We Have the Technological Ability to Keep Americans Safe WITHOUT Spying On Everyone

Tech Fixes to Illegal Spying

NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden says that NSA agents as well as private contractors who work for the American security services can decide on their own to access  any American’s digital communications.  Snowden said in a video interview that he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”

In a question and answer session today through the Guardian newspaper, Snowden said:

Question:


Anthony De Rosa
17 June 2013 2:18pm
1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

Answer:

1) More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ [the British equivalent of the NSA], the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Updated at 11.41am ET

11.40am ET


Anthony De Rosa
17 June 2013 2:18pm
1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

2) NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of “warranted” intercept, it’s important to understand the intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you would consider a “real” warrant like a Police department would have to, the “warrant” is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

Glenn Greenwald follow up: When you say “someone at NSA still has the content of your communications” – what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content?

Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time – and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

Read more at:-
 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/we-have-the-technological-ability-to-keep-americans-safe-without-spying-on-everyone.html