The NSA Speech: Obama Accepts the Logic of Staying Terrorized

The president began his speech on NSA reform by harkening back to “the dawn of our republic,” when a small, secret “surveillance committee” was established in Boston. “The group’s members included Paul Revere,” he said, “and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids.” In this telling, the patriots, literal revolutionaries rebelling against the government of their day, were forerunners of the National Security Agency.

.. National-security leaders behave as if preventing even a single terrorist attack is so important that, to marginally decrease its likelihood, it was incumbent upon us to torture prisoners, invade Iraq, and establish a system of mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocents to identify a tiny minority of terrorists. So long as the NSA is charged with stopping every Boston bombing-style attack, and given more power until it can do so, it will verge toward totalitarianism, because no society can stay free and eliminate the risk of terrorism.

.. Yes, the intelligence agencies are filled with lots of honest, honorable Americans, but for goodness’ sake, the men who spied on Martin Luther King were the friends and family members of regular Americans. They had churches they attended and preachers they honored.

How Britain exported next-generation surveillance

This is why most ANPR stops occur: on the basis of a single, non-specific alert among a flood of thousands issued each day. But the Catts weren’t terrorists or drug dealers or armed robbers. After they filed a complaint about the incident, they discovered what had made them of interest to law enforcement: they had attended a series of legal and peaceful protests against the EDO Corporation, an American arms manufacturer that used to supply weapons systems to the United States and Israel.

Police had spotted their vehicle at protests and decided that it should be tracked, tagging them as “domestic extremists”.

Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished

Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”

.. In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

.. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.

.. In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table.

.. That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA, therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA to presume that data ingested overseas belonged to foreigners.

.. In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”

.. Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.