NSA revelations only 'the tip of the iceberg,' says Dem lawmaker

http://thehill.com/video/house/305047-dem-rep-lawmakers-learned-significantly-more-about-surveillance-programs-in-nsa-briefing

by shill • 13 years ago

257 93 13 years ago

thehill.com

LoganCale• 13 years ago

So while the White House and the NSA are saying the claims so far from Snowden are overblown and hyped up, Congress is saying there's far more going on than has even been reported yet.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

So, politics as usual, then?

wavefunction• 13 years ago

Well, it's a Democratic congress person while we have a Democratic President, so I don't think you can make that charge necessarily.

Certainly this authoritarianism is business as usual, but not the back-and-forth in this case.

ajays• 13 years ago

So while on the one hand Congress, NSA, etc. are denying what Snowden is claiming; on the other hand, they're calling him a traitor and guilty of treason.

If he's lying, _how_ can he be guilty of "treason"? Don't you have to reveal some classified (and truthful) info to be guilty of treason?

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

No, you have to wage war against the United States or provide aid and comfort to its enemies. Revealing true classified information, per se, is neither necessary or sufficient for treason (one of the reason for the Espionage Act and other laws criminalizing revealing secret defense info is that those acts often won't meet the Constitutional standard for treason.)

sxp• 13 years ago

There are two aspects to Snowden's leak: the 41 slide (and other documents) which are hard evidence of what the government is doing and his statements about what the government is doing. It is possible for the second set of claims to be inaccurate because a sysadmin wouldn't be able to understand the intelligence aspects of what the NSA does. Even if this part is inaccurate, it's possible to prosecute him for the leak of the slides which the government appears to be admitting are accurate.

joeguilmette2• 13 years ago

It sounds like this congressman is begging for another leak.

I smell blood. And a republican president in 2016. It looks like this is going to be Obama's big theme for his second term. Like LBJ, he inherited a shitty situation and made it much worse, and thus lost out for credit on all of his domestic work.

We'll see, but I don't see any easy out for Obama. Ironically the only thing saving him is that the conservatives really love these policies, and the liberals, who should be at his throat for this, really can't because he's part of their club. Lucky duck.

cheald• 13 years ago

I really hope this issue sticks around long enough to be the theme of Obama's second term -- not because I want it to ruin his legacy, but because it's a big enough issue that it needs to not go away.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Same here. This needs to be the issue of the next elections. Just like they discussed the economy/jobs 50% of the time in debates, I want this to replace that in the next elections.

Now, good luck with the TV networks actually pushing for that. Knowing them, they'd rather discuss irrelevant things that that.

eclipxe• 13 years ago

It won't.

joshwa• 13 years ago

Actually, the latest Gallup poll[1] showed (and this was a surprise to me) that Republicans disapprove of these policies way more than Democrats do:

    Party      app   disapp
    ----------------------
    Democrats   49%    40%
    Independent 34%    56%
    Republicans 32%    63%
    
    All         37%    53%

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gover...

tunesmith• 13 years ago

This has got to be mostly because of which party is in the white house right now. I think the numbers would be more than flipped if we had a Republican president.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

How much of that GOP opposition is simply "oppose Obama" is an open question, however.

Sean Hannity seems to have had an evolution of opinion (or perhaps it was an intelligent redesign): https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t27i...!

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Yeah, because if the foreign Muslim, communist, probably Martian, Obama says it, it has to be evil, and against god and nature.

Obama could introduce a right to cash, oxygen and water bill and the nut job Republicans would oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that Rep. approval is 32%.

Shish2k• 13 years ago

What was the opinion poll of the republicans creating these things (patriot act, etc) in the first place?

$50 says that no matter what the issue is, each group would be in favour of it if their own party did it, and against it if someone else did it :P

tzs• 13 years ago

I smell blood. And a republican president in 2016.

The Republicans haven't shown any sign of fixing the structural problems in their party that prevented them from offering an electable candidate in 2012. If they don't do that first, they won't do any better in 2016.

As John Huntsman noted in one of the early GOP debates: "Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I'm saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science". Unfortunately for the GOP, their nomination process almost guarantees that people like Huntsman, who believe that running from science is the wrong approach, are out early.

The Republicans need to get the Tea Party to split off and form a third party, and then run moderate Republicans. They would then be able to run candidates who don't want to fuck the environment, massively cut science budgets, ignore climate change, put all our energy eggs in the oil basket, cut aid to the poor, and so on. This would give them candidates that align better with the majority (and more important with the directions the majority is trending). They could more than make up for the loss of the Tea Party people, I think, by getting independents and picking up some moderate Democrats.

temphn• 13 years ago

Actually, it's the "moderate" Republicans and "moderate" Democrats who vote for extremely immoderate surveillance, bailouts, bombings, and invasions:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/domestic...

The Tea Party and Occupy have more in common on these key issues than they do with the "moderates".

jivatmanx• 13 years ago

I think that LBJ is a great comparison. Remember that LBJ won by painting Goldwater as an unhinged warmonger. similarly, the Obama of 2006 talked again and again about protecting civil liberties and limiting executive power.

joeguilmette2• 13 years ago

And he's trying to do just that. He's tried to push through a great many domestic programs, he's asking congress to close up the post 9/11 authorizations he uses to justify the drone strikes, he's tried to get out of afghanistan and iraq...

But then he doubles down on Bush's immigration policy, surveillance, tightens up on whistleblowers... And it's blowing up in his face and I don't know that history will be any kinder to Obama than it was to Nixon or LBJ, with the way this story is playing out.

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

If I had paid attention in junior high civics class, I might expect a member of Congress to correct egregious abuses of government power, once they had been admitted by the actual abusive government officials. As in, I might have thought she would take action, rather than obliquely wondering about who might step forward next. If she doesn't have the power to fix this, who the hell does?

uptown• 13 years ago

Remember the part of this whole equation where a government with access to all of this kind of information could use it in ways to convince or discourage its people to act however they wanted?

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Hahaha, like I said I didn't pay attention, but I seriously doubt the stars-and-stripes gang at my local public school had ever even heard of public choice theory, let alone taught it.

mokus• 13 years ago

What concerns me most about this whole situation isn't even the surveillance, though I think that's pretty abhorrent. It's the fact that something so stupendous has been done without any kind of public debate - despite the fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can't help but see would at least be a strongly polarizing issue.

From this article it sounds like there hasn't even been much of a secret debate. If they won't consult the people about such an explosive issue, the least they could do is consult their elected representatives. Instead, they just did it, and now they want to sweep it all under the rug and tell us "we thought really hard about it and we decided it was OK - and after all, TERR'ISTS!". I have a sinking feeling that it'll work, though, and that this debate will not really happen anyway since most people don't seem to care.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

There was an extensive public debate about the Patriot act at the time of its passage, and the security proponents won. It's past time that we had another one, but anyone over about the age of 30 who wasn't aware of this wasn't paying attention.

adventured• 13 years ago

It was opportunistically passed 45 days after 9/11. Very few Americans were in an even semi-rational position to understand or debate the nature of the Patriot Act. The only public discussion was a small minority of people thinking about the future implications, and the other radical majority that was reacting based on fear / emotion (and the lawmakers that passed it were counting on that, otherwise they would have waited a lot longer to pass it).

err_badprocrast• 13 years ago

From what we've been told, Greenwald has a giant cache of classified documents, and the people who actually know say this is the tip of the iceberg. I highly doubt he's shown all his cards yet, if only to milk this story as long as possible. Personally, my money is on another bombshell this Friday.

tsotha• 13 years ago

If only we had an elected body with oversight authority and subpoena powers that could make sure three letter agencies don't step out of bounds.

Nah, that's crazy.

ck22• 13 years ago

"if somebody else is going to step up"

You're a freaking congressperson sworn to represent the people of the united states.

If something bad is being done, it's YOUR responsibility to "step up" not someone else's.

BTW what the hell is with the NSA calling it the "Black Star" - is that some sick joke about the death star destroying worlds? So the rebels took out the death star with the exhaust port - does that mean the Black Star can be taken offline by the A/C units?

willvarfar• 13 years ago

What she heard at the briefing would be illegal for her to divulge.

By telling us that 1) Snowdon is true, 2) Snowdon was a very small cog and doesn't realise the extent of it all, she's going further than all others at that briefing, and hopefully encouraging more whistleblowers to step up (and ruin their own lives).

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

It was illegal for Snowden to divulge. It's just there is a "public interest" defence for him. So should there be for her.

ma2rten• 13 years ago

2) Snowdon was a very small cog and doesn't realise the extent of it all

Only a small part of what Snowdon leaked is public yet.

ajb• 13 years ago

There are some constitutional protections on speech by congressmen in the course of their duties, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause

ck22• 13 years ago

It's called civil disobedience. If a group of congresspeople decided to hold their own briefing with the press, not much could be done and they would be heroes.

Someone of color trying to attend a state university or even just sitting at the lunch counter with someone white 50 years ago was also very illegal in this country. Doesn't mean it was right no matter how many thought so at the time and all the arguments they gave for it to continue.

bambax3• 13 years ago

The briefing was meant to convince lawmakers that the surveillance programs are legal and necessary in fighting counterterrorism

First, I don't think you want to fight counterterrorism, but, rather, terrorism?

And second, what's with this business of "legal and necessary"? It doesn't matter if it's "necessary", it doesn't matter if it's really really super useful, it doesn't matter if it's very efficient. The only thing that matters -- that should matter, in a democracy -- is whether it's legal and constitutional.

The moment you let "efficiency" step over legality you let the beast loose, and the results are drone killings and surveillance programs.

Drone killings are a hundred million times worse than surveillance, BTW, and somehow make less of a scandal.

disputin• 13 years ago

The drone killings are happening elsewhere, so of course less of a scandal. The surveillance will give the supposed ally Europeans a taste of being a Middle East enemy and possibly change their perspective on a few things.

leohutson• 13 years ago

First, I don't think you want to fight counterterrorism, but, rather, terrorism?

You could read "fight" in that sentence as intransitive and "counterterrorism" as the domain of that fight.

bambax3• 13 years ago

Ah yes, I hadn't thought of that way of parsing it... like "fight the good fight"...? Interesting how language can be interpreted in so many different ways... Kind of like the law I guess... ;-)

redthrowaway2• 13 years ago

And second, what's with this business of "legal and necessary"? It doesn't matter if it's "necessary", it doesn't matter if it's really really super useful, it doesn't matter if it's very efficient. The only thing that matters -- that should matter, in a democracy -- is whether it's legal and constitutional.

Well, no. The Constitution is not the be-all and end-all of governance, nor does it forbid all possible onerous behaviours. The position of the USG is that what the NSA engages in is constitutional. Even if that were the case, that wouldn't make it a good idea--unless it were necessary. You could implement a 1000% tax on beer and it would be perfectly legal and constitutional, but would also need to be somehow necessary in order for it to be justifiable.

Even if what the NSA is doing is deemed constitutional, that doesn't mean it's right or a good idea. In order for that to be the case, it'd also have to have a strong claim of necessity.

bambax3• 13 years ago

That's what I meant. First we need to see if it's legal, and THEN whether it's useful / serves any kind of purpose with any kind of efficiency.

The problem is, "necessity" or "usefulness" are used as substitutes for legality.

"Well, it's not, technically, one hundred percent legal, but look at how well it works in fighting [terrorism|pedophilia|some other big cause that gets people all worked up without actually threatening anyone in any statistically meaningful way]".

lambda3• 13 years ago

Necessity plays a large role in determining whether something is legal.

Many court opinions about a law or government action hinge on whether there is a compelling state interest in the result. When balancing what a government does against rights defined by the bill of rights, you need to show that there is a good reason for the government to do what it's doing beyond simply denying the people their guaranteed rights.

For example, you may have laws about having a parade without a permit. Now, if you took an extreme view on the first amendment, you might say this abridged the rights of the people to peaceably assemble and speak their mind. However, there is a compelling state interest in controlling access to the roads that are shared by everyone; if anyone could parade at any time, it would screw up traffic. So governments are allowed to require a parade permit, as long as the requirements for obtaining one are content-neutral and don't single out any particular groups.

Likewise, whether the spying is legal does depend on whether it's necessary. The fourth amendment clearly says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." Whether the search is reasonable plays a large role in whether it's legal. Thus, necessity is important, as well as being legal in the sense of having followed the letter of the law (gone through the appropriate warrant process, as outlined by the various laws and regulations that control it).

seclorum• 13 years ago

First, the big 'thing' is the secrecy. Why is it a secret? Because it will damage the operation, pure and simple, and the operation is justified, necessary for public protection and the sake of the greater good.

So, we have 'to keep secrets' being applied here, as a dominant principle, because to not do so is unsafe, irresponsible, bad policy, practice, americans will get killed, and so on.

But I would wager that the people making these statements aren't the ones who put themselves into the position of being killed because of associationg with, or killing for, The Country. People need to be reminded, in this big 'secrecy debate' that secrets can be kept, whether a person is dead or alive, but only the LIVING tell the truth for the greater good.

Mordor• 13 years ago

Obama is at liberty to divulge all anytime - the only free man in the US. Perhaps he should resign?

mpyne• 13 years ago

The President is not above the law either. He might have the authority to declassify the material before he divulges it, but then he would have to be personally convinced that the material poses no possible threat to national security.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

My guess:

1) they are also listening to phone calls of Americans, despite what Obama said

2) she may be referring to the fact that NSA can spy on Americans without probable cause a week before deciding whether to ask FISC for a general warrant or not, like Mike Arrington said [2]

3) the "upstream" part of the slide [1] sounded very similar to that AT&T room from years ago, and they might be repeating that, with a slight twist

Steve Gibson from TWiT's Security Now had a theory yesterday [3] that they may be doing something similar now (which is why they also called it "prism"/cable splitter), but this time instead of getting all the data indiscriminately, they get the data from where Google, Microsoft and others are hooking up with the cable providers. This way they know exactly where it came from, so then they can go and use NSL's and FISA orders to get that data on that individual from Google and Microsoft.

[1] http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/20...

[2] http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/11/connecting-the-prism-dots-m...

[3] watch around 00:58 - https://twit.cachefly.net/video/sn/sn0408/sn0408_h264m_1280x...

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Obama's statement, strictly read, was very narrowly tailored: "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

This doesn't mean they're not being collected, recorded, analyzed, transcripted, read, or cross-corrolated.

Just that there isn't a listener assigned to each and every person in the United States to listen to their phone calls.

As someone who's largely a supporter of Obama, I was instantly left cold by his statement. It assured me of absolutely nothing.

_k• 13 years ago

The Guardian interviewed Snowden for an entire week. We've seen 10 minutes of it.

gfunk911• 13 years ago

But according to Obama, everybody in Congress already knew everything

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

According to the polls I'm not supposed to trust Congress, but I do think most of them know the content of their own minds better than Obama does. If a particular Representative was too dense to understand the first presentation, the officials should have dumbed it down and given it again. They report to Congress, not the other way around.

progman• 13 years ago

Global surveillance with RFID

I heard rumors that many (if not all) citizens in the western world already have RFID chips in clothes, shoes, bags etc. so that everyone could be tracked right now.

I think that's not just a rumor. The question is not whether they use it but how far they have come yet.

RFID chips are almost invisible tiny low power circuits which send a unique digital code on request, and which work without battery via energy harvesting. RFID is the perfect tool for global surveillance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID

beloch• 13 years ago

The way Manning's trial has been handled and the way Snowdon's actions are being responded to make the truth obvious. There's a lot more shady business to be revealed and the U.S. government is scared as hell. They're absolutely desperate to discourage further would-be whistle-blowers. Obama just got caught in a rather public lie too. It doesn't sound like these Senators were briefed on PRISM before Tuesday even though Obama said, "every member of Congress has been briefed on this program". Honestly, if Americans will impeach a president for lying about his extra-curricular cigar-related activities, how can they let something like this slide?

DamnYuppie2• 13 years ago

Because he is black and we have lost the will to have open discussions about anyone of that race. We have gone to far in that we now give people too much special treatment for their gender or color of their skin.

Sadly if we had true equality this guy would be roasted....

riggins2• 13 years ago

we've had 4 years of people running around claiming that Obama wasn't born in the US and that he's a secret Muslim sleeper agent based on him being black. The claim that he isn't scrutinized because of his race is indefensible.

The reason Obama gets a pass is the same reason GWB got a pass on privacy invasions. Its seen as part of the WoT so people tend to give the government the benefit of the doubt. In general I think the populace is willing to give the government a lot of latitude when they see something as part of a 'war' effort.

wahsd• 13 years ago

Imagine if you had a meeting scheduled at a place and when you arrived with some unannounced parties it was already known who your compatriots were because of your last calls and proximity to those phones prior to arrival. Wouldn't that be crazy if that happened, just plain non-nonchalantly, without any kind of checks or restrictions or restraints.

People are going to be lulled back into complacency by the same people who have exhibited their absolute lack of trustworthiness. There is something seriously wrong with the human condition as exhibited by the apparent inherent trust placed in those who one should trust least. If one is willing to lie to Congress with assurance of impunity, why would one ever tell the truth about anything to anyone.

Hate to break it to people, America is under a dome of propaganda little different than that of most other autocratic regimes, we simply are far more sophisticated about it due to several unique circumstances. Ever wonder how one could believe the propaganda in dictatorial regimes of the past and present? Well, you are living it right now.

Hitchhiker• 13 years ago

" Universal retention of provenance without commensurate universal commercial rights would lead to a police/ surveillance state. Universal commercial provenance can instead lead to a balanced future, where a middle class can thrive with proportional political clout, and where individuals can invent their own lives without being unduly manipulated by unseen operators of Siren Servers. " [1]

[1] - Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future?. Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

walru• 13 years ago

I personally hope they out the amount of government paid shills on the internet and any documentation as to their directive, such as how they 'slide' topics off of popular social media sites or comment to quell a rising storm.

To that end, when are we going to get some more reputable people in Washington? Why has it become the chore of the least of us to represent all of us? Where are all the upstanding citizens that these jobs should be filled with, rather than the lowest common denominator that's proliferated our house and senate to this day?

I've run through all the possibilities I could think of, regarding solutions to this mess, and the one that seems to come closest to reality is that we need to start pushing for the formation of a new party. Only by the formation of a new group, who has not yet been subjugated by the money powers that be, will we be able to get out of this mess. These revelations are our best chance to get such an initiative started, as those in a position of power are either too cowardly or too bought to do so themselves.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

We already have plenty of alternative parties. Depending on your political leanings, they may or may not be appropriate to you, but there are groups like the Libertarian Party, Green Party, Constitution Party, Worker's World Party, Prohibition Party, Pirate Party, etc. Hell, there's even a "Modern Whig Party".[1]

But a big part of the problem is the mechanism by which we elect representatives to our government. Most of the US uses single member district, "first past the post" (FPTP) voting[2], which has a side-effect of tending to create a "two party system"[3].

There are various initiatives around to push for the use of other voting systems which are more favorable to 3rd parties, like Approval Voting[4], Condorcet methods[5], Range voting[6], etc., but guess who typically sets the standards for how elections are conducted? Yeah, officials (mostly Democrats and Republicans) elected under the existing system! Talk about a "chicken or the egg" problem. But this is one of the first things that needs to be attacked, if we want a less corrupt, and more responsive government.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

Part of the problem, as your post itself demonstrates, is an excess of choice: once we've decided we need something better than plurality voting (PV, aka FPTP), we have to pick a system. It becomes an engineering decision, and a rather subtle one at that. I've long been partial to Approval Voting, but I have to admit it has a clear disadvantage in actual use relative to PV: because the total number of votes is no longer bounded by the total number of voters, it gets much harder to detect fraud.

The point is, first, the relative merits of the various alternatives to PV are debatable (and debated), and second, considerations apply beyond the mathematical properties of the systems.

This is why, though I detest PV, I have little hope that a consensus will emerge as to the best alternative -- at least not without a lot of experimentation.

mikegioia• 13 years ago

I think part of the problem (as in any new party) is defining the initial set of ideas to push for. What are you advocating this party's main concern is? Cleaning up the reputability of elected officials? That's a systemic problem that I'm not so sure a new party could fix.

I think the real action here is just getting one good, honest person to oust a current "low hanging fruit" politician. It needs to be more surgical, and convey a message that any one of you could be removed if the general population really wants to so get your shit together.

EFruit• 13 years ago

The briefing was meant to convince lawmakers that the surveillance programs are legal and necessary in fighting counterterrorism

The Government/NSA is now a terrorist group? Are they fighting themselves? Why not just use the secret surveillance system called PRISM to discover that the enemy has a secret surveillance system called PRISM?

dear• 13 years ago

Snowden and reporters have been saying there will be more leaks over the next few weeks to months.

NSA revelations only 'the tip of the iceberg,' says Dem lawmaker

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