New Yorker Sheds New Light on NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping and Data Mining

lotuseclat79 · May 18, 2011

New Yorker Sheds New Light on NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping and Data Mining.

-- Tom

CloneRanger · May 18, 2011

“This was such a Catch-22,” Roark told The New Yorker. “There was no one to go to.”
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See, that's why it All has to go bang, so we can get those crooks out of ALL the positions "They" are in, & then punish them severely for their crimes.

Searching_ _ _ · May 19, 2011

ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches,GPS equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems.
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That's one powereful tool.

just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, rumors began circulating within the NSA that the agency, with the approval of the White House, was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by conducting domestic surveillance.
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If the Twin Towers didn't fall there would be no domestic surveilance.

The program was “nearly perfect” except for one thing. It swooped up the data of Americans as well as foreigners and continued to intercept foreign communications as they traversed U.S.-based switches and networks. This violated U.S. law, which forbids the collection of domestic communication without a probable-cause warrant.

To solve this problem, Binney added privacy controls and an “anonymizing feature” to encrypt all American communications that ThinThread processed. The system would flag patterns that looked suspicious, which authorities could then use to obtain a warrant and decrypt the information.

ThinThread was ready to deploy in early 2001, but the NSA’s lawyers determined it violated Americans’ privacy, and NSA director Michael Hayden scrapped it.
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Michael Hayden, Public Enemy #100, get a rope, a really long rope. I put him 100th on the list because he's just a dog on a leash. The leash holder needs taking care of first.

NSA people who were apprised of the program told him, “Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers on everyone in the country!”
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You killed America, You evil ~ Snipped as per TOS ~!

nix · May 19, 2011

If this doesn't illustrate the point, nothing will.

Roark, feeling powerless, retired. Before leaving Washington, though, she learned that Hayden, who knew of her strong opposition to the surveillance program, wanted to talk to her...She asked Hayden why the N.S.A. had chosen not to include privacy protections for Americans. She says that he “kept not answering. Finally, he mumbled, and looked down, and said, ‘We didn’t need them. We had the power.’ He didn’t even look me in the eye. I was flabbergasted.” She asked him directly if the government was getting warrants for domestic surveillance, and he admitted that it was not.

During the meeting, Roark says, she warned Hayden that no court would uphold the program. Curiously, Hayden responded that he had already been assured by unspecified individuals that he could count on a majority of “the nine votes”—an apparent reference to the Supreme Court. According to Roark’s notes, Hayden told her that such a vote might even be 7–2 in his favor.
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1Moot08v7

Searching_ _ _ · May 19, 2011

If they control the Executive Branch and the Judicial Branch they can care less about the Legislative Branch, keeping it like a mushroom, in the dark and neck deep in poop.
A minimum of 6 points of control to rule the rest, The Presidency and at least 5 Justices of the supreme court, sigh.

nix · May 19, 2011

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says...[h]e believes that the trial may also test whether the nation’s expanding secret intelligence bureaucracy is beyond meaningful accountability.
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I would guess that the answer to this question is yes, we are beyond meaningful accountability, and there is, in fact, no going back.

When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls. “It was my brainchild,” he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.” He said that although he was not “read in” to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they told me, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ ”—logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ ”

Drake recalled that, after the October 4th directive, “strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ ” Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented.

Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name.
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1Mqpf0pxZ

There is simply too much evidence to ignore.

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New Yorker Sheds New Light on NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping and Data Mining

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