Northwest Indiana Discussion

This would be funny if it weren't true....

Morons thinking that it is true is even more funny.

LOL, you're as illiterate as arc. Actually it's you, Matt and Arc who are defending Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Al Qaeda, Lois.

Matt thinks that American citizenship should be a guarantee that you can commit acts of terror on American soil, and kill countless Americans with impunity. We should absolutely not kill a terrorist linked with multiple attacks on US soil, who was a recruiter and force-multiplier for an organization that perpetrated the attack that resulted in the most deaths on US soil--because one of his passports is American. He should be given free reign to kill more Americans, again and again until he is apprehended and tried--because a piece of paper from a court is what protects us from bombings and shootings, not objective force.

It does not discuss any specific target and emphasizes that it does not go into the specific thresholds of evidence that are deemed sufficient.

It adopts an elastic definition of an “imminent” threat, saying it is not necessary for a specific attack to be in process when a target is found if the target is generally engaged in terrorist activities aimed at the United States. And it asserts that courts should not play a role in reviewing or restraining such decisions.

The white paper states that “judicial enforcement of such orders would require the court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the president and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force against a member of an enemy force against which Congress has authorized the use of force.”

Domestic spying capabilities used by the National Security Agency to collect massive amounts of data on American citizens could soon be available to the Department of Homeland Security — a bureaucracy with the power to arrest citizens that is not subject to limitations imposed on the NSA.

Unlike the DHS, the NSA is an intelligence agency, not a domestic law enforcement agency. It cannot arrest those suspected of wrongdoing. That power of the federal government lies with agencies under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, the Treasury, Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies.

The NSA and DHS have waged a long Capitol Hill turf war over cybersecurity. Bills such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act and the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 have sought to clearly define the relationship between the two agencies, but struggled to get off the ground.

For the record, it has been at least 4 US Citizens that have been killed by US Drone strikes without trial, not just one.

N.S.A. Chief Says Surveillance Has Stopped Dozens of Plots
By CHARLIE SAVAGE


WASHINGTON — Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, said on Tuesday that American surveillance had helped prevent “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11,” including at least 10 “homeland-based threats.” But he said that a vast majority must remain secret to avoid disclosing sources and methods.

“These programs are immensely valuable for protecting our nation and securing the security of our allies,” General Alexander said at a rare public oversight hearing by the House Intelligence Committee.

In addition, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sean Joyce, listed two newly disclosed cases that have now been declassified in an effort to respond to the leaking of classified information about surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.

Mr. Joyce described a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange by a Kansas City man, whom the agency was able to identify because he was in contact with “an extremist” in Yemen who was under surveillance. Mr. Joyce also talked about a San Diego man who planned to send financial support to a terrorist group in Somalia, and who was identified because the N.S.A. flagged his phone number as suspicious through its database of all domestic phone call logs, which was brought to light by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

“As Americans, we value our privacy and our civil liberties,” General Alexander said. “As Americans, we also value our security and our safety. In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation. That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur in 9/11.”

The nonadversarial tone of the oversight hearing was captured by its title: How Disclosed N.S.A. Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries. Both the top Republican and the top Democrat on the committee, Representatives Mike Rogers of Michigan and C. A. Dutch Ruppersburger of Maryland, offered a robust defense of the surveillance programs revealed by Mr. Snowden and expressed anger over the leaks, and all five witnesses were executive branch officials who supported the surveillance activities.

In an apparent reference to Mr. Snowden, for example, Mr. Rogers criticized his actions as “selectively leaking incomplete information” that “paints an inaccurate picture and fosters distrust in our government.” He added, “It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside.”

There was no way to independently verify the claims made by the officials during the hearing.

The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March that the N.S.A. did not collect records on hundreds of millions of Americans. Since the revelation of the phone log database, he has explained that his testimony was the “least untruthful” statement he could make about a classified program.

The testimony on Tuesday focused on two programs: the collection of the content of e-mails and phone calls of noncitizens abroad who were targeted by the agency without individual court orders under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and the maintenance of a huge database of domestic phone logs that has been compiled under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Both programs are used to try to identify any co-conspirators of terrorism suspects. In recent days, intelligence officials and lawmakers have been disclosing details about safeguards built into the systems, including that the phone logs are destroyed after five years and that fewer than 300 terrorism-related numbers were approved for searching in 2012.

The witnesses clarified other details on Tuesday. James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said that while the 702 program can capture the contents of e-mails and phone calls when an overseas target communicates with people in the United States, if officials then want to eavesdrop on purely domestic phone calls or e-mails by anyone in the ring of acquaintances of the overseas target, they must get an individualized warrant from a court.

“If they make a call to inside the United States, that can be collected, but it’s only because the target of that call outside the United States initiated that call and went there,” he said. “If the calls are wholly within the United States, we cannot collect them. If you’re targeting a person who is outside of the United States and you find that they come into the United States, we have to stop the targeting right away.”

In addition, General Alexander said that every query to the domestic phone log database was audited by supervisors, and that so far there had been no willful abuses or discipline carried out. And his deputy, John C. Inglis, said that under court orders, “only 20 analysts at N.S.A. and their two managers, for a total of 22 people, are authorized to approve numbers that may be used to query this database.”

In a rare note of skepticism, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, pressed General Alexander about why the F.B.I. could not use subpoenas to get the necessary domestic phone logs surrounding a suspicious number without the government’s obtaining logs of everyone’s calls. General Alexander said he was open to discussion, but added, “The concern is speed in a crisis.” NY Times

Yep, sounds good.
And it's good to see you whining about Al Qaeda terrorists being killed.

Anwar al-Awlaki and his Egyptian-born wife, Gihan Mohsen Baker, had an American son, born on Sept. 13, 1995, in Denver, while al-Awlaki was a student at Colorado State. His son's name Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki. He was killed at age 16 in a drone strike on Oct. 14, 2011, in Yemen. It, too, was a controversial extra-judicial killing. Some U.S. officials called it a mistake. Even the president is said, in some reports, to have considered it a bad mistake.

It is not clear where the young al-Awlaki was when he was killed. Some reports say that he was in a cafe with friends; other reports that he was sitting by the road eating with friends. His family said that he had run away from home and was trying to find his father. He had no known ties to terrorism.

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, stated that his death was justified, and that he "should have had a more responsible father."

I am sure you also aren't bothered by Obama's flip flop on trials for prisoners at Guantanamo. We have detained people for more than a decade now without giving them a chance at a trial or any attempt at proving them guilty.

Yep, sounds good.
And it's good to see you whining about Al Qaeda terrorists being killed.

Meanwhile...


Whine and cry all you want, nothing is going to change, matt.

Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information “inadvertently” collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target “non-US persons” under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

The procedures cover only part of the NSA’s surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Fisa court’s oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed.

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of “inadvertently acquired” domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve “foreign intelligence information” contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from “U.S. based machine[s]” or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans’ call or email information without warrants.

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA’s foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.

Obama has continued Bush's violation of civil rights

President Barack Obama has given progressives plenty to be angry at him for lately: The liberal wish list he laid out at his second inaugural remains just that. Then came revelations of sweeping domestic surveillance programs that triggered flashbacks to the ultimate villains of the left, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Yet despite all of that, Democratic activists on hand here for the largest annual gathering of progressives cut the president a surprising amount of slack. Yes, they’re unhappy about Obama embracing Bush-era snooping. And they think he hasn’t done nearly enough on climate change or other issues they had high hopes for when they helped propel Obama past Hillary Clinton in 2008.

But two dozen people interviewed by POLITICO at the Netroots Nation conference this week agreed, in broad strokes, that a broken Congress and leftover Bush-era policies deserve at least as much blame as the president. The National Security Agency controversy may be headline news — on Friday night, news broke that federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against NSA contractor Edward Snowden for allegedly leaking classified information — but it was barely mentioned in a series of speeches kicking off the conference.

“When we’re talking about these things in regards to the president, we can’t leave out Congress,” said Gina Cooper, founder of Netroots Nation. “People are definitely looking toward the administration for answers … what they’re not hearing about is checks and balances.”

Said Jonathan Dale, a 42-year-old Planned Parenthood activist from San Diego: “The NSA stuff that came out was disappointing but not surprising.” But “it’s a legacy from the Bush era.”

His colleague, Rachel Dixon, 35, agreed: “I always kind of assumed that our emails weren’t private,” she said.

The idea that Bush, not Obama, was responsible for putting these programs in place came up time and again.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealing that the agency has spent millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions. The documents also reveal that CFPB contractors may be required to share the information with “additional government entities.” [...]

The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.” Issued by CFPB Contracting Officer Xiaoling Ang on July 3, 2012 the IDIQ document’s stated objective: “The CFPB seeks to acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”

To accomplish this objective, the CFPB describes the scope of the program accordingly:

The panel shall include 5 million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]. The initial sample shall be drawn from current records and historical data appended for that sample as well as additional samples during the intervening years [emphasis added] to make the combines sample representative at each point in time.

The number of wiretaps secured in federal criminal investigations jumped 71 percent in 2012 over the previous year, according to newly released figures.

Federal courts authorized 1,354 interception orders for wire, oral and electronic communications, up from 792 the previous year, according to the figures, released Friday by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. There was a 5 percent increase in state and local use of wiretaps in the same period.

The office collects the figures from federal and local jurisdictions at the request of Congress, but does not interpret the statistics. There is no explanation of why the federal figures increased so much, and it is generally out of line with the number of wiretaps between 1997 and 2009, which averaged 550 annually. A large number of wiretaps was also reported in 2010, when 1,207 were secured.

“This is just one more piece of evidence demonstrating the need for a full, informed public debate about the scope, breadth, and pervasiveness of government surveillance in this country,” Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an e-mail. “We have a secret surveillance program churning in the background, sweeping in everyone’s communications, and, at the same time, in the shadows (and frequently under seal), law enforcement is constantly expanding its use and reliance on surveillance in traditional criminal investigations.”

WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.