[governance] FW: [IP] U.S. Says It Gathers Online Data Abroad - NYTimes.com

Fri Jun 7 06:26:06 EDT 2013

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Subject: [IP] U.S. Says It Gathers Online Data Abroad - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?ref=global-home&
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U.S. Says It Gathers Online Data Abroad

WASHINGTON - The federal government has been secretly collecting information
on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation's largest
Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in
search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence
confirmed Thursday night.

The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government
officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of
telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding
revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that
began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama
administration.

Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized
under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against
terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian
conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation
yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming
and ever-widening surveillance state.

The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers
including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file
transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified documents
obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday
afternoon.

In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism,
is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by
Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of
information "incidentally acquired" about Americans and permanent residents.
Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government
open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful
requests for information.

"It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S.
person, or anyone located within the United States," James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law
underlying the program. "Information collected under this program is among
the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is
used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."

The Prism program grew out of the National Security Agency's desire several
years ago to begin addressing the agency's need to keep up with the
explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with the
matter.

The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with
access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the
midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian,
while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously
reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted
intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government
overreach.

Before the disclosure of the Internet company surveillance program on
Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone
program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One
that the kind of surveillance at issue "has been a critical tool in
protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism
personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in
contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities,
particularly people located inside the United States." He added: "The
president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil
liberties."

The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page
presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved -
which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube - and the
dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information
collected under the program.

The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi
Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to
address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying.
Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America's own vast
surveillance operations.

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen
from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain
Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San
Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone
records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed
off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced
the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no
matter how many parts of the government approved of it.

"A pox on all the three houses of government," Mr. Romero said. "On
Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a
paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being
true to its values."

Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective.

Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the
secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon
Communications to give the N.S.A. "on an ongoing daily basis" until July
logs of communications "between the United States and abroad" or "wholly
within the United States, including local telephone calls."

On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of
Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee,
said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a
broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported.

"As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the
case for the past seven years," Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was
carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "under the
business records section of the Patriot Act."

"Therefore, it is lawful," she said. "It has been briefed to Congress."

While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court
order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of
calling information to the N.S.A. Randy Milch, an executive vice president
and general counsel, wrote that "the law authorizes the federal courts to
order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if
Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply."

Sprint and AT&T have also received demands for data from national security
officials, according to people familiar with the requests. Those companies
as well as T-Mobile and CenturyLink declined to say Thursday whether they
were or had been under a similar court order.

Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program
defended it in part by noting that it was only for "metadata" - like logs of
calls sent and received - and did not involve listening in on people's
conversations.

The Internet company program appeared to involve eavesdropping on the
contents of communications of foreigners. The senior administration official
said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that
allows the government to obtain an order from a national security court to
conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without individualized
warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil.

The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is controversial in part
because Americans' e-mails and phone calls can be swept into the database
without an individualized court order when they communicate with people
overseas. While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as
indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies' servers,
several of the companies - including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple -
denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have
negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in
response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements.

"Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data," the company
said in a statement. "We disclose user data to government in accordance with
the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people
allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but
Google does not have a 'backdoor' for the government to access private user
data."

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen
from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain
Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San
Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

While murky questions remained about the Internet company program, the
confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled
national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a
handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising
cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress
enacted after the 9/11 attacks.

Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for
business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national
security investigation.

Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically
come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators
briefed on the program - including Ron Wyden of Oregon - have sought to
tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before
someone's records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was
being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it
was classified.

On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have
been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would "force
a real debate" about whether such "sweeping, dragnet surveillance" should be
permitted - or is even effective.

But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators
Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten
standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot
Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of
broad, bipartisan support for the program.

"If we don't do it," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South
Carolina, "we're crazy."

And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the
program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United
States in the last few years. He gave no details.

It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration's program
of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications
metadata and mining the database to identify associates - called a
"community of interest" - of a suspected terrorist.

In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of
that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule of
law. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general,
announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved "innovative" and "complex"
orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority.

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen
from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain
Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San
Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

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