The Guardian has another blockbuster scoop:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
WaPo also
ran a report on Prism from documentary film maker and target of government harassment,
Laura Poitras. (Poitras also directed a
brilliant op-doc featuring my client NSA whistleblower Bill Binney).
NSA whistleblowers like my clients Binney, Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe have warned for years that the NSA is collecting not just Americans' metadata (confirmed by the secret court Order The Guardian published earlier this week), but the content of Americans' communications as well.
More credence should be paid to their warnings about content, but also their expertise in explaining that the government can learn an incredible amount about individuals from metadata alone, including who people associate with, who they talk to, and the depth of relationships. Binney and Wiebe proposed to glean all of the necessary foreign intelligence to protect the country while protecting privacy prior to 9/11. The NSA rejected the privacy protections, and has since been spying on Americans with impunity.
The Obama administration has offered weak explanations for the spying, which it would not have even told Americans about but for getting caught red handed with records of millions of innocent Americans phone calls. As the New York Times Editorial Board put it:
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.
If the press and the public pay due credence, finally, to what my client NSA whistleblowers have to say, they won't buy Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's rationalizations.
First, there's Clapper's thundering outrage over the disclosure:
The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially
long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.
We've heard that before, when the government tried to convict NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake of Espionage based on his retaining what turned out to benign
unclassified information.
Then, despite that he just threatened that discussing the program somehow hurts national security, Clapper goes on to discuss the program, making the excuse that
The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism -related communications.
This is the EXACT problem that
Binney and his team solved back in 2000,
prior to 9/11 and
prior to the additional surveillance powers afforded under the PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendments Act and the government's secret overboard interpretations of those authorities. There was never a need to invade Americans' privacy to protect the country. No national security threat forced NSA to begin operating domestically, operations completely at odds with the agency's purpose. The government
chose to collect data on Americans, instead of choosing to protect their privacy.
If the past week's disclosures have shown anything, it is that when the Executive branch is given secret power to violate citizens' individual rights and liberties and gets caught abusing that secret power, the abuse revealed is only the tip of the iceberg.