Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court To Allow Warrantless Cellphone Searches

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Cell Phone, Obama Administration, supreme court, warrantless

If the police arrest you, do they need a warrant to rifle through your cellphone? Courts have been split on the question. Last week the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and rule that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless cellphone searches.

In 2007, the police arrested a Massachusetts man who appeared to be selling crack cocaine from his car. The cops seized his cellphone and noticed that it was receiving calls from “My House.” They opened the phone to determine the number for “My House.” That led them to the man’s home, where the police found drugs, cash and guns.

The defendant was convicted, but on appeal he argued that accessing the information on his cellphone without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Earlier this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the man’s argument, ruling that the police should have gotten a warrant before accessing any information on the man’s phone.

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Secret Court Lets NSA Extend its Trawl of VERIZON Customers’ Phone Records

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FISA, NSA, phone records, Surveillance, Verizon

The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian’s disclosure in June of the NSA‘s indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa).

The announcement flowed, the statement said, from the decision to declassify aspects of the metadata grab “in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program”.

According to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, the Verizon phone surveillance has been in place – updated every three months – for at least six years, and it is understood to have been applied to other telecoms giants as well.

The decision to go public with the latest Fisa court order is an indication of how the Obama administration has opened up the previously hidden world of mass communications surveillance, however slightly, since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed the scheme to the Guardian.

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Obama Orders Federal Workers to Spy on Each Other

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Coverup, Insider Threat Program, Obama, scandal, Secrets, Security, spy

WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

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Venezuela and Nicaragua Offer Snowden Asylum; But Can He Get There?

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asylum, Nicaragua, Snowden, Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – The quest by NSA leaker Edward Snowden for a safe haven has taken a turn toward Latin America, with offers for asylum coming from the leftist presidents of Nicaragua and Venezuela.

But there were no immediate signs that efforts were underway to bring him to either nation after Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua made their offers during separate speeches in their home countries Friday.

The offers came one day after leftist South American leaders gathered to denounce the rerouting of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane over Europe amid reports that the fugitive American was aboard.

Snowden, who is being sought by the United States, has asked for asylum in more than 20 countries, including Nicaragua and Venezuela. Many another nations have turned him down.

WHAT NOW? National Intelligence Director Guilty of Perjury before Congress; Apologizes

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Congress, Director, Edward Snowden, James Clapper, Leaks, National Intelligence, NSA, Ron Wyden, U.S. Government

Director Clapper says a response to the Intelligence Committee in March was ‘clearly erroneous’

The director of National Intelligence apologized in June to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for lying during a hearing, according to a letter published on the DNI website on Tuesday.

Director James Clapper appeared before the committee in March, where Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him specifically if NSA spies on millions of Americans. Clapper answered, “No.”

RELATED: Sign the petition asking for the Director’s immediate firing…

Since then, Edward Snowden reportedly leaked government documents that unveiled a secretive government program that did precisely what Wyden suggested in collecting meta data for cell phone and internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Clapper says the intricacy of Wyden’s question – asking for a clarification of “hundreds of millions of dossiers on people” – combined with a need to preserve classified information prompted him to give the wrong answer.

“My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize,” he wrote in the letter to committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. “While my staff acknowledged the error to Sen. Wyden’s staff soon after the hearing, I can now openly correct it because the existence of the metadata collection program has been declassified.”

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NSA Now Accused Of Snooping On European Union

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eavesdrop, eu, European Union, NSA, Spying

BERLIN – A top German official accused the United States on Sunday of using “Cold War” methods against its allies, after a German magazine cited secret intelligence documents to claim that U.S. spies bugged European Union offices.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was responding to a report by German news weekly Der Spiegel, which claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropped on EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. The magazine cited classified U.S. documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that it said it had partly seen.

“If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War,” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies,” she said, calling for an “immediate and comprehensive” response from the U.S. government to the claims.

Other European officials demanded an explanation from the U.S.

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Wikileaks Says Michael Hastings Contacted It Just Before His Death

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Death, Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone, Wikileaks

WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.”

What exactly are they trying to say?

Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to bring down General Stanley McChrystal. He was tragically killed this week in a car crash in Los Angeles, after his car hit a tree. Hastings is believed to have been alone in the vehicle.

Hastings has certainly been in contact with WikiLeaks before. In 2012 he wrote a profile of Julian Assange for Rolling Stone in which he asked tough questions – but the overall tone is sympathetic. Hastings appeared willing to accept that the US government might have targeted Assange in an effort to discredit him; the interview also highlights the failure of mainstream media outlets to expose mistakes made by the US military and generally permits Assange to push his side of the story. Hastings’ empathy for WikiLeaks ties together the deceased journalist, Julian Assange and (through Assange) the leaker Bradley Manning. You can throw Edward Snowden into that mix because he, too, is an admirer of WikiLeaks. And Hastings’ last article was about the evils of the NSA – which ended with the tantalising line, “Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.” Glenn Greenwald Tweeted a link to the piece after Hastings’ death. Of such connections are conspiracy theories made. In the minds of the highly imaginative, that is.

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PARDON? President Defends Domestic Spy Program as ‘transparent’

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Barack Obama, charlie rose, on drugs, Presidential Campaign, Press, spy program, transparent

Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case…. And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.” To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

Charlie Rose: But there is a balance here.

Barack Obama: But there is a balance, so I’m going to get to your — get to your question. The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is “Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.” Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the intelligence gathering business for a very long time —

Charlie Rose: Bigger and better than everybody else.

U.S. Agencies Said to be Swapping Data With THOUSANDS of Firms

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CIA, Data, Data Mining, Firms, Swap, U.S. Government

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc (GOOG). and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that don’t involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.

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Justice Dept. Loses a Round in Battle to Keep Surveillance Wrongdoing Secret

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David Corn, FISA, FOIA, Justice Department, Loses, motherjones, secret, Surveillance

David Corn
Washington Bureau Chief, MotherJones.com

Last week, I reported that in the midst of revelations about the National Security Agency’s extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was fighting to keep secret a court opinion that determined that the government on at least one occasion had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

Last year, after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) released a declassified statement noting that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court had found that the US government had engaged in surveillance that had circumvented the law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest outfit that focuses on digital rights, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department for any FISA court opinion or order that had reached such a conclusion. FISA court proceedings and opinions are top secret, and the Justice Department said, in essence, get lost. EFF sued, and in the course of the proceedings, the Justice Department revealed that the FISA court in 2011 had indeed produced an 86-page opinion concluding a government surveillance program was not constitutionally kosher. But the department provided no details regarding the program the opinion covered, and it contended the opinion could not be released because it was classified and the department itself did not have the authority to release a FISA court opinion, under that court’s rules.

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