on the effects of the act.
 
The Democratic ringmaster for the "No" votes on the amendments was Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Also voting no were the "senator from NSA" Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the senator from the CIA and co-founder of Capital Cellular Corporation and major investor in NEXTEL Mark Warner (D-VA),* the Bilderberg man Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)♣, Kay Hagan (D-NC), Secretary of State-select John Kerry (D-MA), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and the outgoing Ben Nelson (D-NE).

Paul's "motherhood" amendment on Fourth Amendment protections only received the support  of Max Baucus (D-MT), Mark Begich (D-AK), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Dean Heller (R-NV), Mike Lee (R-UT), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jim Webb (R-VA), and Wyden.
 
In the end, STELLAR WIND reauthorization passed the Senate with a vote of 73 for, 23 against, and 4 not voting. Three of the 23 no votes were Republicans: Lee, Paul, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Among the Democrats voting no were Leahy, newly-appointed Brian Schatz (D-HI), both senators from Oregon, New Mexico, Montana, Vermont, and Washington, and Mark Begich (AK), Sherrod Brown (OH), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Coons (DE), Al Franken (MN), Bob Menendez (NJ), Mark Udall (CO), Dan Akaka (HI),and Tom Harkin (IA).
 
The Congress folded like a two-dollar suitcase in giving NSA congressional cover to begin amassing a yottabyte of personal data at its Utah Data Center. A yottabyte is one septillion bytes of data. The NSA will sweep and store in Utah AT&T's DAYTONA database of caller information, itself one of the world's largest databases, and the firm's 312 terabyte HAWKEYE database, containing every domestic telephone communication from 2001. A large Microsoft facility that handles 10 billion Hotmail messages per day and located near NSA Texas in San Antonio, will feed its take directly into the Utah center. All the signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts from NSA and its second, third, and fourth party intelligence sharing partners around the world and contained in the massive OCEANARIUM SIGINT database, which is associated with a central repository of phone number database called ANCHORY/MAUI, will also be stored in Utah. Smaller SIGINT databases called CULTWEAVE and PROTON will also feed into the monster system in Utah. The CREST database automatically translates foreign language intercepts and provides the data to operators in English. The AGILITY database, which stores intercepted voice communications, and PINWALE, which contains intercepted faxes and e-mail, will also be stored in Utah. Another voice intercept database called NUCLEON will also be streamed into the Utah Data Center. A high-capacity/high-speed vacuum cleaner once called SHARKFIN and renamed RC-10, sweeps up all-source communications intelligence (COMINT) from a variety of communication methods and systems. SIGINT analysis tools like PATHFINDER allow operators to drill down on surveillance targets.

 Exchange of data for human operators is handled by automated message handling systems such as one codenamed MESSIAH. SIGINT targeting and reporting systems called SKYWRITER, SEMESTER, and There is one NSA system with the cover name FASCIA that is hauntingly close in name to the word "fasces," the root word for fascism.
 
Under the UK-USA agreement that for over 65 years has seen the sharing of intercepted civilian communications between "First Party" NSA (OSCAR), and "Second Parties" -- Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (ALPHA), Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) (UNIFORM), Australia's Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) (ECHO), and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) (INDIA) -- the allied SIGINT partners have moved into stored data surveillance, including financial information, consumer profiling data, and stored personal computer files. All these agencies will have their hooks into the Utah Data Center and the privacy of Americans' personal data will be routinely violated by foreign intelligence operators on duty in Cheltenham, England; Leitrim, Ontario; Waihopi, New Zealand; and Geraldton and Canberra, Australia.

But access to the most private data of Americans will not merely be accessible to the English-speaking First and Second Parties. It has been revealed that during the Cold War and its aftermath the First and Second Parties also shared intelligence between themselves and non-English speaking "Third Parties." Such intelligence was classified with the designator DRUID and was shared with third parties, countries with NATO or defense treaty relationships with the United States, with SIGINT Exchange Designators of DIKTER (Norway), SETTEE (South Korea), DYNAMO (Denmark), RICHTER (Germany), and ISHTAR (Japan). Other intelligence was shared between First and Second Parties and "Fourth Parties" that were mainly neutral or special category partners. Such Fourth Party intelligence partners had sharing designators like JAEGER (Austria). Other SIGINT Exchange Designators with Third and Fourth Parties were ARCA, FRONTO, NECTAR, SARDINE, KAMPUS, PROTEIN, SEABOOT, DIVERSITY, KEYRUT, PYLON, MUSKET, RORIPA, and THESPIS. These designators covered the sharing of SIGINT with such nations as France, Thailand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Turkey, the People's Republic of China, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

 
There is every indication that these SIGINT agreements continue and now extend to stored data -- phone calls and Internet transactions -- in addition to real-time intercepts. In what should be of concern to every American, Canadian, Briton, Dane, Norwegian, Japanese, Italian, and others, intelligence operators sitting in data fusion centers in Paris (Alliance Base where French, British, German, Canadian, and Australian intelligence analysts comb through databases containing massive amounts of personal data); Cheltenham; Fort Meade, Maryland; the new $1 billion NSA Middle East and North Africa intercept and analysis facility, codenamed SWEET TEA, near Leburda, Georgia; Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado; Canberra; Ottawa; Kunia Camp, Oahu; and the Utah Data Center will be to call up electronic dossiers on everyone with a digital footprint anywhere in the world without regard to national boundaries, court oversight, or data protection and privacy laws.  

-------------
 
* It was a technical adviser to then Virginia Governor Mark Warner who revealed that Warner urged his staff to engage in cell phone "batteries out" conversations when they were talking about sensitive topics. Warner's support for STELLAR WIND powers and his past knowledge of NSA's capabilities to use cell phones turned off but with batteries still installed indicates that he was in on, and may have even profited from, NSA's cellular phone technical capabilities.
 
♣ NSA director and Cyber Command chief General Keith Alexander has attended the last few Bilderberg meetings.