The Der Spiegel report includes a number of new details about the NSA’s hacking abilities. Hackers inside the secretive unit have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. With help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. In one secret operation called White Tamale, the NSA hacked into the communications of Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Security.
These revelations were published just two days after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. phone records. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote, quote, “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything. Technology allowed al Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely. The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the government’s counter-punch,” he wrote. The issue will likely head to the Supreme Court. Earlier this month, another federal judge questioned the program’s constitutionality and described it as “almost Orwellian.”
Jameel Jaffer talking:
it’s a ruling that is limited to the bulk surveillance of metadata, telephony metadata. So, as you know, there’s a program that the NSA has in place now—has had in place now for seven years, at least—that collects information about every single phone call made or received on a U.S. telephone network. So that means every time you pick up the phone, the NSA is making a note, in some sense, of who you called, how long you spoke to them, when you called them, every single time you pick up the phone. And the NSA is doing that with respect to every single phone call made in the United States.
So we challenged the constitutionality of that program, and the judge, Judge Pauley here in the Southern District of New York, upheld the program, saying first that Congress had intended to prevent people like us—that is, the targets of this kind of surveillance—from challenging this kind of program in court, and also that the Constitution doesn’t foreclose the government from collecting this kind of information about everybody. Obviously, we disagree strongly with the decision. We think that it’s wrong in multiple respects, and we intend to appeal it.
I work for the ACLU myself, but the client in this case is the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union. And these organizations are the clients because we are Verizon subscribers. And the order that was disclosed by Glenn and by The Guardian is an order that requires Verizon to turn over all of its information, all of this kind of information, to the NSA on a daily—on a daily basis. So, we have evidence now that our own communications were monitored in this way. We know that everybody’s communications are monitored in this way. And we were able to go into court to challenge the program because we have this evidence.
Glenn Greenwald talking:
I think the history of the post-9/11 era has been one of failed institutions, particularly those designed to check abuses by the executive branch and the intelligence community, beginning obviously with the U.S. media, the U.S. Congress, and I think the worst culprit has been the federal judiciary, which really is the most inexcusable because it’s supposed to be immunized from political pressures by life tenure, which Article III of the Constitution vests to federal judges specifically to say to them, “Your duty is to protect people’s rights, no matter how politically unpopular doing so might be.” And yet they’ve really led the way, with very few exceptions, in endorsing even the most extreme and radical forms of unconstitutional conduct.
And I think Judge Pauley’s decision is just a continuation of that, very typical. It begins by exploiting 9/11 to justify anything the government wants to do. And the reason why Judge Leon’s decision got so much attention was because it was such an amazing aberration. It was one of the very few ringing endorsements that the Constitution actually still matters in the war on terror. And we’ll have to see how these conflicts play out in the appellate courts.
Jameel Jaffer talking:
the fact is that this information rests in an NSA database. It is already being used pretty extensively. Three hundred times in a single year, the NSA has conducted what it calls queries into this data. Every time it conducts one of those queries, it looks at not just the information relating to the person who is suspected of being a terrorist, but the information of everybody who’s been in contact with that person, everybody who’s been in contact with those people, and everybody who’s been in contact with those people. So it’s millions of people every single time the NSA conducts a query.
And that assumes that the NSA is using the data only in the way that it says it’s using the data, and that it will use the data only in the way that it says it will use the data. And we know from past experience, we know from history, that that is not going to be the case. We know that this information will be abused, if not by this administration, by the next administration. At some point, a president will see it as politically valuable to have the information that’s in this database and to use it in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used.
Glenn Greenwald talking:
when I began writing about politics in 2005, 2006, I focused on the NSA scandal at that time, which was that the Bush administration was spying on the telephone calls of Americans without the warrants required by law. And by far the biggest support that I got for the work I was doing was from Democrats and progressives and liberals, all of whom almost unanimously were highly supportive of that work because, as we just saw in that clip, Democrats, back then, understood the serious dangers posed by mass surveillance and by even the collection of metadata. And fast-forward now seven years later, when there’s a Democrat in office, and by far the biggest critics of the reporting that we’re doing, the most vehement defenders of the NSA, are people like Dianne Feinstein, but also just liberal and Democratic Party pundits and reporters and journalists all over the Internet who have suddenly decided that they are going to take it upon themselves to be great supporters of the NSA. Polling data reflects massive changes in how Democrats and progressives think about these issues, simply because there’s a new president in office who belongs to their party. And the Joe Biden clip really underscores just how unprincipled and hackish that faction of the Democratic Party has become, radically changing what they think based not on their own beliefs, but who it benefits in terms of power.
What’s clearly underway, is the same thing that we saw in the 1970s, when the scandal over and concern over abusive eavesdropping powers was at least as great as what we have now, if not greater. And the idea was they needed a way to placate the public and to say, “Don’t worry, we’re putting these great safeguards on these powers, so you don’t have to worry anymore about abuse.” And what they really did instead was just created these symbolic gestures that really didn’t change much of anything, that just made the program prettier and then therefore more palatable. They said, “We’re going to create a court to oversee this,” and yet the court was created to be a very pro-government court and met in secret. Only the government could show up. And they’ve rubber-stamped everything. They said, “We’re going to create oversight committees in Congress,” and yet they installed the most slavish loyalists to the NSA, like Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers, as the committee chair to make sure those committees do nothing but bolster and defend the intelligence community rather than ever checking them or exercising oversight.
That’s what the president is now trying to do with this panel of hand-picked loyalists, to pretend that these reform—that there’s reform going on, and yet most of those proposals, though they sound nice, are actually going to achieve very little, if not make it worse, other than to try and convince the public that they need not worry. That’s the explicit goal of this reform process, to make the public more comfortable with these programs, not to meaningfully reform them.
– source democracynow.org
Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy.
Glenn Greenwald, is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.