“A Misleading Media Picture”: Why The National Security Agency’s PRISM Program Is Nothing To Fear
It has been revealed that the National Security Agency has been employing PRISM, a $20-million-per-year program that monitors the movement of individuals through digital data, for roughly six years. PRISM has gained access to private information and online correspondence through nine technology companies here in the U.S. The USA PATRIOT Act and the Protect America Act of 2007 (PAA) opened the door for this surveillance program to take shape.
President Obama and the NSA have been criticized for a lack of transparency and the program’s assumed targeting of American citizens. The president said during a press conference on Friday that PRISM does not target American citizens or those living in the U.S., stating, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls” and “They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content.” The surveillance program was structured to exclusively monitor correspondence between foreign individuals—solely the lines of communication between these individuals that pass through the U.S.
PRISM may not be the top-secret program of government overreach that many are trying to portray it as. The program is lawful (as long as American citizens and individuals in the U.S. are not monitored) under PAA, and for six years the entire program was fully recognized by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The NSA still must have a reasonable cause for intercepting communications, appeal to a federal court and gain permission to monitor any correspondence—all of which include Congressional oversight.
The NSA recently declassified a slideshow that outlines PRISM on a very basic level. This is what is currently known about the surveillance program: There were a total of nine technology companies included in PRISM—Microsoft in September, 2007, Yahoo in March, 2008, Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009, YouTube in September, 2010, Skype and AOL in early 2011, and Apple in October of 2012.
While officials from AOL, PalTalk, Facebook, Yahoo, and Apple have all denied any knowledge of PRISM or working with the U.S. government on such a program, the NSA would still be within legal parameters if they monitored any data from these companies with a court order.
According to the PRISM slideshow, the types of materials they seek are email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP (phone calls made over the internet), file transfers, video conferencing, log-ins, time stamps, and any information provided on social networking sites.
The NSA slideshow makes three points defining the necessity of such a program: “Much of the world’s communications flow through the U.S.,” “A target’s phone call, email or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path—you can’t always predict the path,” and “Your target’s communications could easily be flowing into and through the U.S.”
Basically, what we’ve learned about the NSA and PRISM is nothing new. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said of PRISM, “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this, and to my knowledge we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.” In other words, these actions have been lawfully taking place for six years and were approved by Congress with the effortless passages of the PATRIOT Act in 2001 and the Protect America Act in 2007.
The picture that is being painted of PRISM—a secretive surveillance program that unlawfully delves into the average American’s private life—is misleading. PRISM, if carried out properly, is only used to monitor suspicious patterns of communications abroad. If individuals choose to use means of communication that are based here in the U.S., the U.S. government, with the proper court approval, is entirely within its rights to seek out information it deems necessary for national security purpose—as long as Congress continues to authorize the laws that allow such programs.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, June 7, 2013
“The Sorry Spectacle Continues”: Polarized Washington Ignores Long-Term Issues At Its Peril
Scandalfest continues. Official Washington is still flitting from one minor controversy to another, with the news media breathlessly reporting the latest leaked email or unsubstantiated accusation. Clearly, the chattering classes have declared the jobs crisis ended and the economic recovery complete.
While the Obama administration hasn’t popped open champagne bottles to celebrate, the air of silliness that hangs over the Beltway is a reminder that the worst is over. After all, the stock market is soaring. Consumer confidence is climbing.
The latest national unemployment number is down to 7.5 percent, the lowest level since December 2007, when the economy started its steep descent. Indeed, the sustained economic uptick may have a direct tie-in to Washington’s current obsession with less consequential matters: The economy is strong enough to have persuaded Republicans to stop blasting President Barack Obama over joblessness, so they’ve had to find other issues with which to batter him.
Here’s an update from outside the Beltway Bubble: The jobs crisis is not over. Average Americans are still struggling through an ugly economic transformation — a structural change decades in the making that jumped into overdrive with the Great Recession. Millions of Americans of working age remain unemployed, while others patch together two or three part-time jobs to keep food on the table. Still others have found full-time jobs but at far less pay than they used to earn.
A recent Quinnipiac poll provides a clear look into the minds of voters, who have little interest in the imbroglios of the moment. Rightly, 44 percent believe the revelations about the Internal Revenue Service, which singled out conservative organizations for unfair screening, as most important among the current controversies. Only 24 percent cited the deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, despite the GOP’s obsession with it. Far fewer, just 14 percent, listed the Justice Department’s scrutiny of reporters.
But here’s the news you may have missed: An overwhelming 73 percent said that boosting the economy and creating jobs is more important than any of the other three issues. If politicians were as poll-obsessed as they are rumored to be, they’d at least pretend to be devoting most of their time to helping middle-class Americans get back into stable jobs with good pay.
The jobs crisis has been decades in the making, an economic restructuring fueled by globalization and technology. Think about it: Those Bangladeshi textile workers killed in an April building collapse were doing work once done in the United States. No matter how many affluent Americans protest the conditions and boycott the designers who contributed to the disaster, those jobs are not coming back to these shores. Manufacturers will continue to pursue cheap labor.
As a result, the jobs that once guaranteed good wages and stable futures to generations of Americans without college degrees have all but disappeared. That transformation, which started in the 1970s, has contributed to the wage gap, the ever-widening rift between the haves and have-nots. The average American worker has been losing economic ground for decades.
Politicians ignore that growing gap at their peril. The notion of an America where everybody has an equal shot has always been more myth than reality, but there was once a time when it was not so difficult for young adults to imagine a more prosperous future than their parents had. That is no longer a likely scenario.
That’s a very difficult problem to solve, which helps explain why politicians don’t like to discuss it. It calls for a multigenerational response, the sort of bipartisan approach that is usually reserved for battles against foreign enemies.
But Washington is stuck in a period of deepening polarization, incapable, it seems, of even agreeing on the causes of our economic woes. Democrats, at least, have a language for discussing widening income inequality. Republicans haven’t yet come to terms with its existence. So the sorry spectacle continues.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, June 6, 2013
“Paranoid Concerns”: Making A Mountain Out Of A Digital Molehill
The revelations this week that the federal government has been scooping up records of telephone calls inside the United States for seven years, and secretly collecting information from Internet companies on foreigners overseas for nearly six years, have elicited predictable outrage from liberals and civil libertarians.
Is the United States no better than those governed by repressive dictators who have no regard for individual rights? Could President Obama credibly raise human rights issues with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at a summit meeting on Friday, if America is running its own vast surveillance state? Has Mr. Obama, for all his talk of ending the “war on terror,” taken data mining to new levels unimagined by his predecessor, George W. Bush?
Hold it just a minute.
From what has been made public, we know that the F.B.I., under the Obama administration, used its powers under the Patriot Act to seek these records; that judges with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these searches; and that members of Congress with oversight powers over the intelligence community were briefed about the searches. Some of them, like Senators Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, were uncomfortable with the scope of the data gathering and made their disapproval public, even though secrecy rules prohibited them from being more specific about their concerns, until now.
It is evident, then, that all three branches of government were involved in the records search afoot at the telecommunications carriers and Internet companies. Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress passed after 9/11, governed the executive branch’s search authority. Oversight committees were kept in the loop, as Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, has confirmed. And the authorizations were approved by life-tenured federal judges who are sworn to uphold the Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. On the surface, our system of checks and balances seems to be working.
We cannot rule out the possibility that the voluminous records obtained by the government might, some day, be illegally misused. But there is no evidence so far that that has occurred.
First, no contents of phone conversations are being provided to the government. Indeed, the Patriot Act precludes provision of call contents.
Second, the two senators who complained in public, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall, apparently were in a minority on the committee. Otherwise, the bipartisan committee could have held hearings, either in closed or open session, to seek further details and prepare legislation to limit the F.B.I.’s data-gathering powers.
Third, unlike you and me, federal judges on the surveillance court, established in 1978, reviewed the government’s request for information and the reasons provided to support the request. We do know that the search requests have required periodic renewal. And we know that, for reasons the judges thought sufficient, the contents of the order were sealed, with special mention that it was not to be available to foreign entities. Judge Roger Vinson, who signed the July order extending the requirement that Verizon furnish phone logs, struck a balance: he put a time limit on the data-gathering, to ensure executive accountability, but also issued a secrecy order, to protect national security.
But shouldn’t I be concerned that F.B.I. agents are trampling my rights, just like the I.R.S. might have trampled the rights of certain organizations seeking tax-exempt status? As it turns out, the answer is no. The raw “metadata” requested will not be directly seen by any F.B.I. agent.
Rather, a computer will sort through the millions of calls and isolate a very small number for further scrutiny. Perhaps one of the numbers was called by one of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombings. Or perhaps a call was placed by a Verizon customer to a known operative of Al Qaeda. The Supreme Court long ago authorized law enforcement agencies to obtain call logs — albeit on paper rather than from a computer database — without full probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.
To listen to the contents of any particular call or to place a wiretap on a particular phone, the F.B.I. would have to go back to a judge for a more detailed order, this time showing probable cause sufficient to meet stringent Fourth Amendment standards. Otherwise, the evidence from the call could not be used to prosecute the caller or call recipient. Privacy rights, in short, have been minimally intruded upon for national security protections.
Finally, let’s consider the alternative some activist groups and media organizations seek: more narrowly tailored gathering of records, and full transparency after the fact about what kinds of records have been obtained. There are obvious problems with this approach. Let’s say the judicial order leaked to The Guardian this week had specified the phone numbers about which the F.B.I. had concerns. Releasing those numbers would surely have tipped off the people using those numbers, or their associates, and caused them to change their mode of communicating. Already, there is a real probability that individuals planning terrorist activities are using channels of communication that will not show up in the databases of service providers. If the order revealed more expansively the standards the F.B.I. used to seek broad sets of records, again those seeking to avoid detection for terrorism-related activities could simply change their methods of doing business.
In short, I think I will take my chances and trust the three branches of government involved in the Verizon request to look out for my interest. Privacy advocates, civil libertarians, small-government activists and liberal media organizations are, of course, are welcome to continue working to keep them honest. But I will move back to my daily activities, free from paranoid concerns that my government is spying on me.
By: Charles Shanor, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, June 7, 2013
“A No Non-Sense FLOTUS”: We Are Not Used To Seeing A First Lady Stand Up For Herself
If my husband were president, I think I’d have to be exiled to the Kingdom of Bhutan for the duration of his tenure, because there is no way would I have the self-discipline of Michelle Obama.
It took the First Lady five years to verbally take down a heckler. I’d be in a wrestling match by month two of the primaries. I can just feel it.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Obama was 12 minutes into her speech at a Democratic fundraiser when Ellen Sturtz yelled for the president to “issue an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Great cause. Lousy timing.
For one thing, the president wasn’t giving the speech. He wasn’t even in the room. As the wife of a U.S. senator, I am familiar with this brand of lobbying. Some constituents will always see me as a convenient shortcut to the target of their ire. Multiply that number by the population of 50 states and the U.S. territories, and you have an idea of what it’s like to be Michelle Obama with the unpaid job of First Lady.
When Sturtz yelled, Mrs. Obama stepped away from the lectern, walked toward her and shut her down.
“Wait, wait, wait. One of things I don’t do, that I don’t do well, is this,” she said, to uproarious approval from those in attendance. (An audio of the moment: http://tinyurl.com/mczexwu).
“Listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.”
Mrs. Obama knew her audience. The donors had paid as much as $10,000 to be there, and they had no patience for Sturtz’s plea for “federal equality before I die,” which is what she yelled as some of the attendees escorted her out.
There’s a sadness to this. Most of the 200 or so donors there likely support Sturtz’s cause, as they should. Congress continues to stall the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and LGBT groups are disappointed that the president hasn’t issued an executive order to fix it. This matters.
But there’s a time and a place, as mothers everywhere say to their children. I wish Mrs. Obama had acknowledged the importance of employment equality for the LGBT community, but I also understand how a person’s screaming at you in front of 200 people can kill the mood.
So, Mrs. Obama finished her speech and launched yet another national debate over who she should and shouldn’t be as America’s First Lady. My, how we love to dissect the intentions of this strong, talented woman.
Some reactions surprised me. Conservative John Podhoretz of “Commentary” tweeted: “Good for Michelle Obama. … Self-righteous, morally preening protestors need to have it stuffed back in their faces.” New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, a longtime champion for women around the globe, tweeted: “I like the First Lady, but her confrontation with this heckler was not her finest moment.”
The Root’s Keli Goff echoed many of Mrs. Obama’s defenders in pointing out that she “does not sign executive orders or sign laws. That’s her husband’s job, which makes Sturtz’s behavior seem all the more silly and misdirected.”
While it’s true that Mrs. Obama is not the president, her marriage and her address — as well as her considerable talents — make her one of the most powerful women in this country. She is a public figure, not a private citizen, and she is not immune from an impolite public. Nor should she be. As she proved this week, she is more than capable of asserting herself.
Great for Michelle Obama. Great for the rest of us, too. May her candor be contagious.
We are not used to seeing a First Lady stand up for herself, and I hope we get more chances to get used to it. Her husband’s presidency thrust her into the limelight, but she is more than her marriage. We’ve celebrated her sense of fun and fashion and her commitment to her family, but there is a no-nonsense side to her that is just right in this time of political stalemate and rampant incivility.
For eight years, millions of American women have been trying to emulate Michelle Obama’s spectacularly toned biceps.
This week, she showed off a new set of muscles.
More, please.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, June 6, 2013
“Your Tax Dollars At Work, Or Not”: Marco Rubio Wants To Amend The Constitution To Repeal Obamacare
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed a constitutional amendment Tuesday that, if approved, would nullify Obamacare’s individual mandate. The amendment is the latest in a string of failed GOP attempts to repeal Obamacare, which many Republicans still view as unconstitutional.
The “Right to Refuse” amendment would make any laws that tax Americans who fail to purchase goods or services unconstitutional, targeting the Affordable Care Act’s stipulation that nearly all Americans must purchase health insurance. The amendment was introduced by Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) in the House in February.
In a press release, Rubio cited the recent Internal Revenue Service scandal as one of his reasons for introducing the bill:
“ObamaCare is a disastrous policy that is not only destructive to job creation, it will also unleash the corrupt and scandal-ridden IRS on taxpayers simply for not buying health insurance,” said Rubio. “We should put our faith in the American people to decide what goods and services they want to buy, not have Congress dictate it and have the IRS empowered to harass Americans to make sure they do it.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Obamacare’s individual mandate could be considered a tax, and therefore was upheld under the constitution. But that hasn’t stopped many Republicans from claiming Obamacare is unconstitutional — the act has survived at least 37 repeal attempts since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, the most recent repeal vote occurring in mid-May. Since news broke in May that the IRS flagged certain conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status for additional scrutiny, several Republican leaders have used the scandal to question whether the IRS can be trusted to implement Obamacare.
Constitutional amendments are far more difficult to pass than bills — amendments proposed by Congress require a two-thirds majority vote in the House and Senate. With a Democrat-controlled Senate, Rubio and Palazzo’s amendment would have difficulty achieving even a simple majority. Rubio has been billed as a rising star in the Republican party and likely 2016 presidential candidate, but his fervent opposition to Obamacare — along with several other positions — show that his views don’t stray far from the status quo of the Republican party.
By: Katie Valentine, Think Progress, June 4, 2013
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