As a former NSA analyst, I'm dismayed by the continuing revelations of the National Security Agency's warrantless -- and therefore illegal -- spying. The case involves fundamental issues related to NSAs missions and long-standing rules of engagement. What's even more dismaying is the lack of public reaction to this.

Fundamentally, this is an issue of law. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was established in 1978 to address a wide variety of issues revolving around Watergate, during which a president used foreign intelligence agencies to collect data on U.S. citizens. As part of FISA, the NSA has to get warrants to analyze and maintain collections of data involving U.S. citizens. FISA has withstood all tests until now, and it involves a fundamental aspect of the U.S. Constitution -- its system of checks and balances.

The FISA law allows NSA to request those warrants up to 72 hours after the fact -- that is, after the data has been analyzed. And lest you think that the courts from which such warrants are requested are staffed by a bunch of liberal, activist, criminal-coddling judges, they have reportedly turned down only five warrants in the last 28 years. So when President Bush says, "If Osama bin Laden is calling someone in the United States, we want to know about it," followed by his nervous laugh, he's laughing at the American public, since "knowing about it" is a totally irrelevant issue. FISA blocks no legitimate acquisition of knowledge.

It doesn't even slow the process down. The issue is not that the NSA cannot examine calls into the U.S. from terrorist suspects -- FISA provides for that -- but that the agency must justify acting on the results and keeping the information within 72 hours. The president claims that the process of getting those warrants -- of complying with the law -- is too time-consuming. Normally, that would sound like simple laziness, but the reality is that the program is so large that they would need an army of lawyers to get all the warrants they'd need to be in compliance with FISA. But the law is the law. No president has the right to pick and choose which laws they find convenient to follow.

If Bush didnt like the FISA laws, he could have asked Congress to amend them. After all, after 9/11 Congress passed a wide variety of laws (without, for the most part, reading them) that were supposed to prevent another attack. They could have easily slipped something modifying FISA into all of that legislation. They did not, though recent revelations about this administration's use of signing statements may indicate that they simply didn't want to raise the possibility of questions.

Ignoring FISA's rules concerning warrants is illegal. It also weakens national security, since the process of obtaining the warrants has an effect on quality control. To date, FBI agents have been sent out to do thousands of investigations based on this warrantless wiretapping. None of those investigations turned up a legitimate lead. I have spoken to about a dozen agents, and they all roll their eyes and indicate disgust with the man-years of wasted effort being put into physically examining NSA "leads."

This scattershot attempt at data mining drags FBI agents away from real investigations, while destroying the NSAs credibility in the eyes of law enforcement and the public in general. That loss of credibility makes the NSA the agency that cried wolf -- and after so many false leads, should they provide something useful, the data will be looked at skeptically and perhaps given lower priority by law enforcement than it would otherwise have been given.

Worse, FBI agents working real and pressing investigations such as organized crime, child pornography and missing persons are being pulled away from their normal law enforcement duties to follow up on NSA leads. Nobody wants another 9/11, of course, but we experience real crimes on a daily basis that, over the course of even one year, cause far greater loss of life and damage than the 9/11 attacks did. There are children abused on a daily basis to facilitate online child pornography, yet I know of at least two agents who were pulled from their duties tracking down child abusers to investigate everyone who called the same pizza parlor as a person who received a call from a person who received an overseas call. There are plenty of similar examples.

We have snakes in our midst, yet we are chasing a mythical beast with completely unreliable evidence.

And now we discover that the NSA is searching through every possible phone call made in the U.S.. They claim that the NSA is not receiving any personally identifying information. Frankly, you have to be a complete moron to believe that. It is trivial to narrow down access to a phone number to just a few members of a household, if not in fact to exactly one person.

The government claims that it got the information legally since it was given the data or bought it from the telecom companies. Perhaps, but USA Today reports that at least one company (Qwest) received threats from the U.S. government for not cooperating. Thats extortion -- another crime.

Congress is not exercising any backbone at all, and neither are its constituents -- a.k.a., you. Every time we receive new information about the NSA domestic spying program, it gets exponentially worse, and it's clear that we still have no clue as to the full extent of the program. More importantly, the courts and Congress do not appear to have a clue as to the full extent of the program, and those bodies are constitutionally required to exercise checks and balances over the NSA. The actions taken by the executive branch after 9/11 aren't protecting our freedom. They are usurping it.

So, besides knowing that it's illegal, that is provides useless information, that it takes law enforcement agents away from investigating and preventing crimes actually being committed, and that it erodes civil liberties, we have no clue how bad it really is. The arguments I hear for it are that 1) I have nothing to worry about so I dont care if they investigate me, 2) we need to do everything we can to protect ourselves, or 3) the NSA isn't listening to the content of the calls, so there's no harm.

Addressing the first point, people who did nothing wrong have been investigated and jailed in this country and others over the years. Additionally, I believe that Saddam Hussein would cheerfully agree with the tired allegation that if you did nothing wrong, you shouldnt mind the government looking at your calls. I think Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and the Chinese government would also agree with that line of thought. Is this the company we consent to keep in the name of safety?

To doing everything we can to protect ourselves, we have, again, pulled law enforcement agents away from real ongoing crimes to investigate poor and scattered "intelligence." This definition of "protection," again, leaves us watching for dragons while very real snakes multiply freely in our midst.

And so what if the NSA isn't listening to the calls themselves? An intelligence agency doesnt need to hear your chatter to invade your privacy. By simply tying numbers together -- an intelligence discipline of traffic analysis -- I assure you I can put together a portrait of your life. I'll know your friends, your hobbies, where your children go to school, if youre having an affair, whether you plan to take a trip and even when you're awake or asleep. Give me a list of whom youre calling and I can tell most of the critical things I need to know about you.

Unnerved at the prospect of one person holding that data? You should be. While I can personally attest to the fact that the vast majority of NSA employees are good and honest people, the NSA has more than its share of bitter, vindictive mid- and senior-level bureaucrats. I would not trust my personal information with these people, since I have personally seen them use internal information against their enemies.

At the same time, we have seen the Bush administration go after Joesph Wilson, the ambassador who spoke out against the Bush administration, by leaking potentially classified information about him. They vigorously tried to undermine the credibility of Richard Clarke and others who spoke out against them. Now consider that the NSA telephone call database is not classified; there's no legal reason that they can't use this database as vindictively as they did, even when the data was potentially classified, as in releasing the information that Valerie Plame, Wilsons wife, worked for the CIA.

Over the years, I have defended the NSA and its employees as reasonable and law abiding. I was all for invading Afghanistan, deployment of the Clipper Chip and many other controversial government programs. NSA domestic spying is against everything I was ever taught working at the NSA. I might be more for it if there was any credible evidence that this somehow provides useful information that couldnt otherwise be had. However, the domestic spying program has gotten so massive that the well-established process of getting a warrant cannot be followed -- and quantity most certainly doesn't translate to quality. Quite the opposite.

Again, I'm not arguing against allowing the NSA or other intelligence agencies to collect information on terrorists. My problem is that they are bypassing legally required oversight mechanisms. This implies that the operations are massive, and go well beyond the scope of looking at terrorists. Not only is this diminishing what makes America unique and worth preserving, it removes all quality control and puts the country at increased risks by moving resources away from critical investigations of more substantial threats.

I think Sen. Jon Kyl, a strong supporter of the NSA domestic spying program, said it best: "We have got to collect intelligence on the enemy." I fully agree. But the enemy numbers in the hundreds at best. the NSA is collecting data on hundreds of millions of people who are clearly not the enemy. These numbers speak for themselves.

Ira Winkler is president of the Internet Security Advisors Group. He is a former National Security Agency analyst and the author of Spies Among Us (Wiley, 2005).

Related Opinion:

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Opinion: Why NSA spying puts the U.S. in danger ...

The latest scoop to come out of the documents that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has been providing to journalists is that the NSA has been harvesting vast numbers of emails and other contacts from online contact lists around the world.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that "hundreds of millions of contact lists" are being sucked up from web servers abroad, many of them inevitably of American citizens. It's the sort of bulk data collection that privacy activists have been angry about. The US isn't going after, say, the contact lists of identified potential terrorists or other foreign intelligence targets. Rather, it appears to be hoovering up everything it can get its hands on.

But given past Snowden revelations about NSA practices, the fact that the NSA was likely to be doing this kind of thing isn't a surprise. Which is why I find this sentence in the thorough article so interesting: "The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internets main data routes."

In the debate about NSA data-mining from telecommunications companies and popular Web services like Google, the US has often been framed as a sort of rogue actor - a big bully spying willy nilly on people around the globe simply because it can. For instance, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the first Snowden stories, has crafted his pieces to make the US look as bad as possible, while generally neglecting the spying of other nations.

In a story for Brazil's O Globo based off Snowden material, for instance, Greenwald wrote about US spying on the Brazilian government, while neglecting to mention Brazil's own spying on foreigners and its own citizens. Greenwald resides in Brazil.

In the broader Internet discussion about the revelations, there's been talk about ending the key US role in routing global Internet traffic. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is considering measures requiring Brazilian Internet users' information to be stored only on servers in the country. The move is ostensibly to make it harder for the NSA to get at it. Deutsche Telekom of Germany has said it will start channeling all domestic Internet traffic through servers in the country (emails within a country are often bounced through servers abroad), and says it wants an agreement with other telecommunications companies in Germany to do the same.

But it's clear that while the US is a data-mining heavyweight, large numbers of other governments are in on the act. A recent story in Ars Technica points out that Germany has legal measures that require email and other Internet services to provide customer data if handed a court order. They're alsolegally bound from saying if they've received an order for data. While laws vary from country to country, Europe in general does not, at first glance at least, seem like a haven from surveillance.

European Union "law does not explicitly protect against access by European intelligence services, but member states law and practice does," Ralf Bendrath, the senior policy adviser to a German member of the European Parliament, told Ars.

Elsewhere? Russia maintains a vast domestic surveillance state of its own. A report in Russia last week alleged that the government's FSB security service has installed a surveillance system that will enable them to intercept and read virtually every digital communication in Sochi during the 2014 winter Olympics.

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Returning to the Washington Post story, who are the foreign telecommunications companies and foreign governments assisting the NSA? Regarding the first group, the article doesn't say. The story does refer to data collection by an "Australian intelligence service on the NSAs behalf" but doesn't name any other countries. There are certainly many more. And if foreign governments are willing to collect Internet data on behalf of the US, you can count on it that they're collecting for themselves.

This is not to suggest the expansion of surveillance enabled by the Internet age isn't troubling. It's just that the US is not alone, with many partners and enemies abroad doing much the same. And those countries haven't found their Snowden yet.

Here is the original post:
NSA spying? Everyone does it. - CSMonitor.com

The spectacle of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposing the covert spying nature of US federal officials has sent ripple waves through the technology industry -- especially in the outsourcing arena.

Experts predict the NSA fiasco could result in the loss of business for some hosting vendors, but it's hard to say exactly what the impact has been or will be.

The head of a European cloud computing provider said recently though that he's seen a "measurable impact" from companies looking to use its services to escape what they fear could be the prying eyes of the US NSA.

"It has not been a profound surge, but there is definitely a measureable impact," says Robert Jenkins, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Sigma, which is headquartered in Switzerland and has data centers across Europe and the United States. "We've definitely seen cases where people are turning to us because of this."

[MORE NSA SPYING:Reported NSA actions raise serious questions about tech industry partnerships

IN THE NEWS:NSA wants even closer partnership with tech industry]

Forrester analyst and cloud tracker James Staten predicted this could happen in a blog A post in the summer. Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimated in a report that the US cloud computing market could stand to lose up to $35 billion by 2016 because of vendors bypassing US providers and looking to overseas competitors. Staten says that's the low end of an estimate though.

It's "naA-ve" to believe that other countries don't have similar surveillance programs ongoing, which could depress not just the US cloud market, but the international outsourcing market as well. If those concerns do turn into real impacts, he estimates the worldwide outsourcing market could stand to lose up to $180 billion. That's the high-end of his prediction and he doesn't necessarily believe it will happen, but it could, he says. A

Some users are already getting out of US providers though. Take Alexander Ljungberg, co-founder, WireLoad, which is an online service that specializes in e-mail migrations the company can take massive stocks of email systems and translate them from one platform to another. Ljungberg and his partner did not want to use a U.S. cloud provider for the massive computing power that are needed for these jobs because of concerns over peering officials potentially being able to intercept his customer's e-mail communications. WireLoad uses CloudSigma's Swiss data center for all its migrations.

"Privacy laws in Switzerland are internationally known to be very good, so we're just more comfortable knowing that it's less likely there will be some kind of prying by the government," he says, adding that it's a selling point for customers. WiredLoad was using CloudSigma's services even before the NSA stories broke this summer, but he says privacy and security concerns were a major factor in deciding to use a European provider. If the company had been in a U.S. provider this summer, Ljungberg says he would have switched over.

Staten, the analyst who advises cloud users, says it's a judgment call as to whether users should be concerned about this issue. If they are, then switching to an international outsourcing provider is one solution, but one that should be considered carefully.

There may be some value in using an international provider for outsourcing needs, but sometimes international providers open their books at the demands of other governments, he says. "You can't conclude (that international) hosting providers would be immune to the same pressures," that U.S. providers are subject to, he says. Plus, there could be significant costs for migrating workloads to an international outsourcer, including latency concerns that could arise.

The better approach if there is a worry, he says, is to work with the security team on ways to secure the data adequately. "Only if they conclude they cannot sufficiently protect this data should they then look to move that data elsewhere," he says.

Jenkins, with Cloud Sigma says he's seen "a handful" of customers drop a US provider in favor of their offering since the NSA allegations were revealed. It's a strategic decision to look into an international provider instead of one hosted in the U.S., he says.The tone by Jenkins is somewhat of an opportunistic one the company and other European providers are happy to provide what customers consider to be a safer haven compared to U.S. providers.

But U.S. technology executives say they're pushing back on the government too.

In a recent interview Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said the company begrudgingly complies with U.S. orders to hand over information, but the company pushes back to ensure there is the proper court oversight on requests for data. Not complying with such court-ordered requests could result in incarceration, she said.

Noted security expert Bruce Schneier said soon after the NSA leaks came out that he believes the issue could be a thorn in the side of outsourcing providers. "Cloud computing is precedent on the notion of trust us with your data,'" he says. "If you don't trust the vendor, you can't do it." These NSA allegations are making it more difficult to "trust your vendor," he says. (Read what Schneier has to say about encryption related to NSA spying.)

The bigger impact, he believes, will likely be on non-US entities not wanting to put information in U.S. cloud providers. If you're a company really concerned about any government peering into your computer systems, perhaps not using an outsourcing provider at all is the best way to go though, he notes.

Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.

This story, "NSA spying fiasco sending customers overseas" was originally published by Network World.

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NSA spying fiasco sending customers overseas | Computerworld

Broken glass covers an armed forces recruiting poster at the scene of an explosion outside the U.S. Armed Forces Career Center in New York's Times Square, March 6, 2008. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

It's becoming increasingly difficult to give the government the benefit of the doubt in regards to dragnet domestic surveillance.

Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications.

The most significant of those occurred in July,whenthe court that was establishedto "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC),found thatthe NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."

Here's the letter from Senator Ron Wyden:

" on at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."

We don't know the details of the classified order, but it's clear that it's a very importantaspect of the domestic spying apparatus that even the court overseeing the program found it straying into illegal territory.

Here's the relevant text of the amendment:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

So in violating that law, the NSA isviolating the constitutional right to privacy provided to Americans.

Here's a rundown of the other reports that corroborate Snowden's claims:

Individually, each one of those claims is both stunning and damning. Taken together, they suggest that America is a full-blown surveillance state where the government has decided to violate the fundamental rights of its citizens.

The rest is here:
NSA Spying Violated The Constitution - Business Insider

EFF's case challenging NSA spying, Jewel v. NSA, has come further than any case trying to end the government's mass surveillance programs. Our clients have survived multiple efforts by the government to end the case, and they continue to push for their day in court. As a result, we're no stranger to overcoming legal obstacles thrown our way.

The latest obstacle came Thursday, when the court hearing our long-running case challenging NSA spying ruled that the lawsuit should be dismissed on account of the government's argument that to proceed further would jeopardize national security. Athough we are disappointed that the case was dismissed on the basis of the governments state secrecy arguments, we are not surprised.

The Justice Department insists that our legal fight against this spying is bound by aCatch-22: no one can sue unless the court first determines that they were certainly touched by the vast surveillance mechanisms of the NSA. But, the government argued successfully, the court cannot decide whether any particular persons email, web searches, social media or phone calls were touched by the surveillance unless the government admits it. Which, of course, it will not do.

We took on this circular argument last month.EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe reviewed the enormous amountof direct and circumstantial evidence showing our clients communications likely swept up by the NSA dragnet surveillance to establish legal standing.We noted that its not necessary to absolutely establish that our clients communications were touched by the surveillance to prevent dismissal. Given the mountain of evidence that we have presented and the admitted scope of the program, there islikely no chance that our clients communicationslike the communications of millions of innocent Americanswerent touched by the government's programs.

We also directly addressed the governments state secret claims, which were first rejected by the Court in 2006 but which the DOJ continues to assert. We got a boost from a recent courtrulingin the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,Fazaga v FBI, which flatly rejected the application of the state secret privilege in electronic surveillance cases. It instead found that Congress required the courts to use a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 50 U.S.C. 1806(f), to decide whether the alleged spying was lawful. That same lawshould be usedinJewel.

The court hearing the case sided with the government. We think the decision is wrong. Moreover, the American people deserve to know whether mass surveillance is legal and constitutional. We look forward to seeking review in the Ninth Circuit.

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Judge Dodges Legality of NSA Mass Spying, Citing Secrecy ...

Jerome Corsi (Fox News video screenshot)

A federal judge in Washington who ruled against the National Security Agencys bulk collection of phone records three years ago declined Thursday to hear the lawsuit by New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi against special counsel Robert Mueller.

Corsi, who alleges prosecutorial misconduct by Mueller in the Russia investigation, including unconstitutional surveillance, wanted Judge Richard Leon to hear the case because of his handling of the NSA surveillance complaint in 2015.

Corsis lawyer, Larry Klayman, said Leon was the last line of defense in obtaining justice for his client, the Washington Examiner reported.

But Leon ruled Corsis case does not meet the criteria that allows certain federal judges to accept hearing similar cases.

The case will be assigned to another judge in Washington.

Corsis lawsuit alleges Muellers team leaked grand jury information to damage him publicly and that surveillance was carried out at the direction of Mueller and his partisan Democrat, leftist, and ethically and legally conflicted prosecutorial staff.

Muellers team has been investigating Corsi based on the theory that he and Trump ally Roger Stone communicated with WikiLeaks about the hacking and release of emails in 2016 by John Podesta, who then was the chairman of Hillary Clintons presidential campaign.

Corsi has rejected an offer by Mueller to plead guilty to one count of perjury, insisting he never lied.

Klayman contended Mueller and others violated the Fourth Amendment, the USA Freedom Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Corsi, the lawyer said, was victimized by the unlawful and unconstitutional and other illegal and criminal conduct complained herein.

The complaint asserts Mueller misrepresented ordinary investigative research by Corsi to spin a fake narrative that Corsi colluded with Russian intelligence.

Corsi charged in a TV interview that Mueller dispatched FBI agents to the homes and workplaces of his family to threaten and harass them.

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Judge who ruled against NSA spying passes on Corsi case ...

Oakland, CaliforniaOn Friday, March 29, at 9:00 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will tell a federal court that its clients should be allowed to proceed with their case challenging the constitutionality of NSA spying. The governments latest attempts to prevent the court from evaluating the legality of surveilling millions of innocent Americans should be rejected, EFF will argue.

Fridays hearing is an important milestone in EFFs long-running lawsuit alleging that the governments mass interception and collection of peoples communications violates the U.S. Constitution. After years of government efforts to delay and block our ability to bring the NSA to account for spying on Americans emails, phone call information, and other communications, the government is asking the court to grant judgment in its favor because, it contends, the plaintiffs cannot prove that they were spied on. The court cannot rule on the issue one way or the other without disclosing state secrets, the government argues. EFF is asking the court to allow the plaintiffs to move forward to the merits of the casewhether the spying was illegalusing the special procedure Congress created for resolving cases which might involve national security information.

EFF presented declarations from new experts and a new whistleblower that make clear that its more likely than notthe legal standard required to proceed with the casethat a communication of at least one of our plaintiffs was vacuumed up by NSA spying programs. At the hearing, EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe will show that the governments own admissions about the scope and workings of its bulk surveillance schemes and the testimony of new experts and the whistleblower more than debunk the governments claimsalready rejected once beforethat the case cant proceed because it would expose state secrets.

What:Hearing in Jewel v. NSAWhen:Friday, March 29, at 9:00 am

Where:U.S. District Court, Northern District of CaliforniaCourtroom 5, 2nd FloorRonald V. Dellums Federal Building & U.S. Courthouse130 Clay St.Oakland, CA 94612

For EFF's motion to proceed on merits:https://www.eff.org/document/plaintiffs-opposition-governments-summary-judgment-motion-and-plaintiffs-motion-proceed:

For more on this case:https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel

For more on NSA spying:https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/faq#38

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Hearing Friday in Jewel NSA Spying Lawsuit: EFF Asks Court ...

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Video: New NSA Spying Revelations Spark Call for More ...

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been empowered by a secret order issued by the foreign intelligence court directing Verizon Communications, a mobile phone provider with 98.9 million wireless customers, to turn over all its call records for a three-month period.

The order is untargeted, meaning that the NSA can snoop on calls without suspecting anyone of wrongdoing. It was made on 25 April, days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Under the order, the NSA only gains access to the "metadata" around calls when they were made, what numbers they were made to, where they were made from and how long the calls lasted.

Obtaining the content of the calls, or the names or addresses of the callers would make the surveillance wiretapping, which would count as a separate issue legally. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the data collection of mobile phone records extends to AT&T (107 million users) and Sprint (55 million). Verizon's advertising catchphrase "Can you hear me now?" has become the butt of instant jokes on Twitter and other social media.

Internal NSA documents claim the top secret data-mining programme gives the US government access to a vast quantity of emails, chat logs and other data directly from the servers of nine internet companies. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple. The companies mentioned have all denied knowledge of or participation in the programme.

It is unknown how Prism actually works. A 41-slide PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Guardian and classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme. Unlike the collection of Verizon and other phone records, Prism surveillance can include the content of communications not just metadata.

President Barack Obama described the programmes as vital to keeping Americans safe and said the US was "going to have to make some choices between balancing privacy and security to protect against terror". The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

Prism is involved in the collection of data, but Boundless Informant organises and indexes metadata. The tool categorises communications records rather than the content of a message itself. A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. Countries are ranked according to how much information has been taken from mobile and online networks, and colour-coded depending on the extent of the NSA's spying operation.

Users are able to select a country on Boundless Informant's "heat map" to view details including metadata volume and different kinds of NSA information collection. Iran, at odds with the US and Israel over its nuclear programme and other policies, is top of the surveillance list, with more than 14bn data reports in March. Pakistan came in a close second at 13.5bn reports. Jordan, a close US ally, as well as Egypt and India are also near the top.

Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping centre has had access to the Prism system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year, prompting controversy and questions about the legality of it. The prime minister, David Cameron, insisted that the UK's intelligence services operated within the law and were subject to proper scrutiny. The foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that "law-abiding citizens" in Britain would "never be aware of all the things agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up".

GCHQ and the NSA have a relationship dating back to the second world war and have personnel stationed in each others' headquarters Fort Meade in Maryland and Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

For many observers the key question is the exposure of a troubling imbalance between security and privacy, against a background of rapid technological change that now permits clandestine surveillance on a massive and Orwellian scale. Legal safeguards and political oversight appear to be lagging behind. The Guardian revelations have underlined the sheer power of electronic snooping in the internet era and have injected new urgency into the old debate about how far a government can legitimately go in spying on its own people on the grounds that it is trying to protect them.

The leaks have led the NSA to ask the US justice department to conduct a criminal investigation. The department has said it is in the initial stages of an inquiry. Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA employee, outed himself as the Guardian's source for its series of leaks on the NSA and cyber-surveillance. He is now in Hong Kong. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he told the Guardian.

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NSA spying scandal: what we have learned | US news | The ...

NSA director-turned-cable-news-pundit James Clapper is still insisting he wasnt lying when he told a congressional panel the NSA wasnt spying on American citizens three months before Edward Snowden told everyone it was.

I didnt lie, I made a big mistake. I just simply didnt understand what I was being asked about, Clapper told CNNs New Day, marking the third time hes changed his story regarding his notorious pre-Snowden testimony. He further explained hed been thinking of another dubiously constitutional surveillance program section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rather than section 215 of the Patriot Act, perhaps hoping the audience had forgotten the context of his response six years earlier.

Asked in early 2013 whether the NSA had gathered any type of data at all on millions of Americans, Clapper responded not wittingly. Just a few months later, Snowden released his first explosive trove of documents exposing the NSAs massive covert data collection program. Oops!

It was hard to spin what appeared to be naked perjury, but the bejowled national security director has certainly tried his best since then. Back in 2014, Clapper was claiming Sen. Ron Wyden had put him on the spot by asking him about a classified program in an unsecure setting, implying he had to keep quiet about the program, because terrorism (even though Stellar Wind and its replacement have never led to the apprehension of a single terrorist).

Clapper had initially claimed he gave the least untruthful answer to a complicated question, splitting hairs over the definition of collection and complaining about the When did you stop beating your wife-type question. But Wyden quickly dispelled that excuse, pointing out that the NSA director had received the senators questions a day in advance, to provide time to prepare his answers, and had even been given a chance to qualify his response.

Wydens response, incidentally, also disqualifies Clappers most recent excuse for lying. But you almost have to feel sorry for a guy whos been reduced from running the nations most powerful spy agency to making guest appearances on CNN. Whats his next response going to be, blaming his evil twin? Oh, right. He already tried that, too.

Clapper, faced with an absence of evidence to back up the conspiracy theory that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, once told NBC that Russians are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever. Perhaps that statement was a cry for help.

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Clapper claims he didnt lie about NSA spying on ...