Next take the time to listen to one Congressperson standing up for you, and our Constitutional principles:
Full transcript over the jump ...
But here it is (with the obligatory text cleanup and enhanced paragraph breaks etc.).
It is well worth the time to listen to, especially if you care about this issue (and even more so, if you don't):
FOREIGN—NOT DOMESTIC—INTELLIGENCE
SURVEILLANCE ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under
the Speaker’s announced policy of January
3, 2013, the gentleman from Florida
(Mr. GRAYSON) is recognized for 60
minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Mr. GRAYSON. Mr. Chairman, I rise
today to discuss shocking revelations
reported in the media starting last
Wednesday, that is 9 days ago, and continuing
for several days afterward, regarding
the scope of the NSA’s spying
program, including both foreigners and
Americans.
The NSA is the National Security
Agency. Its duty is, as part of DOD, to
protect us against foreign attacks, just
as DOD itself is supposed to protect us
against foreign attacks. And DOD, like
the CIA, is on the side of the firewall
dealing with foreign threats as opposed
to the FBI and the Justice Department
who deal with domestic threats.
As of a week ago last Wednesday, the
Guardian reported that a particular
court order had ordered Verizon, the
largest cellular telephone company in
America, to turn over its call records
for all of its calls—all of its calls.
I have the document from the Guardian’s
Web site here in front of me. It is
a document that is issued as a secondary
order by what’s known as the
FISA Court. That court is the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court established
under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
Let’s start with the name of the
court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court. As the name of the act implies,
the jurisdiction of the court is
limited to foreign surveillance and foreign
threats. This is by statute.
The order itself was printed and posted
at the Web site. Millions of people
have seen it since then. What it purports
to be—I say purports to be, but,
in fact, the agency involved in the NSA
has not denied that this is a valid, real
document—it says that the court, having
found application of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation for an order requiring
the production of tangible
things from Verizon—specifically
Verizon Business Network Services, et
cetera, et cetera—orders that the custodian
of records produce—not to the
FBI—but to the National Security
Agency, a component of the Defense
Department, upon service of this order,
and continued production on an ongoing,
daily basis thereafter for the duration
of this order, unless otherwise ordered
by the court, an electronic copy
of the following tangible things:
-- 1350 --
Right here. Take a look at it.
These tangible things are identified
in the order as follows:
All call detail records or telephony
metadata created by Verizon for communications
1) between the United
States and abroad—it sounds like it
might be international—and then 2)
wholly within the United States, including
local telephone calls.
On its face, this is an order for
Verizon—our largest cellular telephone
company—to turn over call records for
every single call in its possession. Mr.
Chairman, that includes calls by you,
it also includes calls by me. In fact, it
includes calls by me when I call my
mother or my wife or my daughter. For
those who are listening on C–SPAN or
otherwise, it includes every call by
you.
Now, the first question that comes to
mind is: Is this just for Verizon? Well,
we don’t know for sure, at this point,
but the NSA has not denied that there
are orders similar in extent for MCI,
for AT&T, for Sprint, for every telephone
company that carries any significant
amount of data or calls in this
country.
Another question is: How far back
does this order go? The order itself is
dated on its face April 25, 2013. One of
the more interesting things about this
order, posted on the Guardian’s Web
site, is that it has no starting date.
Under this order—under the plain
terms of this order—Verizon has to go
and give the Federal Government—specifically
the Department of Defense,
the NSA—all of its call records of all of
its calls going back to the beginning of
time. And this obligation continues
until July 19, 2013, presumably because
the order will be renewed at that point
upon request of the NSA and the FBI.
Let’s be clear about this. This appears
to be an order providing that our
telephone companies providing service
to us turn over call records for every
single telephone call, regardless of
whether it’s international or not.
Now, if somebody had come to me 9
days ago and said to me, Congressman
GRAYSON, do you think that the Defense
Department is taking records of
every telephone call that you make or
I make or anyone else makes, I would
say, no, I have no reason to believe
that. It would shock me if it was true.
Well, it is true and it does shock me.
Why should we have our personal telephone
records, the records of whom we
call, when we speak to them, how long
we are talking, why should we have
that turned over to the Defense Department?
What possible rationale
could there be for that?
Well, I’ll tell you what I think the rationale
might be: because somehow
that makes us safer. Well, let me say
to the NSA and to the Defense Department,
you can rest assured there is no
threat to America when I talk to my
mother.
Now, what exactly is wrong with
this? What’s wrong with this, first of
all, is that there is a firewall between
the Defense Department and the CIA
on the one hand, and the FBI and the
Department of Justice on the other.
One protects us from international
threats, the other one protects us from
domestic threats. That’s been the law
in America since the 1870s when Congress
enacted and the President signed
the Posse Comitatus Act. And this
order crushes that distinction. It eliminates
it, it obliterates it, it kills it now
and forever.
Now, the second thing that is offensive
about this court order is that it
clearly violates the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment reads as
follows:
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.
Now, first of all, when the government
seizes your phone records, unless
you happen to be Osama Bin Laden or
someone close to him, there is no reason
why the government would believe
or have reason to believe probable
cause that you’ve committed a crime
or you’re going to commit a crime or
you have any evidence about someone
committing a crime. There’s no probable
cause here.
Secondly, the Fourth Amendment requires
particularity. There’s no particularity
when the government insists
by court order and under threat of further
action that Verizon or AT&T or
Sprint or anyone else be required to
turn over their phone records to the
government. There’s no particularity.
This really is the essence of the matter.
Because if you ask the NSA for justification,
they’ll say: Well, it’s legal.
What do you mean it’s legal?
Well, according to their published
statements, including a statement by
their Director last Saturday, they
maintain that it’s legal because of a
single Supreme Court case decided in
1979 that said that the government,
specifically local police authorities,
could acquire the phone records of one
person once. That’s the case of Smith
v. Maryland in 1979.
Because the Supreme Court says
that, at that point, the government
could acquire the phone records of one
person once, the NSA is maintaining
that its entire program is legal and
that it can acquire the phone records of
everyone, everywhere, forever. That is
a farce.
Now, the other document that came
to light last Thursday—in other words,
8 days ago as I speak—was a document,
again posted at the Guardian’s and
then later at the Washington Post’s
Web site. This is a document that is a
PowerPoint presentation, which according
to the reports was a
PowerPoint presentation to analysts
working for the NSA. This PowerPoint
presentation is labeled ‘‘PRISM/US–
984XN Overview,’’ or ‘‘the SIGAD Used
Most in NSA Reporting.’’
What you see to my right is the reproduction
of what was posted at the
Web site a week ago. First of all, note
that there are certain logos at the top
of the page:
Gmail, which for those of you who
are not familiar, is the largest provider
of email services and hosting. It’s run
by Google.
Facebook. Many of us are familiar
with that. I think my children are all
too familiar with it and spend an awful
lot of time on it. Facebook allows,
among other things, private messaging
between friends.
Hotmail, which is Microsoft’s email
server and service.
Yahoo, which performs a variety of
functions, including, among other
things, hosting a large number of Web
pages. And by the way, when you go to
their Web page they can tell who you
are from your IP address. And also a
very widely used email service.
Google. I think Google needs no introduction,
but I’ve already introduced
it. Google allows you to do web
searches. It, together with Microsoft,
has almost 90 percent of the Web
search market in the United States.
They keep a record of the searches that
you make based upon your IP address.
Skype, which is a telephone company
that transmits calls electronically over
the Internet.
PalTalk. I’m puzzled. I don’t know
what that one is.
YouTube, which is the largest host of
videos in the world, and again, can tell
which videos you’re looking at by your
IP address.
And AOL Mail, which, as it sounds, is
the America Online email service.
This document is dated at the bottom
April of 2013, meaning last
month—or maybe 2 months ago.
Let’s take a look inside. One of the
pages that’s been produced on the
Guardian and Washington Post Web
site is this:
By way of background, it’s been reported
that this is part of a longer document.
It’s 41-pages long. Only 5 pages
have been released to the public
through the Guardian and through the
Washington Post.
-- 1400 --
So I’m sharing with you the five
pages that were released a week ago
and are now public. Let’s take a look
at this one. This one says that the
NSA’s PRISM program performs the
following functions—and bear in mind,
this is purported to be a training document
given to NSA analysts to explain
what they can do in this program.
Who are the current providers to the
program?
Microsoft’s Hotmail, et cetera,
Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Paltalk,
YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple.
What are they providing? Specifically,
as the document says, What will
you—meaning the analyst—receive in
collection, collection from surveillance
and stored communications?
The document says it varies by provider.
We don’t know how it varies,
but, in general, what you get is the following:
email. The NSA gets email
from these providers. It gets Video and
Voice Chat, videos, photos, stored data,
VoIP, which is an electronic version of
your actual words when you are speaking
on the phone. VoIP stands for
‘‘Voice over Internet Protocol.’’ It’s
your voice. It gets file transfers, video
conferencing, notification of target activity,
including log-ons—in other
words, are you on your computer or
not?—et cetera, online social network
details, and what is beliedly referred to
as ‘‘special requests,’’ as if all of that
weren’t enough already.
You might wonder: How does the government
actually get this information?
The five pages that are released give us
one answer to that question. Let’s take
a look at that.
If you look at the bottom, the green
rectangle, you’ll see that it says that
PRISM collection is directly from the
servers of these U.S. service providers:
Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook,
Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and
Apple.
Since it’s addressed to the trainees at
the NSA, to the people who will actually
be doing the analysis of this data—
and with the injunction on the left
which says you should do both—the
plain meaning of this is that the NSA
apparently has the capability to collect
directly from the servers of these service
providers the information on the
previous page—in other words, our
emails, our chats, our videos, our
photos, our stored data, our Voice over
Internet Protocol, our file transfers,
our video conferencing, our log-ins, et
cetera, et cetera.
Now, there is an interesting distinction
between these two documents:
In the first case, with regard to the
court order, the NSA’s position is that
it’s a valid court order, and we regard
it as legal. If you don’t like it, that’s
too bad with you. Go change the law—
to which I say, fine, I’m going to try to
change that law.
With regard to the second document,
the situation is a little more ambiguous.
What the NSA has said publicly
is that the green rectangle is actually
not correct. Now, bear in mind, no one
has said that this is not an NSA document.
No one has said that it’s
Photoshopped. No one has said that it
is anything other than what it purports
to be and what it was reported as.
However, the NSA has taken the position
that their own document is
wrong for reasons that we don’t know
and that the NSA, in fact, does not
have the capability to directly takecollect
from the servers of these companies
your emails, your Voice over
Internet Protocol, your photos, and everything
else. They say that they just
don’t do that. However, we are still
waiting for an explanation of how this
green rectangle ended up in this document.
If it’s not true, they need to explain
how and why it’s not true.
The NSA also says that, for reasons
not evident from this document at all,
they don’t do this for U.S. citizens.
Now, that raises a host of questions.
You might think that there might be
something else in this document that
says that, but the NSA hasn’t maintained
that. In other words, they
haven’t said, If you look somewhere
else in this document, you’ll find that
we don’t do this for U.S. citizens.
Unless you think that this is somehow
selective on my part or on anybody
else’s part, it has been reported
that the whistleblower provided this
entire document—all, apparently, 41
pages—to The Guardian and to The
Washington Post, and they decided on
their own to release only these five.
So if there is something that indicates
that the NSA is only doing this
for Americans, apparently it’s not in
this document, and we’ve reached a
strange point where people are being
trained in the NSA to have the ability
to get the emails and the other information
on Americans, but somehow we
are told later, separately, that that’s
not correct. In addition to that, the
NSA says that there is some process by
which they can distinguish between the
emails of Americans and the emails of
foreigners.
Frankly, that is a technology so advanced
to me that it seems like it
might be magic. I used to be the president
of a telephone company. I have
literally no idea how I could distinguish
between the email accounts of an
American and a foreigner. I don’t know
how to do it. Maybe they can tell us
how they do it if they’re doing it at all.
That’s the real question: if they’re
doing it at all. I don’t know how they
could possibly say this email account
is for a foreigner, and this email account
is for an American. If they can’t,
that means they’re taking all this
stuff—American and foreign—and having
it, using it, looking at it, and destroying
our privacy rights.
That really is the heart of the matter
here.
I don’t understand why anyone would
think that it’s somehow okay for the
Department of Defense to get every
single one of our call records regardless
of who we are, regardless of whether we
are innocent or guilty of anything. I
venture to say that there are Americans
who have never even had a parking
ticket; yet the Defense Department
is pulling their call records as well.
Eventually, we will find out whether
the NSA’s own document is misleading
and whether the NSA is not pulling
email accounts and emails and photos
and VoIP calls on people who are
Americans, because, if you read this
document, it sure looks like they are.
This is not the first time that we
have had this problem. This is not the
first time that the government has entered
into surveillance on people without
probable cause. Many of us remember
that there was FBI surveillance of
Martin Luther King, including the
wiretapping and bugging of his personal
conversations. I thought, perhaps
naively, that we had moved beyond
that. In some sense, we have moved beyond
that because now they’re doing it
to everyone. In fact, one could well say
that we are reaching the point at
which Uncle Sam is Big Brother.
I submit to you that this program,
although the proponents picked it as
American as ‘‘apple spy,’’ is an anti-
American program. We are not North
Koreans. We don’t live in Nazi Germany.
We are Americans and we are
human beings, and we deserve to have
our privacy respected. I have no way to
call my mother except to employ the
services of Verizon or AT&T or some
other telephone company. I’m not
going to string two cups between my
house and her house 70 miles away.
That doesn’t mean that it’s okay with
me for the government—and specifically
the Department of Defense—to be
getting information about every telephone
call I make to her. It’s not okay
with me.
I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, it’s
probably not okay with you, and I
know that, for most of the people who
are listening to me today, it’s not okay
with you either.
-- 1410 --
Then Franklin said:
Those who would give up essential liberty
to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve
neither liberty nor safety.
I agree with that. We do not have to
give up our liberty to be safe.
I have already heard from people who
tell me that they’re afraid that they’re
going to be blown up by some terrorist
somewhere, that they’re afraid their
personal safety is at risk, and it’s okay
with them if the government spies on
them.
Well, it’s not okay with me. And I
stand here on behalf of the millions of
Americans who are wanting to say, It’s
not okay with me either. I’m fed up,
and I’m not going to take it any more.
When we had the Civil War and there
were 1 million armed men in this country
who rose up heavily armed to fight
against our central government, we did
not establish a spy network in every
city, every town, every village, every
home; but that’s what we’ve done right
now.
When I was growing up and we had
10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us
and some people believed there was a
Communist under every bed, even then
we did not establish a spy network as
intrusive as this one.
I submit to you that this has gone
way too far and that it’s up to us to
tell the Defense Department, the NSA,
the so-called ‘‘intelligence establishment,’’
we’ve had enough. We are
human beings. We are a free people.
And based upon this evidence, we’re
going to have to work to keep it that
way. That’s what I’ll be doing. I hope
you’ll join me.
With that, I yield back the balance of
my time.
WOW. Now that's how you