Obama Is Spying Illegally on Multiple Daily Activities of Every Innocent American!
On Wednesday evening, the London Guardian's Glenn Greenwald published a top-secret order of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) secret eavesdropping court, which ordered Verizon Business Communications to hand over daily to the National Security Agency (NSA) the telephone numbers, times, and caller locations of every U.S. telephone call, including local calls, for a period of 90 days from April into July. What developed rapidly was the obvious: that this was a mere 90-day rollover of spying that had been going on continuously for seven years (almost the entirety of the Obama Administration), as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) admitted in trying to defend the program Thursday,— and that every U.S. telephone carrier had received the same order, while forbidden even to mention it, and was doing exactly the same thing, as the Wall Street Journal reported the same day.
'Few Americans believe that they live in a police state...'
There was instant pandemonium in a Senate hearing Thursday morning, when Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) asked Attorney General Holder whether the Administration was spying on members of Congress and the Supreme Court. When Holder tried to maintain that Congressmen had been "fully briefed," Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) interrupted, saying "We're going to stop right here, because this 'fully briefed' is something that drives us up the wall," and insisted that neither she nor any of the other Senators sitting with her knew what was going on.
Separately, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) told press that this was exactly what they had been publicly warning of for years: that the Obama Administration had a secret, radically overblown legal interpretation of its rights to spy on ordinary Americans under the Patriot Act, one which would shock most Americans were they to learn it. And indeed it has. And it's only beginning.
Veteran Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the author of the Patriot Act, demonstrated in a letter to Holder that the leaked order specifically contravened the Act. He demanded that Holder answer four questions by Wednesday, June 12, of which the fourth was, "Does the FBI believe that there are limits on what information it can obtain under [Patriot Act] section 215? If so, what are those limits?"
Then, Thursday afternoon, only about 24 hours after the first leak, the Guardian and Greenwald obtained and selectively published another file held at the highest level of U.S. security clearance: an internal NSA slide-show instructing employees on how to use a data-mining apparatus called "Prism." The slide-show was dated April 2013—right now. The Washington Post obtained the same leak and published another story at the same time.
The slide-show said that the NSA had obtained direct access to the main servers of nine leading Internet service providers, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. NSA analysts were told that they could obtain any data, whether current or historical, including e-mail, video and voice chats, photos, voice-over-internet protocol, file transfers, videoconferencing, notifications of target activity ("logins, etc."), online social networking details, or "special requests."
Because of the word "foreign" in "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," the slide-show presentation instructed NSA staff, as a fig-leaf of compliance with the law, that they could only target such data if they believed there was a 51% chance that the target might be outside the United States, or in communication with someone outside the United States.
The Guardian accompanied its second leaked revelation with an unsigned June 6 editorial which might have been entitled "An Existential Challenge to American Freedom." After summarizing what the paper had reported over the two days, the editors wrote:
"Few Americans believe that they live in a police state; indeed many would be outraged at the suggestion. Yet the everyday fact that the police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens—in secret—is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom as well as championing it. Ironically, the Guardian's revelations were published 69 years to the day since U.S. and British soldiers launched the D-Day invasion of Europe. The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny. They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants."
After qualifying that Britishers should not minimize the dangers of terrorism, or the very real possibility that their own government might be spying on them in just the same way, they conclude:
"But it is American civil liberties that are primarily in the spotlight now. Ever since 9/11, the U.S. has allowed the war on terror to frame a new domestic authoritarianism that is strikingly at odds with America's passionate sense of its own freedom. This week's revelations have stunned millions of Americans whose justified outrage against 9/11 surely never led them to expect such routine and unrestrained surveillance on such a massive scale. U.S. politicians have a poor post-9/11 record of confronting such powers. Even now, it is possible that many will look the other way. But this is an existential challenge to American freedom. That it has been so relentlessly prosecuted by a leader who once promised to stand up against such authority, makes the challenge more pressing, not less."
Which is to say, accurately, that it is Obama who is the one responsible for these crimes. He cannot blame the Congress, as he attempted to do in a press appearance Thursday morning.
The New York Times appeared Friday morning with a very lengthy, bitter 1,100-word editorial entitled "President Obama's Dragnet," which formalized that newspaper's divorce from the U.S. President, and appropriately ridiculed his apologists. Contorted and emotional, the editorial mirrored fights at high levels in the United States. Bloggers noted that one sentence was altered just two hours after the editorial was first posted on Thursday. In the original version, the lead sentence of the third paragraph read, "The administration has now lost all credibility." Two hour later, someone had added the words, "on this issue."
Further Documentation: Police State U.S.A.: A Timeline of Obama's Expansion of Bush-Cheney Domestic Spy Programs
Despite his campaign promises to the contrary, once Barack Obama became President in 2009, he wholeheartedly adopted and expanded the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance and data-mining program which had been created during the Bush Administration, under the direct control of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Obama's about-face should not have surprised anybody; it was signaled already in July 2008, when then-Senator Obama reversed course and voted to give the telecommunications companies immunity from civil suits for their cooperation with the NSA. A few months earlier, Obama had voted against immunity. It has been reliably reported, and not disputed, that what changed Obama's vote was the advice of this campaign counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, who was speaking out publicly in favor of immunizing the telecoms who had been giving the NSA full access to their electronic traffic.
Upon assuming office, although Obama tried to distance himself from Bush on the issues of torture and Guantanamo, he was silent on the NSA surveillance program. No speeches, no executive orders. And in fact, as we have now learned, the Bush-Cheney program has now extended beyond the major telecommunications companies, to include access to the major Internet companies.
Under the latter program, launched in late 2007 and 2008 after Congress provided new legal authorities (including the immunity law supported by Obama), the NSA obtained the cooperation of Microsoft and Yahoo in providing access to their servers, according to the Washington Post. Since the beginning of 2009, the so-called PRISM program expanded to include Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, and others—so that Obama is now presiding over a data-collection and data-mining project which is truly the fulfillment of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program.
Here are some of the known critical nodal points in that process; much more is still unknown and hidden behind classification barriers:
2001:
February: Shortly after the Bush-Cheney Administration took office, Dick Cheney personally sought the participation of Qwest Communications in a National Security Agency (NSA) program under which they were asked to hand over their customers' private phone records. Quest refused to do so, after finding out that the NSA had no warrant from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court or other legal authority to obtain such records. Although the Bush Administration claimed that it only launched its so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program" after the 9/11 attacks, this shows that the 9/11 attacks were only a pretext for a program of police state surveillance that start months before.
October: Less than four weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, on Oct. 4, President Bush signed an order launching the NSA's domestic wiretapping program, which went operational on Oct. 6. Quickly, the NSA made new approaches to the major telecommunications companies seeking access to all their traffic. These included the three largest: AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. The legal authorization was cooked up by Cheney's lawyer David Addington and second-rank Justice Department attorney John Yoo, bypassing normal channels. It is thought that these still-secret legal opinions reflected Cheney's notion that the President's war powers under Article II of the Constitution overrode any legislative restrictions, such as the FISA law, passed by Congress in 1978.
2002:
A secret presidential order authorized the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance—overturning 25 years of law and regulations. Top Congressional leaders were summoned to Cheney's office for a secret briefing on the program. This was what is known as a "special access program," so sensitive that relatively few people even know about it. According to some sources, the program was code-named "Stellar Wind."
In a parallel development, the Defense Department (DARPA) created the Information Awareness Office, also known as the Total (or Terrorist) Information Awareness Office, a data-mining program run by former Admiral John Poindexter.
In the summer of 2002, AT&T technician Mark Klein learned of secret rooms being constructed at two AT&T switching facilities in San Francisco, from which the NSA tapped into fiber-optic cables connecting its AT&T's WorldNet service to other Internet providers. Klein thought the arrangement was part of the Total Information Awareness (TIA). Only persons with an NSA security clearance were allowed to enter the secret room. Similar NSA secret rooms were built in other AT&T facilities around the country.
2003:
After a public uproar, Congress pretended to shut down the massive data-mining program set up by Iran-contra figure Poindexter, then called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA). The idea of TIA was to create a huge, centralized database consisting of government and commercial records, including bank records, credit card and telephone bills, travel records, and so on, and then to look for "suspicious" associations and patterns.
In fact, the program, which was created in the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was shifted into the Pentagon's classified ("black") budget, and continued to operate within the NSA, and under the auspices of DOD contractors such as SAIC. According to various accounts, it continues to do so up to the present. The unprecedented amounts of data which the NSA collects today, sweeping up all telephone and Internet traffic, is useless unless the agency has the means to mine through it and analyze it — and that's what Poindexter's TIA and its offshoots were designed to do.
On July 17, 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was so alarmed by a secret White House briefing on the NSA program, that he sent a private letter to Cheney, expressing his concerns over the surveillance program, and saying it reminded him of Poindexter's TIA program. Neither Cheney nor anyone else ever answered Rockefeller's letter.
2004:
By March 2004, Justice Department lawyers were becoming so concerned about the legality of the NSA surveillance program that they were considering refusing to re-certify it. The new Deputy Attorney General, James Comey, told Attorney General Ashcroft that the program might be illegal. The Justice Department's balking over recertification led to the dramatic confrontation in Ashcroft's hospital room on March 10 where White House lawyers, acting at the direction of Cheney, attempted to get an ill and sedated Ashcroft to reauthorize the program, but were blocked by Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller. When the White House reauthorized the program the next day, without DOJ approval, Comey, Ashcroft and all the top DOJ leadership threatened to resign en masse unless the program was changed.
Apparently overriding Cheney, Bush agreed to some modifications. There are many indications that Comey's concern was not just with the publicly-acknowledged Terrorist Surveillance Program, but with a much broader NSA program—probably that involving the dragnet sweep of all telecommunications. Administration officials have often said in public testimony that there are other, secret programs which they cannot discuss in public hearings.
2005:
In a series of articles in December 2005, the New York Times exposed the Bush Administration's surveillance and eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a court order. The warrantless surveillance program, operating since 2002, represented a sharp break with the previous practice of obtaining FISA Court warrants for any domestic spying. The Times reported how the NSA has obtained access to the communications streams of the major telecommunications companies.
2006:
As the uproar over the warrantless wiretap progam continued, the Washington Post reported that the NSA was sharing this information with the FBI, CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and other military agencies. USA Today named the private telecommunication companies involved.
In February, a long-time NSA employee, Russell Tice, told a House Government Reform subcommittee that he was concerned about the legality and constitutionality of another "special access" program being conducted by the NSA. Tice said this program was different and more far-reaching that the one disclosed by the New York Times, but he said he could not discuss it because of its highly-classified nature.
2007:
In January 2007, the Bush Administration announced that, henceforth, the FISA Court would authorize any surveillance previously conducted under the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program. If this were true, it constituted a narrowing of the program.
In August, Congress passed the "Protect American Act," which expanded executive power to conduct international surveillance, and allowed the FISA Court, for the first time, to issue blanket authorizations rather than individualized warrants — thus completely obliterating the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In September, the Bush Administration obtained access to Microsoft's Internet traffic, under the newly-launched PRISM program.
2008:
In July, Senator Barack Obama reversed his previous stance, and votes for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gave retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies which had handed over customer records and data to the NSA.
2009:
At the beginning of January, federal courts started dismissing civil suits that had been brought against telecommunications companies, citing their immunity under the 2008 law.
In April 2009, the Obama Administration moved to have another civil suit thrown out of court, on the grounds that any litigation over the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program would require the government to disclose "state secrets." The Obama Administration invoked "state secrets" in other subsequent cases to defend the NSA surveillance program, and fought for broad immunity for telecommunications providers.
2012:
In April, the New York Times reported that the NSA was still engaged in intercepting purely domestic communications, beyond the limits set by Congress.
That same month, NSA whistleblower William Binney said that the NSA's data-mining program has become so vast that the government has assembled 20 trillion transactions of U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens, including phone calls, emails, credit card purchases, and Internet searches.
2013:
On June 5-6, the Guardian reveals a secret FISA Court order requiring Verizon to turn over all customer records to the NSA on a daily basis. "The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual," the Guardian reported, and also cited the "numerous cryptic public warnings" by Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, that the Obama Administration was relying on "secret legal interpretations" of its spying powers, so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn the scope of it.
On June 6-7, the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed the existence of the PRISM program involving the major Internet firms and providers.
On June 7, President Obama acknowledged the reported activities and fully defended them, in terms almost identical to those used by George W. Bush after the disclosure of the NSA spying program in 2005.
