{"id":41196,"date":"2013-06-12T13:37:22","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T12:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-nsa-black-hole-5-basic-things-we-still-dont-know-about-the-agencys-snooping-3\/41196\/"},"modified":"2013-06-12T13:37:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T12:37:22","slug":"the-nsa-black-hole-5-basic-things-we-still-dont-know-about-the-agencys-snooping-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-nsa-black-hole-5-basic-things-we-still-dont-know-about-the-agencys-snooping-3\/","title":{"rendered":"The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don\u2019t Know About the Agency\u2019s Snooping"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.<\/span><\/span>Last week saw revelations<\/a> that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans\u2019 phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. Here\u2019s what we still don\u2019t know:<\/p>\n

Has the NSA been collecting all<\/em> Americans\u2019 phone records, and for how long?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not entirely clear.<\/p>\n

The Guardian published a court order<\/a>\u00a0that directed a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone metadata — the time and duration of calls, as well as phone numbers and location data — to the NSA \u201con an ongoing daily basis\u201d for a three-month period. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported<\/a>\u00a0the program also covers AT&T and Sprint and that it covers the majority of Americans. And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself acknowledged<\/a>\u00a0that the \u201ccollection\u201d is \u201cbroad in scope.\u201d<\/p>\n

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said last week that the NSA has been collecting the records going back to 2006<\/a>. That\u2019s the same year that USA Today revealed<\/a>\u00a0a similar-sounding mass collection of metadata, which the paper said had been taking place since 2001. The relationship between the program we got a glimpse of in the Verizon order and the one revealed by USA Today in 2006 is still not clear: USA Today described a program not authorized by warrants. The program detailed last week does have court approval.<\/p>\n

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s classified.<\/p>\n

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act<\/a>. That provision<\/a>\u00a0allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records \u2014 \u201cany tangible things\u201d \u2014 as part of a \u201cforeign intelligence\u201d or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court\u2019s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.<\/p>\n

As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman recently wrote<\/a>, the details of that interpretation matter a lot: \u201cRead narrowly, this language might require that information requested be shown to be important or necessary to the investigation. Read widely, it would include essentially anything even slightly relevant \u2013 which is to say, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the case of the Verizon order<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0signed by a judge who sits on the secret court and requiring the company to hand over \u201call call detail records” — it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don\u2019t know the specifics.<\/p>\n

Has the NSA\u2019s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.<\/p>\n

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told<\/a>\u00a0CNN on Sunday, \u201cIt’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we could [not] have developed through other data and other intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he could not elaborate on his case \u201cwithout further declassification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Feinstein told<\/a>\u00a0ABC that the collection of phone records described in the Verizon order had been \u201cused\u201d in the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi<\/a>. Later in the interview, Feinstein said she couldn\u2019t disclose more because the information is classified. (It\u2019s worth noting that there\u2019s also evidence that old-fashioned police work<\/a>\u00a0helped solve the Zazi case \u2013 and that other reports<\/a>\u00a0suggest the Prism program, not the phone records, helped solve the case.)<\/p>\n

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through <\/strong>Prism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear.<\/p>\n

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description<\/a>\u00a0that the government can\u2019t get information using Prism unless there is an \u201cappropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing we don\u2019t know is how the government determines who is a \u201cforeign target.\u201d The Washington Post reported<\/a>\u00a0that NSA analysts use \u201csearch terms\u201d to try to achieve \u201c51 percent confidence\u201d in a target\u2019s \u201cforeignness.\u201d How do they do that? Unclear.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don\u2019t know how broad they are. The Post reported<\/a>\u00a0that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained<\/a> it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”<\/p>\n

So, how does Prism work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his statement<\/a>\u00a0Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect \u201cforeign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.<\/p>\n

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally<\/a>\u00a0described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap \u201cdirectly into the central servers\u201d of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies\u00a0denied<\/a>\u00a0giving the government \u201cdirect access\u201d to their servers. In a later story<\/a>, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.<\/p>\n

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows \u201ccollection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,\u201d not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.<\/p>\n

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans\u2019 phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.\u00a0 But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41196","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}