Tag Archives: spying

James Clapper, NSA, & Government Spying

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James Clapper admits lying to the American people in the ‘least untruthful manner possible’ about NSA spying

Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) The tortured logic and pained explanations (and justifications) being given by top government officials and lawmakers in the wake of the disclosure that the National Security Agency snoops on every American is as astounding as it is pathetic. But then again, they are being made by people who are a) offended that you and I would dare question their conduct and intent; and b) don’t think we have the right to do so in any case.

This Big Government arrogance was epitomized by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who recently sought to “clarify” his previous false testimony to a congressional panel that the NSA does not collect metadata and other personal information on Americans. In an interview with NBC News‘ Andrea Mitchell, he said that during his testimony he gave the “least untruthful” answer possible in regards to the NSA’s surveillance program.

On March 12, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Clapper was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., if the NSA gathers “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.”

“No, sir,” said Clapper, “not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”

The ‘Dewey Decimal’ excuse

That answer contradicts revelations contained in an explosive story published in early June by The Guardian, a British newspaper, based on details provided by NSA employee Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on the agency’s massive domestic spying. But during the NBC News interview, Clapper parsed his earlier claim, saying Wyden’s very simple question did not have a very simple answer.

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked – ‘When are you going to start – stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is meaning not – answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no,” Clapper said in the interview, which aired June 9. “So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no’.”

Further, Clapper said his remarks were reflective of his definition of “collection” – which he said means something very specific in the context of discussing intelligence.

“What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers – of those books in that metaphorical library – to me, collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it,” he said.

Is Clapper being advised by former President Bill Clinton? “Well, that depends on with the definition of ‘is’ is,” Clinton – the artful (draft) dodger – once said during his impeachment saga.

For his part, Wyden isn’t playing the word game.

In a statement issued June 11, the Oregon senator said he gave Clapper his question in advance, giving the DNI plenty of notice and every chance in the world to give a “straight answer” to a very straightforward question.

“So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer,” Wyden said. “Now public hearings are needed to address the recent disclosures and the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives.”

Clapper’s lie was quantified by the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, who “said Clapper is one of the most honest people she knows and suggested he misunderstood the question,” according to the Washington Post.

Defending the indefensible

Sure. The director of national intelligence is too stupid to understand a simple question that was provided to him well in advance of his testimony. Don’t you find it offensive that these people think you’re stupid enough to believe that?

Make no mistake – Clapper, President Obama, Feinstein and the growing chorus of Democrats, Republicans and political appointees who are defending the NSA despise those of us who are now trying to hold them accountable. They don’t for one second believe that we have the right to insist upon their accountability, or question their motives, or hold them to the same standards in which they hold us.

They truly believe they are above reproach and that We, the People, are neither smart enough, nor are in any position to question them. What’s more, they believe what they are doing is both justified and proper, despite the fact that neither the law nor the Constitution they swore to uphold gives them the authority they exercise.

Welcome to post-constitutional America, where right is wrong, wrong is right, and the ruling class can barely contain its contempt for you and me.

Center for All Sorts of Data in Utah

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Behold the NSA’s Dark Star: the Utah Data Center

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It’s the ultimate machine of what’s become our Paranoid State. Clive Irving on the Orwellian mass-surveillance data center rising in the Utah desert.

Remember the Stasi, the secret police who operated in East Germany when it was a communist state? When the Berlin Wall came down, East Germans discovered they had been living in a society so rotted by paranoia that at least one in three of its adult citizens were spying on the other two.

NSA Phone Records
NSA’s Utah Data Center shown June 6, in Bluffdale, Utah. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

In the case of East Germany, this ended up producing warehouses stuffed with bulging files containing the minutely observed details of the everyday, humdrum lives of millions. The product was both banal and, in its range and results, terrifying (a world caught beautifully in the film The Lives of Others).

In the case of the U.S., the apotheosis of the same mind-set lies in a sprawling complex at Camp Williams, Utah, due to start operating this fall. Billions of dollars have gone into creating this cyberintelligence facility for the National Security Agency.

There’s no official explanation of the Utah Data Center’s real mission, except that it’s the largest of a network of data farms including sites in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland. But it’s obviously been built to vastly increase the agency’s capacity to suck in, digest, analyze, and store whatever the intelligence community decides to collect. As of this week, we know a lot more about the kind of data that includes.

Of course, the U.S. is still far from being the police state that East Germany was. But I do think we need to better understand how this technological juggernaut works, what its scope really is—and particularly we need to appreciate how our political acceptance of this scale of surveillance is shaping the kind of society we are.

The national-security industrial complex is now of the size, power, and influence of the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, which President Eisenhower first defined and warned of. As then, this complex uses the national interest as a reason for having to operate in secrecy, and invokes patriotism—literally in the PATRIOT Act—to create a political consensus.

Nineteen terrorists with minimal technology—box cutters—have enabled the counterterrorism industry to enjoy unbounded reach. White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest used the familiar argument to defend the newly disclosed surveillance: it was, he said, “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 terror activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

NSA Phone Records
The Utah Data Center is part of “a network of data farms” in the U.S. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Where is it absolutely essential to violate privacy and where not?

That’s actually a simplification. Surveillance has two fundamental purposes: to track the known and discover the unknown. It’s hard to comprehend the science involved. How, for example, do you cull billions of bytes of data a second in a way that discriminates between the useless and the essential? Only one thing is for sure, and that is that the policy driving the velocity of the NSA’s ever-expanding sweeps is first to make those sweeps as global and indiscriminate as possible and then to apply algorithms able to instantly see the significant from the insignificant. If only it were that simple.

It is patently easy to defend the resources devoted to intelligence gathering by saying that many attacks have been thwarted, without saying what and where they were. Neither the Boston Marathon atrocity nor the London assassination of a British soldier were detected in advance, even though intelligence services in both countries had the perpetrators on their radar.

There is a certain kind of intellectual depravity in trying to have us accept that all surveillance is good for us. Politicians of both parties who now say there is nothing new in what has been revealed, that this was all authorized and kosher, are captives of this depravity, because they don’t really know any more than we do where to draw the line. Where is it absolutely essential to violate privacy and where not?

This is made even worse by the cover of enormous technical complexity. At least the Stasi’s low-tech methods could be seen for what they were, part of a cumbersome and gross bureaucratic machine, essentially human in its systems, allowing culpability to be clearly assigned.

In our case there is the Dark Star factor, like the Utah operation, working on robotic principles, not dependent on putting bugs in chandeliers, leaving no fingerprints, and capable of awesome penetration. We have the ultimate machine of the Paranoid State, an Orwellian apparatus that intoxicates its operators with its efficiency, enthralls its masters with its omniscience, and emasculates its political overseers with its promise of efficacy.

from:    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/08/behold-the-nsa-s-dark-star-the-utah-data-center.html