Risen and Lichtblau discover more NSA abuses of FISA

By Michael Fraase

Wednesday, 17 June 2009 07:34PM CDT

Section: Privacy

AT&T: Your world, delivered to the NSAIn April the US National Security Agency (NSA) disclosed that its warrantless wiretaps instituted at the behest of the George W. Bush administration—including domestic email—have exceeded any legal limit since late 2008. According to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, reporting for the New York Times, a former NSA analyst “described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.” Email messages were collected in a secret database, codenamed Pinwale, that could be queried freely so long as no more than 30 percent of the total database was searched in a single command.

At the same time, the Obama administration claimed it had taken the necessary steps to bring the NSA into legal compliance. Under the law, the NSA can surveil only those Americans suspected of having links to international terrorism and only then after obtaining permission from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The NSA, in Congressional testimony, steadfastly maintains that any “overcollection was inadvertant.” Representative Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, told Risen and Lichtblau that he disputes that position and that “the people making the policy don’t understand the technicalities.”

Risen and Lichtblau report that the NSA is believed to have overstepped its legal bounds in 8-10 cases. But in each of those cases, potentially thousands of email addresses were illegally surveilled. “Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” a senior intelligence official told the reporters.

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On the privacy of Steve Jobs

By Michael Fraase

Thursday, 15 January 2009 07:46PM CDT

Section: Privacy

Steve JobsI don’t like Steve Jobs—never have. He’s an arrogant, abrasive, prima donna. But unlike most other people I dislike, I have tremendous respect for Steve Jobs. He’s outrageously creative, wildly persuasive, has a gift for seeing what the rest of us don’t, and is obsessed with quality. The positives, believe it or not, far outweigh the negatives.

Steve Jobs and Apple’s board of directors have done everything that’s necessary with regard to his personal information and his role as CEO of a publicly-traded US corporation. Period. If he doesn’t want to disclose the details of his health, that’s no one’s business but his own and the financial and technical media must back the fuck off.

I’ve chosen to take a fairly open position with regard to the status of my health. I fully disclose my health condition, its co-morbidities, and the ramifications involved to employers and co-workers, up-front. Partly because I don’t want to be accused of withholding crucial information later, should my condition worsen—of which there’s a fairly high likelihood. But mostly because it’s easier to just get it out of the way as early as possible: like my job, it’s part of my life but it’s not who I am.

But full disclosure was my choice. Steve Jobs’ choice is to disclose the minimum amount of information necessary for appropriate decisions to be made. That’s his choice—and his choice alone—and it’s every bit as valid as mine. Fact is, it’s none of our business.

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Security theater

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 19 October 2008 11:39AM CDT

Section: Privacy

Fake boarding passI confess. Research for Information Eclipse got me all wound up about government and corporate surveillance in the United States. It only got worse when George W. Bush was installed in the White House and systematically expanded the unchecked power of the executive branch.

Last night my wife and I watched the first installment of The Last Enemy (no spoilers, please; we’re behind in our Tivo watching). It’s simultaneously fascinating and disturbing in a way that only our limey friends across the pond can do. Watching it didn’t help my internal spring one little bit.

But then I read something like Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” and I breathe easier. Wait. What? Shouldn’t the fact that Goldberg got through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints at various US airports with “al-Qaeda t-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls” not to mention “pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste… bottles of Fiji water, and box cutters” (box cutters!) be at least upsetting? Or how about the Beerbelly, designed to sneak of to 80 ounces of liquid into concerts and athletic events?

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