Obama made the culture more transparent to the NSA. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...6ef658-0fe5-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011 By Ellen Nakashima, Published: September 7 The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agencyâs use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americansâ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years â and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Declassified 2011 FISA court ruling struck down an NSA program that unlawfully gathered thousands of electronic communications between Americans. Move allowed agency to search for Americansâ communications. What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban â at the governmentâs request â on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used. Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSAâs authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administrationâs assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term âtargetâ that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the governmentâs approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americansâ privacy later. âThe government says, âWeâre not targeting U.S. persons,â â said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. âBut then they never say, âWe turn around and deliberately search for Americansâ records in what we took from the wire.â That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.â The court decision allowed the NSA âto query the vast majorityâ of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Batesâs opinion. The queries must be âreasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.â And the results are subject to the NSAâs privacy rules. The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the governmentâs request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction âto remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,â he said. But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, âwe did ask the courtâ to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. âWe wanted to be able to do it,â he said, referring to the searching of Americansâ communications without a warrant. Joel gave hypothetical examples of why the authority was needed, such as when the NSA learns of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects that a U.S. person may be a conspirator. Searching for communications to, from or about that person can help assess that personâs involvement and whether he is in touch with terrorists who are surveillance targets, he said. Officials would not say how many searches have been conducted.
Convicted Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) is scheduled to receive $8,700 per month in government disability pay, as well as a partial federal pension of $45,000. That generous $8,700 in disability comes thanks to Jacksonâs sudden development of a âmood disorderâ as the federal government began looking to indict him. Jackson, who was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, had no history of mental illness during his prior 17 years in Congress. Rev. Jesse Jackson has defended his sonâs claims of mental illness, stating to the court, âThis time a year ago I thought we may have lost him.â 1)Who said crime doesn't pay, it sure does if you're a congressman. 2)"Mood disorders" are fatal? Who knew?
There's nothing new about this behavior. The Los Angeles Times wrote about it almost two years ago. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/31/opinion/la-ed-secrets-20111031 One of the most disappointing attributes of the Obama administration has been its proclivity for secrecy. The president who committed himself to "an unprecedented level of openness in government" has followed the example of his predecessor by invoking the "state secrets" privilege to derail litigation about government misdeeds in the war on terror. He has refused to release the administration's secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which two senators have described as alarming. He has blocked the dissemination of photographs documenting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. service members. And now his Justice Department has proposed to allow government agencies to lie about the existence of documents being sought under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.