WASHINGTON (AP) -- Edward Snowden identified himself Sunday as a principal source behind revelations about the National Security Agency's sweeping phone and Internet surveillance programs. Five things to know about the disclosures:
-- THE PROGRAMS: The NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans each day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the U.S. While the NSA program does not listen to actual conversations, the revelation of the program reopened the post-Sept. 11 debate about privacy concerns versus heightened measures to protect against terrorist attacks. Separately, an Internet scouring program, code-named PRISM, allows the NSA and FBI to tap directly into nine U.S. Internet companies to gather all Internet usage -- audio, video, photographs, emails and searches. The effort is designed to detect suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
-- THE LEAKER: A 29-year-old high school dropout who worked for consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton has claimed responsibility for disclosing the programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Snowden told The Guardian that he enlisted in the Army, was dismissed after breaking both legs during a training exercise and later got a job as a security guard at a covert intelligence facility in Maryland. He says he later joined the CIA and was posted under diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. He later worked for consulting companies and claims he spent four years working as a contractor with the NSA. In a statement, Booz Allen Hamilton said he has worked for them less than three months.
-- THE REASON: In interviews with The Guardian and the Washington Post, Snowden said he felt compelled to disclose the program because he wanted "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them." Snowden says he also was disillusioned with CIA tactics to recruit spies in Geneva and was disappointed President Barack Obama did not do more to curtail surveillance programs after his 2008 election.
-- THE REACTION: The government's response was fierce. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the disclosures were "gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities" and asked the Justice Department to investigate. Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the journalists who reported on the programs don't "have a clue how this thing works; neither did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous." Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she wanted to see the leaker prosecuted. Rep. Peter King, a Republican on the intelligence panel, called for Snowden to be "extradited from Hong Kong immediately." John Negroponte, a former director of national intelligence, called it "an outright case of betrayal of confidences and a violation of his nondisclosure agreement." Yet some also said Snowden's revelations should spark a debate about the secret programs and civil liberties. "I am not happy that we've had leaks and these leaks are concerning, but I think it's an opportunity now to have a discussion about the limits of surveillance, how we create transparency, and above all, how we protect Americans' privacy," said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
-- THE CONSEQUENCES: The NSA has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation, and Snowden could face decades in prison if convicted on espionage or treason charges. The Obama administration has been particularly aggressive in prosecuting those who disclose classified information. Snowden has fled to Hong Kong, a former British colony that is now a semi-autonomous region of China. Snowden says he chose the city because he expects leaders could resist pressure from the U.S. government. Snowden also says he would "ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy." Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that took force in 1998, according to the U.S. State Department website.
http://www.wtop.com/209/3352506/5-things-to-note-about-NSA-surveillance-programs
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans
The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.
Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair’s recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.
The judges “were really upset about this,” said the former official. As a result, Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take steps to correct the problem as a condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program.
The Justice Department publicly confirmed to the New York Times in April 2009 that Holder had taken “comprehensive steps” to correct a problem in NSA collection after it “detected issues that raised concerns.” But department officials declined to discuss details about what was described at the time as the “over-collection” of information.
In another instance that was made public in July 2012, a U.S. intelligence official acknowledged in a letter to Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon that “on at least one occasion” the national security court found that “some collection” by the intellligence community “was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution. The official also wrote that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence believed that the government’s collection of information “has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law” and that “on at least one occasion” the national security court had “reached this same conclusion.”
Blair declined to say how many times the NSA had had to report the improper collection of information to the court, but indicated it had happened more than once. A spokesman for current DNI Clapper declined comment.
The 2009 incident that Blair described may shed light on an exchange between Clapper and Sen. Ron Wyden, D.-Ore., at a March hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Asked by Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps collect-but not wittingly.”
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/07/18831985-officials-nsa-mistakenly-intercepted-emails-phone-calls-of-innocent-americans
Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide
The journalist who broke the news that the government is monitoring vast quantities of American phone records is claiming the U.S. is building a “massive” snooping apparatus committed to destroying privacy worldwide.
“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for the British newspaper “The Guardian,” speaking on CNN. “That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.”
Greenwald, speaking with CNN’s Piers Morgan, appeared during a week in which Americans learned that according to reports, the National Security Agency and other parts of the government have been monitoring the phone records of Verizon users and accessing Internet information as part of intelligence-gathering procedures. Some Republicans and Democrats have defended the phone records strategy, including the highest-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee — Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). But Greenwald dismissed those arguments.
(PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report)“So whatever the Justice Department wants to do, they can beat their chests all they want,” he said. “People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing … light to what it is they’re doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them. It’s well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve. That’s certainly how I intend to treat them moving forward, with more investigation and disclosures.”
He also bashed the Obama administration for issuing “threats.”
“The Obama administration has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody who thinks about exposing it or writing it or even doing journalism about it, and it’s well past time that come to an end,” he said.
Greenwald also told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the administration has taken a “warped and distorted” view of the PATRIOT Act, the legislation that authorized certain kinds of surveillance for security reasons in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“What the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so warped and distorted and it vests themselves with such extremist surveillance powers over the United States and American citizens that Americans, in their words, would be stunned to learn what the Obama administration is doing,” he said on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Speaking with MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, Greenwald dared lawmakers to investigate how information about the Verizon phone records leaked, as Feinstein has said should happen.
“Let them go and investigate,” Greenwald said.
He added, “There is this massive surveillance state that the United States government has built up that has extraordinary implications for how we live as human beings on the earth and as Americans in our country, and we have the right to know what it is that that government and that agency is doing. I intend to continue to shine light on that, and Dianne Feinstein can beat her chest all she wants and call for investigations, and none of that is going to stop and none of it is going to change.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/glenn-greenwald-us-privacy-92400.html#ixzz2VYWMfqp7
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