What Happened to that Third Branch Oversight?
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is pissed.
After spending 2002 to 2006 as Chief Judge of the FISA Court struggling to keep parts of the American legal system walled off from a rogue surveillance program, she read the classified account the NSA's…
On the Refusal to Exercise Oversight over Vast Surveillance Programs, Episode 117
The Joint IG Report on the illegal wiretap program left out all discussion of what happened to the Internet and (to a lesser extent) phone metadata collection that got moved into Pen Register/Trap&Trace and Section 215 collection, respectively,…
Yahoo, the Law-Abiding Free Email Provider
The FISA Court has officially agreed to declassify that Yahoo was the company that challenged a Protect Amendment Act order in 2007.
Once this PRISM slide was published, it was always pretty likely that Yahoo -- or maybe Google -- was the…
Defense Department Ignores SIGAR, Orders Russian Helicopters in End-Run Around NDAA
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, (SIGAR) issued a report (pdf) yesterday that serves as microcosm of the bumbling ineptitude and denial of reality that has characterized the entire US military's misadventure…
The 14% Domestic Phone Content Collection under the Illegal Wiretap Program
There's something funny about the claims the NSC Draft IG Report makes.
On page 8, the report notes:
Domestic Collection. The wording of the first authorization could have been interpreted to allow domestic content collection where both…
OMIGOD James Clapper Has Our Gun Purchase Records
It's a testament to Ron Wyden's good faith that this letter -- asking James Clapper for more information about the government's secret use of the Section 215 provision of the PATRIOT Act -- didn't try to inflame the NRA.
It's not until the…
How David Addington Hid the Document Implicating George Bush in Illegal Wiretapping
On December 16 and December 20, 2005, respectively -- just days after the NYT revealed its existence -- EPIC and ACLU FOIAed DOJ for documents relating to George Bush's (really, Dick Cheney's) illegal wiretap program (National Security Archive…
Shorter Mark Udall: Why Can't John Brennan "Honor the Oath"?
Still reading the NSA IG Report, so I'll just quote right from Mark Udall's release:
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I am concerned to see news reports about the CIA's response to the Committee's Study of the CIA's Detention…
Working Thread, NSA IG Report
This will be a working threat on the March 24, 2009 Draft NSA IG Report on PSP. Page numbers below are hardcopy pages.
P1: The Authorization on October 4 has never been mentioned in any FOIAs (there was an OLC memo that was).
P1: The…
Metadata Oversight: "A Banner"!!!!!
The Guardian has their next big NSA scoop, and it is meatier than the earlier ones. The headline is that President Obama continued a 2-degrees of separation analysis of Internet metadata under Section 702 for two years after he came into office.…
BREAKING: CIA Admits to SSCI Millions of Its Official Records Are Badly Inaccurate
As I noted in this post, today John Brennan will try to convince Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss that their (well, really McCain and the Democrats') 6,000 page report documenting that torture didn't work and CIA lied to Congress (and the…
Who Was the Short-Sighted Personnel Guy at CIA Who Set up NYPD-on-the-Hudson in 2002?
As Charlie Savage reports, the CIA's IG report on CIA-on-the-Hudson has finally been released. It finds that the decision to put CIA personnel at NYPD was ill-advised and poorly managed by CIA's executives who oversaw the arrangement.
While…
After Khalid el-Masri, Details Like Snowden's Middle Name Matter
Anonymous (heh) DOJ officials have taken to the press to whine that Hong Kong delayed turning over Edward Joseph Snowden because the US got his true middle name, James, wrong (and once left it at "J").
They scoffed at the middle name mixup.…
The FBI and CIA Unminimized Collections and the Holes in Article III Review of FISA Amendments Act
In my piece confirming that the NSA can search on US person data collected incidentally in Section 702 collection, I pointed to these two paragraphs from the minimization procedures.
6(c)
(1) NSA may provide to the Central Intelligence Agency…
Keith Alexander: "We Must Win, There Is No Substitute for Victory"
I frankly have no problem with Keith Alexander giving the employees of the National Security Agency a pep talk as the truth of what they're doing to us becomes public. They are not, after all, responsible for the serial disinformation Alexander…
The Marriage Equality Decisions
The moment of truth has finally come on the long and tortured path through the Supreme Court for the marriage equality movement. Without further adieu, the Defense Of Marriage Act has been struck down as unconstitutional under Equal Protection…
FISA Amendments Act Minimization: Preventing Serious Harm to Corporate Persons
As I was working through some other things last night, I had an opportunity to compare the minimization standards for the FISA Amendments Act (see section h) with the standards under which the actual minimization procedures allow the retention…
Keith Alexander's Secret Lie: Retention and Distribution of Domestic Encrypted and Hacking Communications?
As I noted in my last two posts, Keith Alexander has admitted that the classified lie Mark Udall and Ron Wyden accused him of telling "could have more precisely described the requirements of collection under FISA Amendments Act."
He then…
NSA's Querying of US Person Data, Take Two
Update: Alexander's office has conceded Udall and Wyden's point about the classified inaccuracy. It also notes:
With respect to the second point raised in your 24 June 2013 letter, the fact sheet did not imply nor was it intended to imply…
Confirmed: NSA Does Search Section 702 Data for Particular US Person Data
Update: To help Joshua Foust understand this topic, I did a second, really basic version of this post here. So if you're fairly new to all this stuff, you might start there and then come back.
Update: Alexander's office has conceded Udall…