Congress Votes To Limit NSA Spying
The road to NSA reform took another unexpected turn. In a surprise vote late Thursday night, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly sided in favor of an amendment that would stop...

By: WochitGeneralNews

See more here:
Congress Votes To Limit NSA Spying - Video

The House of Representatives may have only passed a puny attempt to reform the NSAs surveillance activities last month. But on Thursday evening it swung back with a surprising attack on a key element of the agencys spying programs: their funding.

In a late night session, the House of Representatives voted 293 to 123 to pass an amendment to a Department of Defense appropriations bill that would cut off all funds for two of the agencys most embattled activities: First, using the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to perform searches of collected surveillance data that target Americans, and second, asking hardware markers and software developers to build backdoors into their tools designed to give the agency access to users communications. On that second count, the amendment specifically forbids funding for any agency attempt to mandate or request that a person redesign its product or service to facilitateelectronic surveillance.

Both of those funding bans represent a clear reaction against behavior revealed from the leaks of Edward Snowden, which have shown over the past year that the NSA subverted cryptography standards, diverted hardware shipments to plant bugs in products, and found other ways to gather raw communication data from Silicon Valley firms like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and others.

Though the amendments bans still havent been mirrored in the Senate, the House vote nonetheless sends an unambiguous statement that theres political will to do something about the issue of unchecked NSA spying, says Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supported a campaign to persuade citizens to call their congressman in support of the amendment. This is not a trivial thing. These surveillance programs need money to survive. Without it there are hard questions ahead for the NSA.

The bill also represents a striking shift from the USA Freedom bill, intended to reform NSA mass surveillance, that passed the house last month in a watered-down form that disappointed privacy advocates. In part, the contrast is a result of political procedure: Much of the Freedom bills weakening took place in the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, says Julian Sanchez, a fellow at the Cato Institute who follows surveillance policy. As an amendment to an appropriations bill, he says, the defunding legislation instead escaped thatdouble gauntlet of lobbying. In particular, it didnt have to go through the Intelligence Committee, which is basically a proxy for the intelligence community, says Sanchez.

In fact, the toothless surveillance reform bill may have directly inspired Thursday nights landslide vote by not going far enough to satisfy legislators seeking to curtail the NSAs most controversial activities. Due to the weakening of that bills anti-spying provisions in committee, many House members never had a chance to show their intention to more drastically limit the NSAs spying.

Even if the amendment becomes law, it still wouldnt necessarily end all federally-mandated backdoors in hardware and software, cautions Matt Blaze, a computer science professor and cryptographer at the University of Pennsylvania. According to his reading of the amendment, it wouldnt cover the FBI, for instance. The goal is clearly important. I worry that the scopeis limited, he says. Even when the NSA and CIA dont request or put pressure on vendors to incorporate backdoors, other agencies, like FBI, may be in the same business.

Still, the passage of the amendment marks a serious shift in the political landscape following a year of Snowdens spying disclosures. A similar amendment put to a vote last year came up seven votes short of passing. The lopsided tally this year shows that reining in the NSA has become a popular political cause that crosses party lines, says the EFFs Higgins. Last year, legislators who voted in favor of this amendment were sticking their necks out, he says. Now the status quo has changed. Theres a sense that if youre not doing something about this problem, its going to be a black mark on your record.

View post:
House Votes To Cut Key Pursestrings For NSA Surveillance ...

Relations between the U.S. and Brazil have been in the doghouse since documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that Brazil was one of the biggest targets of NSA spying. The abuses included mass collection of millions of Brazilians' email and phone records, spying on President Dilma Rousseff's personal communications, and targeting the computer systems of Brazil's Petrobras -- the latter with obvious commercial benefits for U.S. corporations.

Dilma summed it all up rather succinctly in a blunt speech at the United Nations last September, denouncing "a situation of grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties; of invasion and capture of confidential information concerning corporate activities, and especially of disrespect to national sovereignty."

But now, thanks to additional leaked documents described by Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras in The Intercept, we find there is another U.S. agency working with the NSA that poses similar threats: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). According to the documents, there is a "two-way information sharing relationship" between the DEA and NSA: it's not just the NSA helping the DEA catch drug traffickers, but also the DEA helping NSA with its non-drug-related spying programs.

From the Intercept: "DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is," says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent, "Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence."

Selander added that "countries let us in because they don't view us, really, as a spy organization."

This is potentially an even bigger breach of diplomatic trust than the NSA spying that Dilma denounced at the U.N. Governments allow the DEA access to military, police and intelligence resources -- sometimes including phone-tapping -- as part of a collaborative effort with the United States to fight organized crime. They do not expect that by doing so they are unwittingly assisting the NSA and the enormous U.S. intelligence apparatus with unauthorized spying for political or commercial purposes.

Meanwhile in Brazil, although both Dilma and former President Lula have called for apologies from President Obama for the abuses, U.S. officials have made it clear that this will not happen (in the words of former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon, "you should not expect an unexpected gesture"). Nor has Washington given reasonable assurances that such abuses won't occur in the future.

It seems that better relations will have to wait until after Brazil's presidential elections in October. While Dilma's detractors say that this is because she is playing to the electorate, it's more likely that the electoral calculations are on the other side: Washington is hoping to see a president who is more subservient to U.S. foreign policy. After all, the problem of U.S. disrespect for Latin American sovereignty is much deeper than just the spying scandals. Although it was George W. Bush who expressed it most plainly -- countries are either "with us" or against us -- this remains Washington's guiding principle in the hemisphere.

This was published by The Hill on June 20, 2014.

Link:
Another US Spying Problem in Latin America: The US Drug ...

WASHINGTON House libertarians and liberals banded together for a surprise win in their fight against the secretive National Security Agency, securing support for new curbs on government spying a year after leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about the bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records.

The Republican-led House voted 293-123 late Thursday to add the limits to a $570 billion defense spending bill. The provision, which faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, would bar warrantless collection of personal online information and prohibit access for the NSA and CIA into commercial tech products.

Proponents of the measure described them as government "backdoors" that give intelligence agencies an opening to Americans' private data.

"The American people are sick of being spied on," said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who joined with libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats to push the measure.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, railed against "this dragnet spying on millions of Americans."

The House was expected to pass the defense bill Friday. It still must be reconciled with a still-to-be written Senate version.

In the showdown between privacy and security, the House earlier this year overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act that would codify a proposal made in January by President Barack Obama, who said he wanted to end the NSA's practice of collecting and storing the "to and from" records of nearly every American landline telephone call under a program that searched the data for connections to terrorist plots abroad.

Massie, Gabbard and other lawmakers complained that the legislation didn't go far enough, necessitating their amendment to the defense bill. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and other Republican and Democratic leaders pushed back, arguing that the amendment undercut their reform package that was a year in the making.

During hours of debate and votes Thursday, the House also endorsed several new roadblocks to Obama's long-sought effort to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Republicans and some Democrats repeatedly have blocked any effort to shutter the post-Sept. 11 prison to house terror suspects, and congressional furor over Obama's trade last month of five Taliban leaders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl prompted a bipartisan effort to add fresh obstacles.

More here:
House backs limits on NSA spying

The Obama administration has received approval from a federal court to continue the National Security Agencys collection of telephone metadata for another three months.

US officials said on Friday that the government's application to renew the existing program was approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill to restrict the spy agencys electronic surveillance powers.

If passed by the Senate, the bill will bar the agency from using personal electronic information from citizens without a prior court order.

According to a statement from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government will continue the current NSA program.

"Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program, as modified by the changes the president announced earlier this year," it said.

The government's application to renew the program expires Sept. 12.

The NSA has been eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and internet data.

AGB/AGB

See the article here:
US federal court approves NSA spying