US Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced a bill that threatens the digital security and freedom of speech in the United Nations. The proposed bill EARN IT forces providers of the private messaging services to serious legal risk, potentially forcing them to undermine their tools security. Edward Snowden warned about the proposed bill.

The former NSA agent and the well-known whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted that the government is attempting to exploit anger at tech companies to pass a law that intentionally undermines digital security and censors speech. He added that such a law is even being considered by Congress is a national disgrace. Online privacy advocate Edward Snowden, the author of Permanent Record, revealed how the National Security Agency had tools of mass surveillance and used them to spy on the USA and foreign citizens.

The proposed bill undermines section 320 that permits the online platform to allow its users to share their thoughts on their platforms without any fear. EARN IT act weakens section 320, forcing platforms to kick innocent people off of the Internet entirely. The bill aims to protect child exploitation on the Internet and forces online platforms to adhere to best practices.

This is not the first time US lawmakers have blamed end-to-end encryption for weakening national security and child exploitation, earlier Attorney General William Barr, blamed encryption for sexual crimes against children

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Edward Snowden warns about an upcoming bill that threatens digital security and freedom of speech. - Coinnounce

Its been nearly seven years since Edward Snowden shook the world by orchestrating the largest security leak in world history. Still today, little question remains as to how profoundly Snowdens courageous actions impacted the conversation on mass surveillance not just within the U.S., but around the world.

"Of course I would like to return to the United States," said Snowden in a September 2019 interview with CBS. "But if I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison, then one bottom line demand that we all have to agree to is at least I get a fair trial The government wants to have a different kind of trial They want to be able to close the courtroom. They want the public not to be able to know what's going on.

As Congress argues over whether to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the approaching expiration date of March 15 (an act that would allow federal officials to continue seizing business records by extending Section 215 of the Patriot Act), the time is now to understand why Snowden should be afforded a fair shot in the courtroom.

In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act in an attempt to prevent insubordination within the U.S. military and silence critics of Americas involvement in World War I. In his 1915 State of the Union address, President Woodrow Wilson begged Congress to pass the law, declaring, Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.

After the bills passage, antiwar activist Charles Schenck was arrested for distributing flyers encouraging men to resist Wilsons draft. That same year, socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison, stripped of his citizenship, and disenfranchised for life over a speech he made criticizing the war. In January 1919, the Supreme Court heard the cases Schenck v. United States and Debs v. United States, concluding that neither mans arrest constituted a violation of the First Amendment.

Then, in 1973, the law was unsuccessfully used against economist Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Following repeated attempts on part of intelligence officials to intimidate The New York Times into ceasing publication of the documents, an appellate court finally succeeded in temporarily ordering the newspaper to discontinue publication. While the courts eventually restored publication rights to the press, other victims of the Espionage Act throughout history have not been as fortunate, including journalist Victor L. Berger, activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning, and former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee Henry Kyle Frese.

In reviewing the advances that have been made in recent decades towards the construction of an Orwellian national security state, its not overstating it to say what once seemed possible only on the ink-lettered pages of dystopian science fiction novels has entered the realm of reality.

A 2016 study from Georgetown University, for example, estimates that at least one in four state or local police departments in the U.S. now have access to facial recognition software. Coupled with the steady increase in surveillance cameras, its not difficult to see where the current trends are headed. In 2019, the estimated number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. stood at 70 million; experts now estimate this number to reach 85 million by 2021.

And when it comes to the data, the only country with a surveillance apparatus worthy of comparison to the U.S. is communist China, where police officers regularly sport facial recognition glasses and artificial intelligence to hunt down suspects and political enemies. Tragically, Beijing recently began weaponizing these technologies against the countrys Muslim and minority populations (particularly in the Xinjiang region).

Even considering the fact that China has more than four times the population of the U.S., however, the two countries stand neck-and-neck in terms of the number of cameras per individual; while China holds an average of one camera for every 4.1 people, the U.S. trails closely behind at 4.6. By a similar metric, the U.S. surpasses China with more closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras per person. To no surprise, this has predominantly impacted Americas major cities; Chicago, for instance, now has 30,000 surveillance cameras, equipped with night vision, facial recognition, and license plate-reading technology.

Roughly 66 percent of Americans agree that the potential risks outweigh the benefits regarding government collection of data, according to polls released by the Pew Research Center in November 2019. Out of the same pool of respondents, 84 percent answered that they feel very little or no control over the data collected about them by the government.

A similar poll released by Morning Consult in December 2019 found that 79 percent of Americans believe Congress should make crafting a bill to better protect consumers online data a priority, while 65 percent answered that data privacy is one of the biggest issues our society faces and legislation is needed to stop data breaches.

Ironically enough, it seems as though the American surveillance state wants everything monitored and scrutinized except itself. Shielding the so-called intelligence community from the public eye is a towering wall of government agencies, unaccountably bureaucratic review processes, and strict nondisclosure agreements designed to muzzle dissenters. One day after the release of Snowdens memoir Permanent Record in September 2019, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against him for alleged breaches in previous nondisclosure agreements.

Regardless of what people think of Snowden, it is irrefutable that, without others like him, a tremendous amount of our governments failures and atrocities would go unseen (as untold scores likely already do). Without Daniel Ellsberg, the world would be oblivious to the true extent of Lyndon B. Johnson lies surrounding Vietnam. Without Mark Felt, Richard Nixon might have finished a second term as president. And without Edward Snowden, the realization that the American government is spying on its own citizens would have never occurred.

Politicians pay lip service to the Constitution. Snowden put his life on the line to defend the Fourth Amendment and the right to privacy for every American. The least we can do is offer him a fair trial.

Cliff Maloney is the president of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL).

*DISCLAIMER: For the record, Cliff Maloney is not the Cliff Snowden references in Permanent Record.

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The top 4 reasons Edward Snowden deserves a fair trial | TheHill - The Hill

It took all of a day after the text was released for the House of Representatives to vote for a surveillance reform and reauthorization bill that privacy groups (and some members of Congress) say doesn't go nearly far enough.

On Tuesday evening, Reps. Jerry Nadler (DN.Y.) and Adam Schiff (DCalif.) released the text of the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act. On Wednesday evening, it sailed through the House by a vote of 278136.

The bill renews but revises the USA Freedom Act, which was passed in 2015 after Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had secretly been collecting and storing massive amounts of Americans' phone and internet records. The USA Freedom Act was a compromise between those who pointed out these acts violated Americans' privacy and Fourth Amendment rights and those who insisted the United States needed the info to fight terrorism. The law allowed the NSA and FBI to access these collected records under more strict guidelines and authorized the use of roving wiretaps to keep track of "lone wolf" terrorists.

The USA Freedom Act sunsets this weekend, and privacy activists on both the left and the right have used the opportunity to push for stronger protections from secret surveillance and unwarranted data collection.

Last night's vote suggests we will not see tougher reforms. The bill does include some milder (but nevertheless welcome) changes. It ends the records retention program entirelynot as big a deal as it might sound, since the NSA has already abandoned it. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) Court will have modestly expanded powers to bring in outside advisers when the feds want a warrant and to review decisions.And the attorney general will have to sign off on any secret surveillance warrant applications that target federal officials or federal candidates for office. But the bill does not grant civil libertarians' demands for limits on how business records can be secretly collected and used, for stronger protections against secret surveillance of First Amendmentprotected activities, and for a stronger role for those outside advisers.

The vote did not follow party lines. There is a consistent group of Democrats and Republicans who support strong privacy and Fourth Amendment protections, even if they don't see eye to eye on most other issues. Among the 60 Republicans who voted against the limper reforms were Louis Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, and Tom McClintock of California. Among the 75 Democrats who voted no were Zoe Lofgren of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ted Lieu of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Independent Justin Amash of Michigan also voted against the bill.

But they're the minority. The larger, more establishment-minded leadership of Congress seems fine with kicking the can down the road yet again (the law will sunset once more in 2023) and reforming as little as they can get away with.

One of the more notable "yea" votes comes from Rep. Devin Nunes (RCalif.). A vocal defender of the president, Nunes has long insisted that the feds and the FISA Court abused their powers when they snooped on Trump aide Carter Page. (Subsequent investigation shows he was right to be concerned.) Nunes has even gone so far as to call for the entire FISA Court to be dismantled. Yet when it came time to vote, he, like he has done historically, voted to preserve the wider surveillance authorities.

This bill wouldn't have done anything to stop the FBI from wiretapping Page. He was neither a candidate for office nor a federal official at the time. But it will make it harder for the feds to wiretap Nunes.

The legislation heads over to the Senate now, where Rand Paul (RKy.) is trying to use his influence over Trump to stop the bill and demand stronger reforms. A tweet from Trump suggests Paul has the president's ear:

We went through this once before. That time, Trump wound up approving legislation that actually expanded the feds' authority to secretly spy on American citizens. Let's hope this isn't yet another case where the people in power care only about whether they are the ones being surveilled.

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Over Objections From Privacy Advocates, Tame Surveillance Bill Sails Through the House - Reason

This was originally published by Just Security.

Something quite unusual happened last fall. After an internal Justice Department watchdog reported that the government had submitted flawed documents to get court approval for surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Republicans who had long supported broad surveillance powers began calling for greater civil liberties protections. A rare window opened for reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)the law that governs surveillance of suspected terrorists, spies, and other foreign agents. That window coincides with an upcoming deadline to reauthorize three expiring FISA authorities, providing a perfect opportunity for Congress to make much-needed changes.

Something much more ordinary is happening now: Members of Congress are poised to let this opportunity pass them by. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Or.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) have introduced astrong, bipartisan reform bill, but the administration and intelligence hawks in Congress are seeking straight reauthorization without reform. The House Judiciary Committee decided to split the baby, and on Monday unveiledmodest reform legislationthat is missing key safeguards against surveillance abuse. Committee members should insist on strengthening the bill when it goes to markup on Wednesday.

What weve learned since the last reauthorization of Section 215

The main authority at issue is Section 215 of the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which amended FISAs business records provision. It allows the government to get an order from the secret FISA Court compelling a third party, such as a bank or telephone company, to turn over any tangible thing in their possession. The government need only show that the item is relevant to an ongoing counterterrorism or foreign intelligence investigation.

This is one of the lowest legal standards availableso low, in fact, that the FISA Courtinterpreted itto justify the National Security Agencys (NSA) indiscriminate or bulk collection of Americans telephone records, based on the theory that some relevant information must surely buried within them. Whats more, while the government cannot obtain thecontentof phone calls or emails under Section 215, it can obtain information that is often every bit as personal, such as medical records, book sales, library records, and tax returns.

In 2015, after Edward Snowden revealed the NSAs phone records program, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act to prohibit bulk collection under Section 215 and other FISA authorities. But there were two flaws in Congresss approach. First, instead of requiring the government to focus on individual suspects, Congress allowed the government to collect information about entire companies, organizations, and IP addresses, which can encompass thousands of people. Civil liberties advocates thus feared that bulk collection might simply be replaced with bulky collectioni.e., collection that is tied to a particular target but still sweeps in the information of large numbers of innocent Americans.

A second problem was that Congress created a new program within Section 215 for collecting Americans phone records. Under the so-called CDR Program (for call detail records), the government can collect the phone records of suspected terroristsandanyone who has ever been in contact with them. Withtwoindependentexecutive branch commissions having concluded that the NSAs bulk collection program provided little to no counterterrorism value, it was unclear why a scaled-down version was deemed necessary.

Five years later, we can see how these flaws have played out. The law requires the government toreportboth the number of targets of Section 215 orders, and a number that indicates how many peoples information is actually collected. There were 56 targets of Section 215 orders in 2018, but 214,860 people had their information collected under those orders. If that isnt bulky collection, its hard to think what is.

As for the CDR program, it has been, without exaggeration, a disaster. Although intended to replace bulk collection, itswept inmore than a billion phone records between 2015-2018. Moreover, in 2018, the NSAdisclosedthat it had been collecting data it was not legally authorized to collect, due to technical problems it was unable to fix. NSA officials bluntlyadmittedthat the program wasnt generating sufficient benefit to justify its continuance, and the agencydecidedto pause collection in early 2019. A government study declassified and released todayconfirmsthat the program provided scant value while costing $100 million to operate.

The opportunity now

As a starting point, any legislation to reauthorize Section 215 must revoke authorization for the CDR program. Even the leaders of the Senate intelligence committeewhich is notoriously pro-surveillance and anti-reformhaveacknowledgedthis necessity.

Thebilloffered by Senators Wyden and Daines, with a companion bill offered by Representatives Lofgren (D-Ca.), Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Davidson (R-Ohio), would go much further. It would tackle the problem of bulky collection by limiting the targets of Section 215 collection to foreign powers, agents of foreign powers, or people in contact with thembasically, people who could themselves be legitimate focuses of a counterterrorism or foreign intelligence investigation.

Their proposal would also take on a host of other problems with FISA. For instance, the governments default practice is to keep the records it collects for at least five years, even if the information is highly personal and contains no evidence of wrongdoing. This exposes Americans private data to theft, negligent mishandling, or abuse. The Wyden-Daines bill would require the government to delete data within three years unless it is determined to constitute foreign intelligence. It also specifies certain categories of data, such as geolocation information and web browsing history, which the government must obtain a warrant to access. And it includes several provisions that would enhance transparency and oversight of the FISA process.

The billoffered by the House Judiciary Committee, by contrast, is much less ambitious. It would end the CDR program, as it must. But it would do nothing to address the problem of continuing bulky collection under Section 215. It allows the government to continue hoarding the data of innocent Americans. It prohibits the use of Section 215 to collect items that would otherwise require a warrant, but it does not specify what any of those items are, leaving the government with far too much wiggle room to rely on its own cramped legal interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. And its transparency and oversight provisions, while important, are less far-reaching than those in the Wyden-Daines bill.

Committee members should insist on amendments to fill these gaps during Wednesdays markup. Opportunities to build meaningful civil liberties protections into our sprawling surveillance laws are few and far between. The politics of fear that underlie most national security debates generally create a one-way ratchet, in which government authorities grow ever broader while protections for Americans privacy are eroded. We are in that rarest of moments in which Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for civil liberties enhancements. The House Judiciary Committee should not allow this moment to pass with a business-as-usual compromise between the reform seekers and the defenders of the status quo.

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Congress Is Ready for Surveillance Reform Will the House Rise to the Occasion? - brennancenter.org

By the end of the week, Congress is supposed to decide whether it will renew some federal surveillance regulations, reform them, or let them expire.Many legislators would probably prefer either to kick the can down the road with another temporary renewal or to pass a modest set of reforms. But several members of Congress are opposed to ketting the status quo continueenough members, in fact, that we may well see reductions in the feds' power to secretly collect data about Americans without our knowledge, as well as more oversight over the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.

The USA Freedom Act expires on Sunday. Passed after Edward Snowden exposed the ways the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly collecting telephone and internet metadata of millions of Americans, the act both retroactively authorized the data collection and added some stricter rules to the process. Privacy and civil rightsfocused lawmakers and activists have been trying since then to rein in domestic surveillance even further. Sen. Rand Paul (RKy.) has been using his positive relationship with President Donald Trumpand the president's anger at the surveillance of his campaign, which ultimately led to a failed impeachment attemptto push for reforms.

The Hill reported on Sunday that Paul is, as he has been in the past, the loudest voice stopping Congress from quietly keeping things the way they are:

Paul says he won't support a short-term extension and appeared skeptical that he would back a larger deal that paired a USA Freedom extension with reforms to FISA, though he added that he could support some of the surveillance reforms if they get standalone votes, as amendments, for example.

He's also pushing for an amendment vote to prohibit FISA warrants from being used against American citizens and to prohibit information obtained in the FISA courts from being used against a U.S. citizen in domestic courts.

"I'm not for any extension. I'm for fixing it.I'll vote no on any extension," Paul said.

He's not alone among Republicans in the Senate, and he's got plenty of support from Democrats in the House as well, to require that there be changes. Rep. Doug Collins (RGa.) went on Fox Business yesterday to say that there weren't enough votes in the Democratic-controlled Congress to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act unless there were reforms.

Reform-minded members of Congress aren't focused entirely on the same reforms. The Democrats want to make sure that the records collecting program is officially dead. (NSA has unofficially stopped doing it, but the authorization still exists.) Paul and some other Republicans are using the problemswith the warrants used to wiretap former Trump aide Carter Page to call for more independent oversight to review and advise the FISA court on warrants. Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) prefer renewal without changes.

Nothing in these reforms is likely to have prevented what had happened with Page, since it's not the USA Freedom Act's authorities that were used to snoop on him. And based on the angry reaction of the FISA Court's judges when they found out the FBI had misled them in parts of the warrant applicationand their decision to call for an independent reviewerit's not clear additional oversight of the court itself would have stopped what happened with Page. The problems seemed to have originated from within the FBI itself.

But this is probably the only way to get Trump to care about restraining the use of secret surveillance on the rest of us. That is surely why Paul is hammering on about what happened to Page and Trump.

Paul's proposed reforms are probably a bridge too far to actually pass, but it's an admirable effort. Paul seems unlikely to be able to convince Congress to eliminate domestic FISA warrants entirely. But just as the USA Freedom Act was a compromise reform forced in part due to Paul's stubborn refusal to shut up about Americans' rights after Snowden's reveal, his prominent status in Trump World will guarantee that at least the broadest reforms will be considered.

But will they actually be debated? That's not so clear. There was already an aborted effort to attach reauthorization to a coronavirus emergency bill last week. With a deadline looming, there's sure to be an effort to roll reforms of some sort into other must-pass legislation. It's just not clear as yet how far those reforms will go.

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Will We See Real Surveillance Reform This Week? - Reason

Buffeted by hurricanes, earthquakes, a hostile White House and decades of exploitation and ecological destruction, many view Puerto Rico as an ongoing disaster. Some, however, see Puerto Ricos plight as an opportunity. Tired of waiting for solutions from the top down, a nascent Puerto Rican grassroots movement supported by widespread social unrest is attempting to change its society and economy from the bottom up and Berkeley is lending a helping hand.

Instead of waiting for disaster assistance that never comes, this new generation of Puerto Ricans is looking for ways to work together and build their own independent, sustainable future. Hurricane Maria was the catalyst that ignited the cooperative grassroots movement. Maria changed everything island residents constantly recount.

The devastating storm showed clearly that the emperor had no clothes, and that Puerto Ricans were on their own with regard to extreme vulnerability to climate change, food insecurity (90% of its food is imported) and economic recovery.

Realizing they could not wait for government action, Puerto Ricans reacted to events by creating food kitchens, emergency search groups and shelters. These actions helped raise consciousness about the strength and need for grassroots community action. Many of these operations became ongoing activities and many people have chosen to stay on the island and contribute to the back to the land movement to produce more healthy food locally.

Berkeley residents have been involved in supporting these grassroots community groups, just as they have been throughout the decades on trips to Cuba, South Africa, and Vietnam. Green Cities Fund, established in 2005 by myself and my journalist wife TT Nhu (known as Nhu) is supporting projects in the new Puerto Rico.

Soon (when the coronavirus subsides) a team of chef graduates of Chez Panisse including Dominica Saloman and Melissa Fernandez, and restaurateur, chef, winemaker and author Narsai David will join organic Farmer Al Courchesne, owner of Frog Hollow Farm (a major Chez Panisse supplier), and others on a solidarity tour of Puerto Rico in support of its local organic sustainable food movement Local street artist Anthony Holdsworth, whose son is building microgrids in Puerto Rico to enable farms and villages to become energy independent, plans to join the group to record the journey. A similar tour to Cuba in 2012 led to innovative improvements in its cuisine.

These people-to-people efforts have long been part of The Republic of Berkeleys DNA as its citizens and City Council have a long tradition of taking political action on matters far beyond Berkeleys borders which affect the nation and the world. The Free Speech movement began in Berkeley and Berkeley resident Bob Baldock was one of the few U.S. citizens to participate in the Cuban Revolution as a combatant in Fidel Castros unit based in the Sierra Maestra in 1958. The man who released the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, and, filmmaker Judith Ehrlich, whose Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America inspired Edward Snowden, are also part of this Berkeley tradition.

In 1972, Nhu and I assisted UNICEFs expansion into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam and, in 1975, when thousands of Vietnamese orphans arrived in the U.S. at the end of the war, Nhu and her friends discovered that many were not orphans and had families searching for them. This resulted in a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government and adoption agencies, which ultimately resulted in many childrens return to their Vietnamese families in the United States. Daughter from Danang, a documentary on one of the orphans by Berkeley filmmaker Gail Dolgin was voted best documentary at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar.

Our work has also extended to Afghanistan, where we established Parwaz, the first Afghan-run microlending organization. Much earlier, in 1961, I had the privilege of helping to train, at U.C. Berkeley, the first group of Peace Corps volunteers and, in 1966 I worked with plastic and reconstructive surgeon Arthur Barsky, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, to establish a hospital in Vietnam to treat war-injured children. Nhu and I recently visited the hospital on the 50th anniversary of its official founding (having operated for several years in a Saigon apartment house liberated from the American embassy). It was a journalist, Martha Gellhorn, who alerted me to the plight of children in Vietnam, and an article in the New York Times which brought our attention to the new movement in Puerto Rico.

Berkeley resident Eric Leenson, co-founder of Progressive Assets Management the first socially responsible investment fund, is spearheading Green Cities Fund work in Puerto Rico. In 2019, Eric helped organize the first national gathering of the new grassroots cooperative organizations. Over 240 people from 130 organizations, 25 of whom were non-island experts from seven regional countries, attended in a truly multigenerational environment to address a variety of key topics including agroecology, sustainable tourism, and the construction of a stronger cooperative movement.

The Christopher Reynolds Foundation funded the gathering and also donated an Oggun, a small, inexpensive, easy-to-fix tractor suitable for small organic farms. The design for the tractor is open source, most of the parts can be manufactured locally, and it can be assembled in a day by a mechanic. It will soon be manufactured in Puerto Rico.

California is also contributing to survival and sustainability in Puerto Rico through innovative earthquake-proof superadobe housing developed by the California Institute of Earth Architecture (CalEarth) Much of the housing in Puerto Rico is substandard and unable to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. The well-insulated superadobe earthquake-proof construction is easily built from earth and other local materials. Heres a local TV story on project.

The Green Cities group soon visiting Puerto Rico will meet with innovative Puerto Rican chefs who are substituting local foods into the islands cuisine. The group will also visit the farms producing these foods. They will meet with the organizers of the grassroots movement and also visit Plenitud, an organization devoted to the grassroots rebuilding of communities and making them sustainable through agriculture, home and infrastructure rebuilding, community organization and energy independence. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of an ongoing program of exchange and assistance.

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Opinion: Berkeley reaches out to Puerto Rico, part of its tradition of helping others - Berkeleyside

Is the National Security Agency illegally intercepting your emails?

Elliott J. Schuchardt insists that it is.

A federal appeals court has concluded that he didnt prove it, however.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit reached that conclusion this week in upholding the dismissal of a lawsuit Schuchardt, an attorney, originally filed against President Barack Obama and the NSA in 2014.

Circuit Judge Thomas L. Ambros opinion on the case touches on such issues as domestic spying and has a cast of character that includes Edward Snowden, the internationally-known whistleblower and former CIA employee who leaked highly-classified NSA information.

As outlined by Ambro, Schuchardts allegations read like the plot of a thriller, maybe even the script for an episode of The X-Files.

Schuchardts claim, as relayed by Ambro, is that soon after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the NSA began collecting massive quantities of email and other data created by U.S. citizens without legal warrants directly from the servers of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Dropbox and Apple.

The supposed collection violated the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, Schuchardt insisted. To back his allegations, Schuchardt cited Snowdens disclosures, articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian news outlets and affidavits from former NSA employees, including one who said he developed the technology used for the supposedly unlawful mass interceptions.

The first time U.S. Western District Judge Cathy Bissoon dismissed Schuchardts suit, the circuit judges sent the matter back to her for reconsideration. Bissoon dismissed the case a second time in February 2019 and this time around Ambro agreed with her finding that Schuchardt had failed to rebut the governments evidence that his claims are untrue.

Ambro found that Schuchardt didnt prove that affidavits from his alleged experts on NSA operations were reliable. The news media reports he submitted as evidence constituted only hearsay, the circuit judge agreed. Schuchardts reliance on the documents he claimed came, indirectly, from Snowdens whistleblower disclosures fell short as well, Ambro found.

Schuchardts argument that the Snowden documents are authenticated by the governments admissions that Snowden misappropriated documents also fails, he wrote. Any general admissions by government officials that Snowden stole documents did not authenticate the specific documents Schuchardt submitted to the court.

Ambro noted that federal officials countered Schuchardts claims with evidence including a sworn affidavit from NSA Operations Director Wayne Murphy. In that affdavit, Murphy stated no NSA intelligence-gathering activity involves the bulk collection or storage of all or substantially all of the email or other internet-based communications of all U.S. persons.

The government insisted Murphys statement is backed up by a 2014 report required under the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Bissoon credited the federal governments evidence and reasoned that Schuchardt could not show that his communications would have been targeted and collected, Ambro noted.

So, he found that since Schuchardts evidence was inadmissible in court and the governments evidence stood uncontroverted Bissoon was right to dismiss the suit on grounds that Schuchardt lacked factual standing to keep pursuing it.

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The feds are illegally intercepting everybodys emails, lawyer claims. U.S. court says he didnt prove it - PennLive

The controversial surveillance program that gave the NSA access to the phone call records of millions of Americans has cost US taxpayers $100m and resulted in just one useful lead over four years.

Thats the upshot of a report [PDF] from the US government's freshly revived Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The panel dug into the super-snoops' so-called Section 215 program, which is due to be renewed next month.

Those findings reflect concerns expressed by lawmakers back in November when at a Congressional hearing, the NSA was unable to give a single example of how the spy program had been useful in the fight against terrorism. At the time, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) stated bluntly: If you cant give us any indication of specific value, there is no reason for us to reauthorize it.

That value appears to have been, in total, 15 intelligence reports at an overall cost of $100m between 2015 and 2019. Of the 15 reports that mentioned what the PCLOB now calls the call detail records (CDR) program, just two of them provided unique information. In other words, for the other 13 reports, use of the program reinforced what Uncle Sam's g-men already knew. In 2018 alone, the government collected more than 434 million records covering 19 million different phone numbers.

What of those two reports? According to the PCLOB overview: Based on one report, FBI vetted an individual, but, after vetting, determined that no further action was warranted. The second report provided unique information about a telephone number, previously known to US authorities, which led to the opening of a foreign intelligence investigation.

A short explanation of that sole useful investigation is redacted, so it is unknown what it covered or whether it proved useful or led to a prosecution.

So, overall, millions of Americans' phone logs were given to the NSA at a cost of $100m, and the result was the opening of one lone probe. It is perhaps no wonder that the NSA and the FBI has spent years stalling and refusing to hand over any information about the program.

Its also worth noting that the NSA has not once but twice shuttered the program because it ended up with millions of records it did not have a right to see ie: the program was twice found to have gone out of bounds and used illegally. And yet the intelligence services still want to keep the program even if the legislation supporting it, the USA Freedom Act of 2015, expires on March 15.

The Trump Administration has asked that Congress extend the law so the NSA can, if it wishes, turn the program back on at some future date.

The lengthy report is a welcome return for the PCLOB, which was turned into a zombie organization unable to do any work for several years after its previous report on NSA spying programs concluded that they were illegal and Congress was obliged to scale them back.

Those reports themselves stemmed from the fact that the full depth of the programs was exposed by NSA IT-admin-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in a vast leak of information.

And yet, despite it being made clear that neither Congress nor the PCLOB were able to adequately track or oversee what was really happening with Americas spying program, little or nothing has changed and repeat efforts by some in Congress to reform those programs have been repeatedly stymied.

Not to be beaten, several senators are again trying to scale back the various NSA surveillance programs, announcing a new bill last month aimed at ending NSA blanket snooping, protecting abuse of the FISA oversight process, closing various loopholes in the secret law that the spying agency uses, and expanding scrutiny of the programs.

The PCLOB notes in its report it was only able to gain access to the information it has now shared because the intelligence services agreed to declassify at least some of the details. And the only reason the snoops did that is because they concluded the program serves no real useful purpose anymore, thanks to the widespread use of encrypted messaging apps over telephone calls. Such apps are more secure.

As to what is happening with the NSAs other spy programs, neither the PCLOB, nor Congress, nor even the highly classified secret FISA oversight court knows. And the only way it seems likely we will find out is if there is another Edward Snowden.

Sponsored: Detecting cyber attacks as a small to medium business

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After blowing $100m to snoop on Americans' phone call logs for four years, what did the NSA get? Just one lead - The Register

Congress has postponed a planned vote to reauthorize controversial surveillance programs. As Politico reports, the House Judiciary Committee intended to renew parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before they expire on March 15th. But the committee canceled a vote set for today after learning that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) would offer new amendments ones that Democrats feared would hurt the bills chances in a House-wide vote.

The bill would extend a handful of domestic surveillance rules, particularly Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which lets government agencies demand sensitive business records with a secret court approval. Section 215 was set to expire in late 2019, but Congress extended it for three more months in a funding bill, pushing the debate to 2020.

Politico and other outlets describe a sensitive bargaining process over the reauthorization, complicated by political tensions. The resulting bill tweaks elements of the program to increase accountability and limit surveillance powers. Among other things, it would expand the power of a friend of the court who could challenge the governments arguments before the FISA court. And it would explicitly end a program that let the National Security Agency demand call records from phone companies although the NSA previously said it already abandoned that approach.

Lofgren, however, described the bill as a puny reform to Politico. The bill as introduced by the committee was not one I thought was worth supporting, she said.

Her amendments were expected to further limit government data collection and add more scrutiny to FISA court approvals. The changes could have pleased civil liberties advocates who have been frustrated by a lack of meaningful reform. They could also have garnered support from some Republicans who were once ambivalent of limiting the Patriot Act but have since echoed President Donald Trumps claims of an FBI conspiracy against him. An anonymous Democratic aide, however, called the amendments a poison pill that would sink the bill.

NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA phone surveillance which involved collecting data on millions of Americans to fight foreign terror threats in 2013. The revelations sparked public protest, a congressional reform effort, and several lawsuits, especially because the program was apparently unproductive. A recent report said the years-long effort revealed only two unique leads, only one of which led to an investigation. But reformers have seen only incremental results.

Now, the latest bills future is unclear. The committee could reschedule a vote and meet the March 15th deadline, either with the bill described above or with a straight reauthorization of the old rules. Lofgren also said that she would soon offer her own alternative bill. We have the opportunity to reform the system, she told The New York Times. We should take that opportunity.

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Congress postponed a vote to extend Patriot Act surveillance programs - The Verge

Socialist Bernie Sanders, the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, refused to answer during an interview on CNN whether the Democratic Party was trying to take the nomination away from him.

President Trump questioned last night the timing of Buttigiegs withdrawal, tweeting in part, this is the real beginning of the Dems taking Bernie out of play, no nomination again, CNNs Anderson Cooper said to Sanders. He also also tweeted again this afternoon, they are staging a coup against you.

Is he right? Cooper asked.

Sanders refused to answer the question.

You know what, I really wish that the president of the United States, might kind of spend his time doing his job, Sanders responded. Maybe, just maybe, he might wanna worry about the coronavirus, he might wanna worry about the stock market, he might worry about the 500,000 people in this country who are homeless, or the massive level of income and wealth inequality that exists.

So, President Trump, stay out of the Democratic primary, Sanders continued. Why dont you do your job for a change as president? Stop lying, stop running a corruption administration, pay attention to the American people not just your own political aims.

WATCH:

Trump has repeatedly accused the Democrats of plotting to take the nomination away from Sanders again, writing in January, They are taking the nomination away from Bernie for a second time. Rigged!

Mini Mike is a 54 mass of dead energy who does not want to be on the debate stage with these professional politicians, Trump tweeted last month. No boxes please. He hates Crazy Bernie and will, with enough money, possibly stop him. Bernies people will go nuts!

The Dems are working hard to take the prized nomination away from Bernie. Back room politics, which Bernie is not very good at, Trump tweeted last week. His people will not let it happen again!

The Daily Wire highlighted Sanders extreme policy stances in a profile piece last year:

On The Issues: Sanders calls himself ademocratic socialistwho, whiledisavowingwhole-hearted socialist theory with respect to government ownership of the means of production, nonetheless has consistently advocated for economic class warfare that pits the lower and middle classes against the wealthy. He has routinely supported anti-capitalistic and anti-growth economic policies, heavy-handed government regulation over the private economy, robust labor unions, and the Nordic model of a sprawling welfare state. On foreign policy, he has frequently mollycoddled communist dictatorships and has often been hostile toward Americas closest geopolitical allies. Overall, he is a far-left progressive who has long defined the leftward flank of what it means to be a progressive in America.

Constitution: Sanders supports a living Constitution interpretive methodology that effectively empowers unelected federal judges to determine large swaths of the laws that govern Americans lives. He is hostile to the First Amendments protection of free speech and has supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the political speech-affirming 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision ofCitizens United v. F.E.C.He has generally supported a more robust role for Congress and a more diminished role for the presidency in the context of foreign policy and the conduct of overseas military operations. He takes an expansive view of the Fourth Amendment and has even praised disgruntled NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Continue reading The Daily Wires profile piece on Bernie Sanders here.

Link:
Bernie Asked If Democrats Are 'Staging Coup Against' Him. He Refuses To Answer. - The Daily Wire