Section 702 Used for Cybersecurity: You Read It Here First
I have been reporting for years that the government uses Section 702 for cybersecurity purposes, including its upstream application. June 10, 2013: Hacking was the biggest success story for 702 August...
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Carrie Cordero’s Counterintelligence Complaints
I wasn’t going to respond to Carrie Cordero’s Lawfare piece on my and Jason Leopold’s story on NSA’s response to Edward Snowden’s claims he raised concerns at the agency, largely because I think her...
View ArticleIn Spying, “Things like phone numbers or emails” Turn Out to Be Far More
According to Reuters, the Intelligence Community doesn’t intend to share any details of the Yahoo scan revealed several weeks back with anyone outside of the FISA oversight committees — the House and...
View ArticleWhy I Left The Intercept: The Surveillance Story They Let Go Untold for 15...
The Intercept has a long, must-read story from James Risen about the government’s targeting of him for his reporting on the war on terror. It’s self-serving in many ways — there are parts of his...
View ArticleDOJ Did Not Fulfill Legally Required Disclosure on Section 215 to Congress...
In the Guardian’s superb summary of the importance of the NSA leaks, Zoe Lofgren challenges the claims that Congress has received all the documents NSA claims it has gotten. I do serve on the Judiciary...
View ArticleThe Intelligence Community’s Wide Open, Unprotected Back Door to All Your...
PCLOB has posted the transcript from the first part of its hearing on Monday. So I want to return to the issue I raised here: both Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt and NSA...
View ArticleThe Leahy-Sensenbrenner Language on Back Door Searches Improves But Doesn’t...
As the top Intelligence Community lawyers have made clear, the IC maintains it can search US person data incidentally collected under Section 702 without any suspicion, as well as for the purposes of...
View ArticleWas Adel Daoud Targeted Off of a Back Door Search of Traditional FISA...
Daoud Adel is a 20-year old US citizen from suburban Chicago who was charged last year in an FBI sting in which he allegedly tried to set off a car bomb outside a night club. Last year, during the...
View ArticleDiFi Fake FISA Fix Explicitly Allows Contractors to Conduct Suspicionless...
The Senate Intelligence Committee has released its report on DiFi’s Fake FISA Fix. The report makes it clearer than ever that this is not at all an improvement, but rather an attempt to use the Snowden...
View ArticleIn Naming Its Man of the Year, Time Proves It Doesn’t Even READ the News
I’m probably fairly lonely among my crowd to be satisfied that Time picked Pope Francis over Edward Snowden to be Person of the Year. Not only do I prefer that the focus remain on the reporting on NSA...
View ArticleIs PCLOB Holding Out for EO 12,333 Information?
As you know, I’ve been tracking the way President Obama seems to want to game the various legislative and review group recommendations with his own. Which is why I’m interested in this anonymous...
View ArticleRobert Litt and Mike Rogers KNOW Congress Hasn’t Ratified the Phone Dragnet
WaPo has a biting profile of Robert Litt, ODNI’s General Counsel who made one more failed attempt to rationalize James Clapper’s lies to Congress last week. One of the most newsworthy bits is that WaPo...
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In Sworn Declaration about Dragnet, NSA Changes Its Tune about Scope of “This...
I’ve been tracking the sudden effort on the part of NSA to minimize how much of the call data in the US it collects (under “this program,” Section 215). That effort has, unsurprisingly, carried over to...
View ArticleRosencrantz and Guildenstern Visit Pee-Clob
The first panel of an all-day Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board hearing on Section 702 of FISA just finished. It featured NSA General Counsel Raj De, ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt, Deputy...
View ArticleNSA’s New “Privacy Officer” Releases Her First Propaganda
Over at Lawfare, Ken Anderson released the public comment on Section 702 the NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Office have submitted to the Privacy and Civil Liberties and Oversight Board. Anderson notes...
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Causing Exceptionally Grave Harm to National Security by FOIAing FOIA Process
Jason Leopold has a new article at the Guardian based off a FOIA of NSA’s FOIA process. Perhaps the funniest part of the documents he received, however, is the number of times the NSA claimed its own...
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In Advance of PCLOB, WaPo Busts ODNI’s Limited Hang Out on Certifications
Earlier today, I got to tell the journalists who have long ignored that the FBI does back door searches — or even suggested I was guessing that they do, when it appeared in multiple public documents —...
View ArticlePCLOB Member Rachel Brand Asked NSA General Counsel to Help Her Dissent from...
Let me say straight out: Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board member Rachel Brand is no slouch. She’s very smart and very accomplished. All that said, I am rather intrigued by the way she...
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