Kim Zetter | Wired.com 

Just a week after the Defense Department announced plans to put the National Security Agency in charge of military cyber defense and attack, the agency’s reach has already expanded to include monitoring of government civilian networks.

The Obama administration has decided to proceed with a classified Bush administration plan to let the NSA monitor traffic going to and from government civilian networks to protect the networks from malicious code and activity, according to a Washington Post story on Friday.

Given the NSA’s involvement in the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, critics are concerned that the monitoring of government traffic on private-sector telecommunication networks that are used by the general public would allow the agency to once again spy on large swaths of non-government traffic without a warrant.

AT&T, which was scheduled to launch a pilot project last February to test the monitoring program, has insisted on government assurances that its cooperation is legal. The company, along with other U.S. telecoms, were sued in 2006 for their involvement in the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping scheme before being given retroactive immunity by Congress last year.

In the monitoring program, called Einstein 3, telecommunication companies would route data going to and from government networks through an NSA monitoring box, which would examine the traffic for malicious code or suspicious activity suggestive of a network attack.

But critics are concerned that proper oversight is in place to prevent non-government traffic from being vacuumed into the system.

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Rachel Oswald | RawStory.com 

The Obama Justice Department continues to stand behind a Bush era law meant to prevent lawsuits against telecommunications companies accused of illegally sharing private customer information with intelligence agencies.

In a brief filed late Wednesday obtained by Raw Story, the Department of Justice provided its views to Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, after the San Francisco federal judge questioned the constitutionality of the wide-sweeping law and whether it gives the U.S. Attorney General too much power in deciding whether a company is immune from lawsuits after it has shared information with federal agents.The law was specifically designed to protect companies who participated in government wiretapping programs from legal claims and is one that President Obama supported as a senator when it was approved by Congress last year.

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Bob Egelko | SFgate.com 

President-elect Barack Obama dismayed civil liberties groups last summer when he voted to authorize President Bush’s clandestine wiretapping program after publicly denouncing it.

Now, thanks to a ruling by a San Francisco federal judge, Obama must take a stand on whether the Bush administration violated Americans’ rights when it intercepted their phone calls and e-mails without seeking a court’s permission.

The Jan. 5 decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker revived the last remaining lawsuit against the program Bush authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Without seeking congressional approval or court warrants, the president ordered the National Security Agency to intercept calls and e-mails between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists.

Every other legal challenge to the program has been thwarted by its secrecy and the resulting inability of plaintiffs to prove they were a surveillance target. But Walker rejected the Bush administration’s central argument for dismissal in the case being heard in San Francisco - that no one has the right to sue unless the government admits it conducted surveillance - and set the stage for a potentially decisive ruling on whether Bush exceeded his authority.

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By Zachary Roth - September 26, 2008, 2:00PM

Murray Waas reports on the website of the Atlantic that Alberto Gonzales is now telling investigators that he was being personally directed by President Bush when, as White House counsel, Gonzales made a much-discussed late-night visit in 2004 to the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, in order to get Ashcroft to certify that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was legal.

During Congressional testimony last year, Gonzales repeatedly refused to answer persistent questioning from Sen. Chuck Schumer as to whether the president, or Vice President Cheney, had directed him to seek out Ashcroft in the hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

Infowars
August 25, 2008

The following is an excerpt from a report posted by Cindy Sheehan at the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center:

The most troubling thing happened, though, when I arrived back to my hotel. We got back early because the altitude and sleeplessness were starting to take a toll on us. We did not march after the rally, so we decided to rest before the next event at 7pm. As I walked toward my room, I noticed that the door was opened with the security bolt blocking the complete closing of the door. I knew immediately that I had not left the door open, and I double checked to make sure it was the right room because, as a frequent traveler, I have been known to forget my room number, but it was the right room. I was upset at first thinking that housekeeping had made a mistake and left my room open and I was worried that something might be missing. So I walked into my room and bigger than life, there was a man standing by my desk holding the room phone with a screwdriver in his hand! I immediately said; “What the hell are you doing? Are you putting a bug on my phone?” He looked like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and stammered out: “N–no, we are having problems with the phone.” I told him to get out of my room because my phone was fine and I called the front desk and the person at the front desk stammered something out about “problems” with some of the phones. This room was reserved soon after we got to Denver last night because the room we had was inadequate for 3 people. The room was reserved under my campaign manager’s name with a CFC debit card. By the time we left for the march, it could have very well been ascertained that I was the one in this room, and the room we did reserve could be bugged, also. I am confident that that’s what was happening when I walked in on the “maintenance” man and I am becoming more shocked every day with what the ruling class are capable of….that’s why… My phones are in the room fridge. Let them listen to refridgerator noise…

Obama - Aye
McCain - No Vote
Cantwell - Nay
Murray - Nay

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush’s five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government’s authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.

The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.

The 68 to 29 vote puts an end to more than a year of debate over whether the government should be able to collect millions of e-mails and phone calls daily from U.S.-based communication switches without any probable cause.  It also answers whether Congress believes the nation’s telecoms and president had a duty to follow the rules set out in 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed after the abuses of the 1950s and 60s.

If the FISA Amendments Act survives constitutional challenge, it dooms the dozens of anti-wiretapping lawsuits filed against the nation’s telecoms, by ordering the judge in charge of the cases to dismiss them if the telecoms can prove the government asked them to help out.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com Just days before the Senate will convene to give a final blessing to President Bush’s secret, warrantless wiretapping program, a federal court judge ruled that his legal justification for the surveillance has no legal merit.

He’s the same judge Congress is trying to save the nation’s telecoms, such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, from having to face in court.

Late Wednesday, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker issued a ruling(.pdf) in a case against the government alleging illegal spying, finding that in 1978 Congress had clearly set out the rules for wiretapping inside the United States and that Bush’s claims to have inherent authority outside of those rules did not pass Constitutional muster.

Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive  means for foreign intelligence surveillance activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities. 

Walker, the chief judge of the Northern District of California, affirmed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive legal method for conducting surveillance inside the United States against suspected spies and terrorist. The Bush Administration argues that Congress’s vote to authorize military force against Al Qaeda and the president’s inherent war time powers were exceptions to the exclusivity provision.

Not so, according to Walker:

This provision and its legislative history left no doubt that Congress intended to displace entirely the various warrantless wiretapping and surveillance programs undertaken by the executive branch and to leave no room for the president to undertake warrantless surveillance in the domestic sphere in the future. 

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com

Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate’s vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.

[Wednesday]’s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and  endorses an all-powerful president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution.

The Democratic leadership is touting the deal as a “compromise,” but in fact they have endorsed the infamous Nuremberg defense: “Just following orders.” The judge can only check their paperwork. This cynical deal is a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice.

Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T’s internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government’s warrantless wiretapping program broke.

Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) — which were under court seal — andpublished the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated.

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.

According to a Denver Post report, “It’s a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs’ mission, and their focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com 

Breaking months of acrimonious deadlock, House and Senate leaders from both parties have agreed to a bill that gives the nation’s spy agencies the power to turn a wide swath of domestic communication companies into intelligence-gathering operations, and that puts an end to court challenges to telecoms such as AT&T that aided the government’s secret, five-year warrantless wiretapping program.

Civil liberties proponents quickly blasted the deal.

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation,” said Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001. “The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home.”

The deal marks a huge, though belated, victory for a lame-duck White House, which fought a pitched, hyperbolic battle to expand its legal wiretapping powers after being busted targeting Americans without warrants.

Despite that desire for expanded spying powers, the president threatened to veto any bill that did not give amnesty to the telecoms that helped with program, which has been declared illegal by a secretive U.S. surveillance court.

The bill (.pdf) could be voted on as soon as Friday in the House, given its backing by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who in February organized a high-stakes showdown with the president over a substantially similar bill. The Senate would likely also quickly pass the bill, despite already vocal opposition from the ACLU, left-leaning bloggers, as well as Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive “blanket” administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI’s counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas “retroactively to justify the FBI’s acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests,” the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine’s 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

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____________

Kevin Poulsen | Wired.com

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

Pasdar won’t name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a “Rapid Deployment” team hired to revamp security on the carrier’s internal network. He noticed that the carrier’s officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” — a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.

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The Case Against Expanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Powers
By JOHN W. DEAN / FindLaw.com

“I’ve got nothing to hide, so electronic surveillance doesn’t bother me. To the contrary, I’m delighted that the Bush Administration is monitoring calls and electronic traffic on a massive scale, because catching terrorists is far more important that worrying about the government’s listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails.” So the argument goes. It is a powerful one that has seduced too many people.

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Nearly a year ago President Bush tried to grant himself and his entire administration immunity from war crimes that date back to September 11, 2001.

Where is the outrage?

By Ryan Singel     08.29.07 | 2:00 AM

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It’s a “comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems,” says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

Slideshow
Snapshots of the FBI Spy Docs

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

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Ten advances towards the end of freedom and privacy in the United States

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The top ten advances towards tyranny in the United States during the tenure of the Bush administration, from the Patriot Act to the latest expansion of the illegal eavesdropping surveillance program.

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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) says it all. It’s official, George Bush and Alberto Gonzales now have the legal authority to spy on you and I without a warrant at any time.

The vote was as follows:Yea:227 Nay:183
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