EDWARD SNOWDEN vs MIKE ROGERS: I Trust SNOWDEN! He Deserves Some Level Of Clemency!

#EdwardSnowdenMikeRogersNSA

The whole world now wants America to Pardon/ Forgive NSA Whistleblower EDWARD SNOWDEN for alerting American Citizens that Our Civil Liberties & PRIVACY were being severely Violated by our Elected Officials (Pres OBAMA & CONGRESS).

I too believe Mr SNOWDEN deserves some level of Clemency for his Courageous act.

Initially I judged Mr SNOWDEN as a TRAITOR.

However as I researched the FACTS of his case, I learned this Young Man is indeed more of a PATRIOT than a TRAITOR.

Why??

Here are four reasons:

**1) Mr SNOWDEN did NOT Hire himself as a NSA employee, the Federal Gov't did.

**2) Mr SNOWDEN did NOT conduct his Background Check, the Federal Gov't did.

**3) Mr SNOWDEN did NOT grant himself a Security Clearance, the Federal Gov't did.

**4) Mr SNOWDEN did NOT Violate our Civil Liberties & PRIVACY, the Federal Gov't did.

Thus how can EDWARD SNOWDEN be a Criminal??

Mr SNOWDEN knew he was being Hired to be a HACKER for the Federal Gov't but he thought he was just being Hired to HACK into the Personal Info of Real Suspected TERRORISTS.

Not SPY on Innocent American Citizens WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE!

Not SPY on Innocent American Citizens WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE for POLITICAL Reasons, or just to keep entire Communities of Human Beings in BONDAGE!

The Federal Gov't Hired Mr SNOWDEN.....offered him a Great Salary....and in exchange for keeping that Great Salary, they expected him to Betray the American People by HACKING into their Personal Lives WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE!

Please understand I am Not Opposed to the U.S. Federal Gov't using Broad Surveillance Powers Legally for authentic NATIONAL SECURITY purposes because I too want to be SAFE from TERRORISM.

I am Only Opposed to the U.S. Federal Gov't ABUSING its Broad Surveillance Powers to Violate the same U.S. Constitution its ELECTED Officials have vowed to uphold, for POLITICS & other Personal reasons!

So in essence the Federal Gov't is using the NSA NOT to track down Real Suspected TERRORISTS as Congressman MIKE ROGERS proclaims.

And why is the Federal Gov't COLLECTING DATA & INFO on Each American Citizen??

It's being stored at a huge Compound in UTAH but Why??

Federal Gov't Officials are using the NSA to SPY on ALL American Citizens WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE just because they Can, NOT because they need to!

i.e., "Big Brother" Is Here!

This is beyond WRONG & ILLEGAL!

Another example of Federal Gov't ABUSE is the IRS targeting Innocent American Citizens for their RELIGIOUS Beliefs & POLITICAL Affiliations.

Or......

Using the IRS to RETALIATE against Innocent American Citizens.

Both actions are also WRONG & ILLEGAL!!

So do I strongly believe EDWARD SNOWDEN is a necessary, Courageous Young Whistleblower who deserves some level of Clemency??

YES!!

FYI:

I WILL NEVER TRUST CONGRESSMAN MIKE ROGERS (R-MI) AGAIN.

Why??

One word.....DETROIT!








"Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower"


Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights.

The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal).

A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

Mr. Snowden is currently charged in a criminal complaint with two violations of the Espionage Act involving unauthorized communication of classified information, and a charge of theft of government property. Those three charges carry prison sentences of 10 years each, and when the case is presented to a grand jury for indictment, the government is virtually certain to add more charges, probably adding up to a life sentence that Mr. Snowden is understandably trying to avoid.

The president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower.

“If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.

In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:

■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.

■ The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.

■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.

■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)

■ The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.

■ A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.

The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr. Snowden would stop any additional leaks.

And it’s why President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.


Sources: AP, CBS News, CNN, NY Times, Russia Today, The Guardian, Youtube

NSA PHONE SPYING ON U.S. CITIZENS RULED AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL BY A FEDERAL JUDGE

NSA PHONE SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL & MAKES THE INTERNET LESS SAFE.

FEDERAL GOV'T CAN'T USE 1979 SCOTUS CASE TO SPY ON AMERICAN CITIZENS NOR TO CREATE "BIG BROTHER" TYPE SOCIETY.


"Updated: Federal Judge Finds NSA Spying Unconstitutional"

Government can't use 1979 law to justify its "Almost-Orwellian" Technology.

In a stunning decision, a DC-based federal judge has ruled that the National Security Agency spying revealed this summer violates the constitution.

The opinion (PDF) published today by US District Judge Richard Leon is in response to a lawsuit filed by Larry Klayman, a longtime conservative activist.

Klayman was fast on the draw, filing his lawsuit on June 6, one day after widespread NSA surveillance was revealed in June.

Leon's order grants an injunction that will shut down the NSA's Bulk Telephony Metadata Program, and it requires the government to destroy the metadata collected on the plaintiffs' accounts. The shutdown will only happen if an appeals court agrees with Leon, who has stayed the injunction pending appeal, "in light of the significant national security issues at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues."

A problematic precedent

Today's 71-page order works around a problematic precedent for privacy reformers, Smith v. Maryland. That's the 1979 Supreme Court decision that found there's "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in the actual phone numbers dialed from a telephone, because they are "business records." That's what allows "pen registers" to be installed by police without judicial review, since it's not a "search" in the eyes of courts.

"The question before me is not the same question that the Supreme Court confronted in Smith," wrote Leon. Using a pen register "is a far cry from the issue in this case." We've reached a turning point in the history of technology, in Leon's reading. The government's decades-old reasoning can't hold up in the present day.

He writes:

Indeed, the question in this case can more properly be styled as follows: when do present-day circumstances—the evolutions in the Government's surveillance capabilities, citizens' phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court 34 years ago that a precedent like Smith simply does not apply?

The answer, unfortunately for the government, is now.

The court of 1979 could not "have ever imagined how the citizens of 2013 would interact with their phones," writes Leon, leaving the Smith precedent with little value.

The pen register the court considered was operational for less than two weeks, in March 1976, and there was "no indication from the Court's opinion that it expected the Government to retain those limited phone records once the case was over." The "almost-Orwellian technology" used by the government to capture phone data "is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979."

The NSA is using two weeks of data collected from a single phone to justify "the creation and maintenance of a historical database containing five years' worth of data," writes Leon. "And I might add, there is the very real prospect that the program will go on for as long as America is combatting terrorism, which realistically could be forever!"

Fundamentally, Leon is making the case that the law must be reconsidered in the age of the smartphone. He cites data from CTIA counting more than 326 million mobile subscribers in 2012, including 22 million computers, tablets, and modems.

"Count the phones at the bus stop, in a restaurant, or around the table at a work meeting or any given occasion," writes Leon. "Thirty-four years ago, none of those phones would have been there. Thirty-four years ago, city streets were lined with pay phones. Thirty-four years ago, when people wanted to send 'text messages,' they wrote letters and attached postage stamps."
A new North Star

The Smith case and NSA surveillance are wildly different, so a different analysis must take place. "I cannot possibly navigate these uncharted Fourth Amendment waters using as my North Star a case that predates the rise of cell phones," writes Leon.

No judge outside the secret Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court has "has ever recognized a special need sufficient to justify continuous, daily searches of virtually every American citizen without any particularized suspicion," writes Leon. "In effect, the Government urges me to be the first non-FISC judge to sanction such a dragnet."

And Leon won't do it. The Verizon subscribers who filed the suit do have an expectation of privacy, and the government has intruded on it, he concludes.

In Leon's reading of the record, the government isn't merely trying to investigate possible terrorists. It's trying to do so as fast as it possibly can. "The affidavits in support of the Government's brief repeatedly emphasize this interest in speed," he notes. But the Government can't cite a single instance where the bulk metadata program "actually stopped an imminent attack."

He notes that the government could have shown more evidence to the judge privately, in chambers, but didn't. "Although the Government has publicly asserted that the NSA's surveillance programs have prevented 54 terrorist attacks, no proof of that has ever been put before me," Leon writes.

That leads him to have "serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program." While there's a "limited record" at this point in the litigation, the plaintiffs have a "substantial likelihood" of showing their privacy interests outweigh the government's interest in collecting the bulk data.

They are likely to show the bulk data program is an unreasonable search, and violates the Fourth Amendment, Leon finds. The public interest "weighs heavily in favor of granting an injunction" that will bar the government from collecting any metadata in association with their personal Verizon accounts.

Government lawyers also said that removing just the plaintiffs, two Verizon subscribers, from its database will be burdensome. That's not a "burden" Leon takes seriously. "Of course, the public has no interest in saving the government from the burdens of complying with the Constitution!"

A controversial plaintiff

In the coming months, Leon's opinion will be considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That court considers an array of federal agency issues, and until recently it had leaned strongly Republican as the Senate held up confirmation of the candidates put forth by the Obama Administration.

However, the opposition to judicial nominees has eased somewhat following Obama's re-election, and three of the four vacancies have been filled in 2013.

The case against the NSA is not Klayman's first controversial lawsuit. Many of his cases have not ended well. Klayman has been rebuked and sanctioned by several judges, and he has been barred from some courtrooms.

In 2012, Klayman filed a lawsuit in Florida to kick President Barack Obama off the primary ballot in that state, based on the discredited theory that he was not born in the United States. In 2011, he sued Facebook for "negligence" because it didn't remove an anti-Israel page quickly enough. Neither suit was successful.

The Klayman suit is not the only challenge to NSA telephone-data program.

The more widely known case is the one filed in July by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union.

That case, filed on behalf of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, was consolidated with a pre-Snowden anti-NSA lawsuit called Jewel v. NSA.

The government has filed a motion to dismiss, and the case awaits a judge's decision. A DC-based privacy group, EPIC, tried to take the issue straight to the Supreme Court, but that failed.

Dissatisfaction with NSA surveillance has hit Congress, as well.

The USA Freedom Act, which would end NSA spying, has 130 co-sponsors.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden's statement on today's decision has been published in The New York Times. Snowden said:

I acted on my belief that the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts.

Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.


Sources: ARS Technica, CNN, NBC News

F.B.I. Wants To Search Your Trash & Track Your Car!

Under George W. Bush's Administration F.B.I. Agents Were Given More Legal Leeway To Invade The Privacy Of American Citizens.

More Leeway To Search Databases, Your Household Trash, Use Surveillance Teams, etc., Without Court Orders Or Motive.

Pres. Obama Concurred With That Same Policy By Giving F.B.I. Agents Even MORE Legal Leeway To Conduct Such Searches.

Considering The High Level Of Terrorists Threats Both Homegrown & International, Along With Multiple Racist Hate Crime Threats Made Against Pres. Obama's Life, I Agree With Him On This Policy.

As They Say: Keep Your Friends Close & Enemies Even Closer.




F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.

“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”

Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.

Mr. German said the change would make it harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal purposes. But Ms. Caproni said it was too cumbersome to require agents to open formal inquiries before running quick checks. She also said agents could not put information uncovered from such searches into F.B.I. files unless they later opened an assessment.

The new rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and searching people’s trash. Under current rules, agents cannot use such techniques until they open a “preliminary investigation,” which — unlike an assessment — requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment, too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant.

Agents have asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others. But Ms. Caproni said information gathered that way could also be useful for other reasons, like determining whether the subject might pose a threat to agents.

The new manual will also remove a limitation on the use of surveillance squads, which are trained to surreptitiously follow targets. Under current rules, the squads can be used only once during an assessment, but the new rules will allow agents to use them repeatedly. Ms. Caproni said restrictions on the duration of physical surveillance would still apply, and argued that because of limited resources, supervisors would use the squads only rarely during such a low-level investigation.

The revisions also clarify what constitutes “undisclosed participation” in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant, which is subject to special rules — most of which have not been made public. The new manual says an agent or an informant may surreptitiously attend up to five meetings of a group before those rules would apply — unless the goal is to join the group, in which case the rules apply immediately.

At least one change would tighten, rather than relax, the rules. Currently, a special agent in charge of a field office can delegate the authority to approve sending an informant to a religious service. The new manual will require such officials to handle those decisions personally.

In addition, the manual clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter” — investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.

The new rules make clear, for example, that if the person with such a role is a victim or a witness rather than a target of an investigation, extra supervision is not necessary. Also excluded from extra supervision will be investigations of low- and midlevel officials for activities unrelated to their position — like drug cases as opposed to corruption, for example.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs. And it will limit academic protections only to scholars who work for institutions based in the United States.

Since the release of the 2008 manual, the assessment category has drawn scrutiny because it sets a low bar to examine a person or a group. The F.B.I. has opened thousands of such low-level investigations each month, and a vast majority has not generated information that justified opening more intensive investigations.

Ms. Caproni said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.


Sources: MSNBC, NY Times, Russian Times, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

CIA Missed Visible Clues To Umar Mutallab's Planned Jihad Attack

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Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror


The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.

The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counter Terrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.

The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.

A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”

The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”

The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.

In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across the United States’ national security apparatus.

One day after President Obama delivered a blistering indictment of “human and systemic failures” leading up to the foiled attack, the battle to assign blame for these failures escalated on Wednesday.

Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.

Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.

The environment in Washington was further charged by a barrage of partisan attacks revolving around whether Mr. Obama bears ultimate responsibility for the security lapse, including a statement by former Vice President Dick Cheney that Mr. Obama “pretends” that the United States is not at war against terrorists.

A White House official fired back, blaming the Bush administration as having allowed Al Qaeda to thrive while it focused on the Iraq war.

A White House review into the episode is finding that agencies were looking at information without adequately checking other available databases — not because they were reluctant to share, as was the case before Sept. 11, but out of oversight or human error, said a senior administration official familiar with the review.

In interviews Wednesday, government officials and others provided an account of how various agencies had gleaned bits and pieces of information about the young Nigerian, but failed to pull them together to disrupt his plot. Most of the officials spoke only on the condition that they not be quoted by name.

The first sign of a threat came in August, when the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic eavesdropping around the world, intercepted the Qaeda conversations about the mysterious, unidentified Nigerian. That same month, Mr. Abdulmutallab arrived in Yemen and apparently soon began preparing for the Christmas Day attack.

Three months later, in November, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, a former senior Nigerian government official and a prominent banker, became panicked about his son’s turn to radicalism, according to an interview with a family cousin. The father beseeched Nigerian and American officials to intervene before his son did harm, said the cousin, who declined to be identified by name, citing the family’s desire for privacy.

The cousin, who attended a gathering of the family on Sunday, said that what alarmed Mr. Mutallab were the text messages his son had sent from Yemen. He said the son told the father that “he had found a new religion, the real Islam.” The son also texted that his family “should just forget about him; he’s never coming back,” the cousin recounted.

Mr. Mutallab consulted with the onetime national security adviser to a former Nigerian president. He also approached Nigeria’s National Intelligence Agency. Then he went to the American Embassy in Abuja, the cousin said. There, he said, American officials essentially ignored him.

American officials contend that they took the father’s account seriously, but that he never signaled that his son might carry out a terrorist attack. Still, on Nov. 20, based on the father’s meeting, embassy officials wrote a cable called a Visas Viper — government jargon for a warning about terrorism — and sent it to the counterterrorism center.

The cable referred to the father’s statement that his son had fallen under “the influence of religious extremists based in Yemen,” an American official said.

The Americans could have revoked Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa, but they chose not to. Some 1,700 visas have been revoked since the Sept. 11 attacks on grounds of suspected terrorist connections, State Department officials said, but that step is almost always taken only after a review by counterterrorism officials in Washington.

Based on the father’s account, C.I.A. officials in Nigeria also prepared a separate report compiling biographical information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, including his educational background and the fact that he was considering pursuing academic studies in Islamic law in Yemen.

That cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies, government officials said on Wednesday.

Some officials criticized the C.I.A. for withholding some of the information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, saying it might have prompted a broader investigation into him and possibly would have led to putting him on a watch list.

One intelligence official said that the C.I.A. should probably have shared the cable, but he said there was nothing that the C.I.A. knew at the time that suggested Mr. Abdulmutallab was planning to carry out a terrorist attack.

“You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family’s wealthy lifestyle,” the intelligence official said. “That alone makes him neither St. Francis nor a deadeyed killer.

“Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.”

At the counterterrorism center, analysts looked at the cable from the embassy in Nigeria and deliberated over just how severe a threat Mr. Abdulmutallab presented. Sometime during that period, other information began flowing in that terrorist groups might be planning an attack around Christmas. But the intelligence analysts did not connect this to the story of Mr. Abdulmutallab.

There were conflicting reports Wednesday about whether counterterrorism center analysts had at their disposal all of the details of the National Security Agency communications intercepts in August.

What is clear, however, is that the center’s officials concluded that the information they had about Mr. Abdulmutallab was not worrisome enough to do anything more than add his name to the biggest — and least scrutinized — of four intelligence databases. This list includes 550,000 names, and essentially serves as holding area for cases that need more research.

The government chose not to add Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name to a much smaller, more refined watch list that would have required that he be pulled over and patted down before boarding a plane, or blocked entirely from flying to the United States.

On Christmas Eve, Mr. Abdulmutallab flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Amsterdam.

Had all the clues been assembled, he would by then have been on the no-fly list, which would have barred him from taking his next flight, to the United States.

Even if he had not been placed on that list, American authorities had one final chance to intercede. Before a plane can take off for the United States, details on every passenger are forwarded electronically to the Department of Homeland Security. There is also an electronic summary of each passenger’s airline reservation — which in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s case would most likely have included the fact that his ticket had been bought with cash and that he had not checked any bags.

The Homeland Security Department, with this information, can request that a passenger like Mr. Abdulmutallab get extra scrutiny by airport officials before the plane takes off. But no action was taken, as department officials said they had no reason to believe he presented a threat.

So Mr. Abdulmutallab, after passing through a metal detector that missed his hidden bomb materials, walked onto the Northwest flight, bound for Detroit.



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Sources: NY Times, MSNBC, Newsweek, Google Maps

Michael Chertoff: ACLU Partially To Blame For Lax Airport Security

Is the ACLU partially to blame for America's current lax Airport Security crisis? Former Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff seems to think so.

Chertoff says the ACLU's issue was over Body Scanning machines and Violation of Privacy.

I have to admit that I agree with Chertoff's perspective on this one.

What's more important or the lesser of two evils?

Someone seeing my underwear or being blown to bits by a radical Al-Qaida Terrorist?

Come on ACLU man up!

Your organization is most certainly necessary in Western Society but please use some common sense and work with our Gov't.

I'm not sure about anyone else but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

After all you can't really sue anyone for "Violation of Privacy" if your dead right?

Check out Mr. Chertoff's discussion on the video below.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Sources: MSNBC, ACLU, Wikipedia, Google Maps

CIA Sat On Intelligence About Umar Mutallab's Terrorist Tendencies

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What The CIA Did And Didn't Know About Alleged Underpants Bomber



Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

Intelligence officials are insisting that while the Central Intelligence Agency prepared—and apparently sat on—its own cable about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab after his father visited the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, there was no information in that message that likely would have caused U.S. authorities to put him on a "no fly" list or that otherwise would have stopped him from boarding the Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, which he allegedly tried to blow up with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

According to news reports, CIA personnel were involved in discussions with Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, Umar's father, when the father went to the American Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, on Nov. 19 of this year to ask for help in locating and retrieving his son. The next day, according to U.S. national security officials, embassy officials, including representatives of the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism operations, met to discuss the father's information.
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As a result of this meeting, as we reported on Monday, a cable was sent by the embassy into Visas Viper, a database used by the State Department to track foreigners who hold or apply for U.S. visas. This cable noted the father's concern that his son "may be involved with Yemeni based Islamic Extremists." Information from this cable was subsequently entered into the government's broadest classified database on terrorist suspects, known as TIDE, which is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a unit of the National Intelligence Director's office that was set up after 9/11 to ensure that counterterrorism information was rapidly shared among relevant U.S. agencies.

According to an intelligence official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, the Viper cable gave Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's full name and passport number. The cable did not contain any direct accusation or suggestion from the father that his son either had been involved in or was about to become involved in any act of terrorism, according to several U.S. officials, all of whom asked for anonymity due to the continuing investigation.

Around the same time the embassy sent out this cable, the CIA station in Abuja sent its own separate cable back to agency headquarters at Langley, Va., on the meeting with the elder Mutallab. "At no time did the father claim his son was a terrorist or was planning an attack on the United States.

Not at all," an intelligence official told NEWSWEEK. By contrast, the official noted, the father "said his son was considering a multi-year course in Yemen in Islamic law—hardly the precursor to an imminent assault." According to the official, CIA's own cable on the meeting with the father included details like this, which arguably at the time would have looked exculpatory.

The CIA, according to a National Security source, did not circulate a copy of its own report about the meeting thoroughly around U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies until weeks after it was sent from Nigeria to Langley.

An intelligence official noted that analysts at the NCTC, which maintains the TIDE database, did have access to the raw CIA cable about the meeting with the father at about the same time the message was sent to CIA HQ; it is not clear at this point what the NCTC analysts did with the cable, though officials have said that the principal entry in the TIDE database was based on the State Department's Visas Viper cable, not the CIA cable.

In any case, given that the CIA cable did not report that Abdulmutallab was directly invovled with terrorists, and in fact contained information suggesting his disappearance to Yemen could have been innocent, officials still maintain that there was nothing in the CIA report that should—or, under rules that then existed, could—have triggered a move to put Abdulmutallab on U.S. no-fly or other transportation watchlists.

In the wake of President Obama's declaration of his determination to get to the bottom of alleged intelligence failures, however, an intelligence official acknowledged that the CIA cable "perhaps, ultimately should have been disseminated in a more formal way. It could well be declassified in some form before all this is over. There's really nothing mysterious or magical about it."

The intelligence official added: "While this is the season for second-guessing and finger-pointing, I have not seen anything to come from the meeting in Abuja—including the cable—that suddenly would have rocketed Abdulmutallab to the no-fly list. You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family's wealthy lifestyle.

That alone makes him neither St. Francis nor a dead-eyed killer. Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now."


Sources: Newsweek, MSNBC, Hardball

GOP Attack Dems On National Security, Terrorism Issues

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GOP Seizes On Terror Issue


Republicans have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253 — a significant departure from the calibrated, less partisan responses that have followed other recent terrorist activity.

The strategy — coming as the Republican leadership seeks to exploit Democratic weaknesses heading into the 2010 midterms — is in many ways a natural for a party that views protecting the U.S. homeland as its ideological raison d’etre and electoral franchise.

President Obama’s GOP critics have been emboldened during the past 48 hours by the stumbling initial response of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who spent Monday retracting her Sunday claim that “the system worked” in the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab’s near takedown of a jet ferrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit.

“In the past six weeks, you’ve had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I think Secretary Napolitano and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went even further, telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.

“[S]oft talk about engagement, closing Gitmo, these things are not going to appease the terrorists,” he said. “They’re going to keep coming after us, and we can’t have politics as usual in Washington, and I’m afraid that’s what we’ve got right now with airport security.”

Obama didn’t address his critics during a brief appearance in Hawaii on Monday, saying only that "the American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season. … As Americans, we will never give into fear and division."

But other Democrats say the GOP’s yuletide political offensive could backfire on Republicans, putting the spotlight on the party’s own less-than-spotless record on homeland security.

Exhibit A: DeMint’s controversial “hold” on Obama’s choice to lead the Transportation Safety Administration, Erroll Southers, which has left the agency leaderless during a critical period of reappraisal and potential reorganization.

“Considering that this group has been playing politics with the TSA for months, their new-found concern about safety seems a bit contrived,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who acknowledged “legitimate beefs” about lapses leading up to the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

DeMint says he’s blocking Southers because the top cop at Los Angeles International Airport hasn’t vowed to block TSA unionization. And spokesman Wes Denton said the agency is better off headless than with big labor running the nation’s airports.

“This is an important debate because many Americans don't want someone running the TSA who stands ready to give union bosses the power to veto or delay future security measures at our airports,” Denton said.

DeMint isn’t the only Republican raising concerns that Abdulmuttalab was allowed to board the plane despite being placed on a list of potentially dangerous foreign nationals and that he managed to escape detection despite carrying a large amount of explosive powder sewn into his underwear.

Early Monday morning, the House Republican Conference blasted an e-mail offering up a half-dozen GOP lawmakers to discuss national security — and to criticize the Obama White House.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the top Homeland Security Committee Republican, criticized the Obama administration for not going public more quickly to reassure Americans that the skies are safe.

Hoekstra, for his part, blamed the president for “downplaying” the threat of terrorism and slammed the White House for failing to provide detailed bipartisan briefings.

Democrats, on the other hand, say they have plenty of ammunition for a homeland security counterattack.

Over the summer, 108 House Republicans voted against the final conference report of the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which included funding for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures.

The no voters cited a procedural dispute over the appropriations process. They included Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Hoekstra and a who’s who of big-name House Republicans: Reps. Mike Pence, Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Wilson (R-SC).

The conference bill included more than $4 billion for "screening operations," including $1.1 billion in funding for explosives detection systems, with $778 million intended for buying and installing the systems.

“It’s a base political calculation,” said one senior House Democratic aide. “It’s risky to play politics with something like this. The morning after [the attempted bombing], Republicans had already drawn a bright line on this.”

In June, both parties overwhelmingly backed Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who inserted an amendment into the House's massive Homeland Security appropriations bill barring the use of full-body image scans as "primary" screening tools at airports.

The amendment, which died in the Senate, passed the House on a bipartisan 310 to 118 vote, with conservative libertarians joining liberals, all decrying the scans as a major invasion of privacy.

It would also have given passengers the option of getting a pat-down — which might have also detected the Christmas bomb — while banning the storage and copying of the images, which show a virtual picture of a person's naked body.

The measure was little-noticed at the time, but it could have a big impact if the Obama administration follows through on its pledge to increase such imaging, which experts say could have detected the explosives hidden on the body of the would-be airplane bomber.

Chaffetz, for his part, doesn’t regret the amendment, telling the Salt Lake Tribune, "It's a difficult balance between protecting our civil liberties and protecting the safety of people on airplanes," adding, “I believe there's technology out there that can identify bomb-type materials without necessarily overly invading our privacy."

In the coming days, GOP criticism of the administration’s actions may give way to a louder, if more decorous din from Democrats questioning security procedures here and abroad.

A handful of key congressional chairmen have already scheduled hearings to see what did go wrong on that Northwestern Airlines flight.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says his panel will investigate how the attempted bomber slipped through security and screening procedures.

"I view Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a terrorist who evaded our homeland security defenses and who would have killed hundreds of people if the explosives he tried to detonate had worked," Lieberman said.

"What we know about the Abdulmutallab case raises two big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer: Why aren't airline passengers flying into the U.S. checked against the broadest terrorist database, and why isn't whole body scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?"


Sources: Politico, MSNBC

Bush Administration Used Wiretapping (Illegally) & Spied On U.S. Citizens Just For The H*LL Of It!...80% Warrantless

Huffington Post, CBS News----

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" _ allowed access to _ the classified program.

The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.

The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.

The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."

The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.

The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."

In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden _ the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.

Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.

The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure _ but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.

House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

(This version CORRECTS that Bush brought wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006 rather than started the program in 2006.)

Sources: Huffington Post, CBS News, Political Base