Category Archives: NSA

Story highlights Paul's speech wasn't technically a filibuster because of intricate Senate rules Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden joined Paul in support

Paul, R-Kentucky, ran through several binders of material over the course of his marathon protest, and also got some help from 10 fellow senators -- three Republicans and seven Democrats.

Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, were the biggest boons to Paul's efforts, joining Paul on the Senate floor several times to give the Kentucky Republican a chance to catch his breath -- and often grab a sip of water and pop a candy in his mouth. And one of Paul's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, also ended up helping Paul's efforts late in the night.

"There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged," Paul said at the opening of his remarks, and those who joined him on the Senate floor shared his concerns and stressed the need to reform the Patriot Act.

The Senate is considering whether to reauthorize or reform a crucial section of that law that gives the government sweeping powers to collect phone metadata on millions of Americans in an effort to thwart terrorist plots. The House last week overwhelmingly approved a bill to reform that law.

The NSA's bulk collection program expires at midnight on June 1, and the Department of Justice warned in a memo shared by a GOP aide on Wednesday that the agency will have to begin preparing a week before the expiration date for a potential lapse in the law.

Paul's talk-a-thon Wednesday came more than two years after his nearly 13-hour filibuster in 2013, which was widely anticipated and brought him national attention for delaying the confirmation of CIA chief John Brennan to draw attention to U.S. drone policies.

But his speech Wednesday wasn't technically a filibuster because intricate Senate rules required him to stop talking by early Thursday afternoon for an unrelated vote.

Still, Paul's office insists it was a filibuster, saying Paul prevented lawmakers from taking action to reauthorize the Patriot Act while he had the floor.

READ: Boehner, McConnell split over NSA bill

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Rand Paul wraps 'filibuster' over Patriot Act and NSA ...

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Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces say they have recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists. Iraqi security forces control pockets of territory in Anbar, a vast desert province that stretches from the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the western approaches to Baghdad.

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A member of the Afghan security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.

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Iraqi counterterrorism forces patrol in Ramadi, Iraq, on April 18. Iraqi special forces maintained control of the provincial capital after days of intense clashes with ISIS left the city at risk.

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Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad, as they flee Ramadi, Iraq, on Friday, April 17. The city of Ramadi has been embroiled in clashes with ISIS militants.

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People leave their hometown of Ramadi on April 15. ISIS' offensive in Ramadi shows its resilience despite months of U.S.-led airstrikes and its recent defeat in the northern city of Tikrit.

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NSA: ISIS views 'increasingly resonating' with Americans ...

The government has argued it has the power to carry forward with the program under a section of the Patriot Act, which expires in June. Lawmakers are locked in a debate on whether or how to renew the authority, which was first passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, but has been renewed by both Presidents Bush and Obama in the intervening years.

Documents confirming the program's existence were first revealed in June of 2013 with the leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The decision by a three-judge panel that the phone record collection program, which was mostly secret for nearly a decade, is not supported by the current version of the law, will certainly enter into the brewing political debate over renewing it.

RELATED: Why the NSA decision matters

Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing for a three judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, said the program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized."

Lynch wrote that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program."

The Court did not address the larger question of whether the program is constitutional and sent the case back down to a lower court for further proceedings. It noted that the section of the Patriot Act that the government said authorized the law - Section 215 - is set to expire in early June.

"In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape," Lynch wrote.

He was clearly concerned with the scope of the program. He wrote the "sheer volume of information sought is staggering."

Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is also running for president, defended the NSA program on the Senate floor shortly after the court decision was made public.

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Court rules NSA program illegal - CNNPolitics.com

Police Investigating Incident at NSA
Police investigating incident at NSA Police investigating incident at NSA Police investigating incident at NSA Police investigating incident at NSA Police investigating incident at NSA https://you...

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Police Investigating Incident at NSA - Video

Edward Snowden: The NSA Is Looking at Your Nude Pics
Edward Snowden: The NSA Is Looking at Your Nude Pics Snowden warned that while some NSA programs were helpful to the country #39;s intelligence officials, spying had started coming against ...

By: Economic News TV

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Edward Snowden: The NSA Is Looking at Your Nude Pics - Video

NSA has been spying on Americans for decades
FAIR USE NOTICE: This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a #39;fair use #39; of any such copyrighted material as...

By: Liberated Galaxy

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NSA has been spying on Americans for decades - Video

Last December, I had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands to meet with multiple European tech companies, web hosts, and other infrastructure providers. The topic of intelligence agency backdoors and US corporate involvement with such policies came up more than once, often in not-entirely-friendly ways. Its therefore refreshing to see the head of the NSA, Admiral Michael S. Rogers, state up front that the NSA isnt interested in a backdoor solution to digital surveillance. Instead, he wants a so-called front-door solution which could be even worse.

Instead of handing the NSA a unilateral window into encrypted communications taking place at Google or Apple, Rogers suggested a future in which the encryption keys to access such information would be divided between at least two groups possibly more. In the simplest example, Google would retain half the key, while the NSA held the other half. Thus, the agency wouldnt be able to unilaterally snoop inside anyones files it would need Googles support.

I dont want a back door, Rogers, the director of the nations top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, according to the Washington Post. I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.

The first problem with Rogers proposed front-door solution is that its a meaningless feel-good measure given the current regulatory structure of our national security system. Before the Snowden leaks, Google, Microsoft, and other digital providers were forbidden from disclosing that theyd received national security letters, even in aggregate. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that Yahoo went to bat for users, challenging the legality and authority of the NSA and lost, every time.

Giving half a key to Google or Yahoo would be meaningless unless the company possesses the authority to refuse to use it. In theory, the court system offers robust oversight of how such capabilities are used. In practice, the FISA court has operated more like a rubber stamp body than an organization devoted to judicial oversight. The government, as a whole, doesnt currently have a great track record of respecting suspects rights the FBI is on record as ordering local police departments to drop cases rather than disclose how secret stingray hardware may have been used in ways that fundamentally violate those suspects Fourth Amendment rights.

The other systemic problem with Rogers suggestion is that it assumes a degree of trust between corporations and government at a time when such good feelings are at an all-time low. The NSA has demonstrated no practical ability to differentiate between friend and foe. Its decision to hoover up data running across Googles transatlantic cables may have been legal, but it illustrated a total lack of respect for Google and a willingness to resort to extrajudicial methods when it was convenient.

The NSA could avoid this problem by sharing the key with government-appointed escrows rather than corporations, but this simply hides the process from public view. Thats already extremely problematic.

The technological problems with the NSAs front-door policy are formidable. The divide the key among trusted parties, approach isnt new the NSA proposed exactly this method of securing its ill-fated Clipper Chip in the early 1990s. At the time, the newly-formed EFF and other consumer advocacy agencies battled the NSAs proposed system, noting that it exposed citizens to increased surveillance while providing no assurance that the cryptographic standard, dubbed Skipjack, was actually secure.

Many of these questions would remain in any escrow system the government dreamed up today. The basic question is, is it possible to design a completely secure system to hold a master key available to the U.S. government but not adversaries, said Donna Dodson, chief cybersecurity adviser at the Commerce Departments National Institute of Standards and Technologies. Theres no way to do this where you dont have unintentional vulnerabilities.

Hackers, generally speaking, dont go after the code itself or attempt to brute-force it instead, they work to compromise the organizations that hold the keys, or find other avenues of attack. Splitting the key into parts is only an advantage if the parts cant be combined or analyzed for clues to the final key structure. In order to function properly, every escrow needs to be secure, and every one-time access key needs to be destroyed.

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The NSA wants front door access to your encrypted data

WASHINGTON The National Security Agencys authority to collect the phone records of millions of people is scheduled to end on June 1, and a bipartisan privacy coalition of 39 organizations wants to make sure it stays that way.

The new coalition, Fight215.org, is asking Congress to end Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which requires phone carriers to hand over the call records of American citizens to the NSA.

While NSA surveillance has been in the news for nearly two years following the first disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowdens document leak, a number of Congressional attempts to reform the agency have failed.

For example, Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, who promised during his announcement to run for the GOP presidential nomination to end the bulk collection program, voted no against the USA FREEDOM Act in Nov. 2014 because it would have extended the Section 215 program for another two years.

The coalition includes a range of organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Free Press Action Fund, DownsizeDC, TechFreedom, Fight for the Future, R Street Institute, and Human Rights Watch and the Sunlight Foundation.

Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, said in a statement calling upon Congress to act, of course the NSA plays a valuable role in protecting Americans, but it must and can do that consistent with the Fourth Amendment, which bars indiscriminate surveillance of innocent Americans with no connection to national security threats.

Click here for more from Watchdog.org.

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Groups push to end NSA spying before June

T-Vice NSA Live Rehearsal!
This video is about T-Vice NSA Live Rehearsal!

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T-Vice NSA Live Rehearsal! - Video

Jeb Bush LOVES the NSA and proves it
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/03/30/jeb-im-nervous-about-nsa-criticism-obama-should-defend-nsa/

By: MattyD 4Truth

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Jeb Bush LOVES the NSA and proves it - Video