‘ACTIVELY MISLED’
New Spy Revelations Expand Evidence Of Officials Lying To Public
By Elizabeth Coady
THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY REVELATIONS JUST KEEP GETTING MORE AND MORE ALARMING.
With information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald today revealed yet another top-secret government program enabling government contractors to access virtually every phone call, email, chat or social media exchange that Americans have on the Internet.
From The Guardian:
The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.
“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.
US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”
Rogers’ denials, along with those of many other elected officials underscore just how much the NSA has either lied to its supposed overseers, or how those overseers are lying to the American public.
“We don’t monitor emails,” Chambliss said on ABC This Week last Sunday. “That’s what kind of assures me is that what the reporting is is not correct. Because no emails are monitored now. They used to be, but that stopped two or three years ago. So I feel confident that there may have been some abuse, but if it was it was pure accidental.”
You can read Greenwald’s new story in its entirety at The Guardian, but here are some of the story’s highlights:
- XKeyscore and other NSA systems can intercept individual’s “real-time” Internet activity.
- XKeyscore enables analysts to target US residents for surveillance without a warrant with their email or IP address alone.
- Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, language and type of browser used.
- The amount of information XKeyscore collects is so massive that most data only remains in the system between three to five days; metadata is stored for 30 days.
Lat this afternoon, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been obliquely warning Americans for years that government was exceeding its authority, told ABC’s Jake Tapper that intelligence officials have repeatedly misled members of Congress and the public.
“The fact of the matter is, Jake, on issue after issue, too many of the leaders in the intelligence community have not just kept the Congress in the dark. The Congress have been given inaccurate statements and in effect have been actively misled.”
During Greenwald’s appearance on ABC last Sunday, he described the equipment that analysts use to access our information.
“What these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future. …These systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents.”
The latest revelations come as the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed intelligence officials on surveillance systems during a hearing on the Capitol Wednesday. They also put the Obama Administration “10 steps behind the The Guardian in addressing leaks,” charges the National Journal.
