Posted on 06/09/2013 10:50:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday that the government's acquisition of phone records and surveillance of Internet activity is lawful and justified by the changing nature of the war on terrorism.
Hayden, who served as NSA chief from 1999-2005 and is also a former CIA director, says NSA's activities are "perfectly legal" and "an accurate reflection of balancing our security and our privacy."
The program of gathering phone record metadata, first detailed in The Guardian newspaper last week, is analogous to collecting the haystack in case you should suddenly need to find a needle, he tells NPR.
"We roll up an al-Qaida cell somewhere, let's just say Yemen," he says as an example. "We grab a cell phone. We know through the pocket litter that the owner of that cell phone is involved in terrorist activity. We didn't know about that cell phone before. We didn't have that number."
But only with the number can the agency run it through the metadata and parse correlations and connections. Otherwise, the information is put away and "not touched," he says.
"So fears or accusations that the NSA then data mines or trolls through these records, they're just simply not true," Hayden tells host Rachel Martin.
Before the NSA started collecting such data, the agency found itself at a dangerous disadvantage, he says. For example, prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the agency knew about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the two individuals who piloted the jetliner that hit the Pentagon.
"NSA actually intercepted about half a dozen phone calls from those guys in San Diego calling a known al-Qaida safe house ... in the Middle East," Hayden says. "Nothing, nothing in the physics of the intercepts, or in the content of the communications, told us these guys were in San Diego. If we would have had this program in place ... we would have known these two known terrorists were living in San Diego," he says. "That's a big deal."
Hayden says the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court gives NSA a "generalized approval" to search the metadata, given probable cause.
He says another program known as PRISM, which has been described in media reports as a top-secret data-mining program, is "about Internet data, not telephony, and it's all about foreigners."
"So, if I've got a bad person in Waziristan, talking to a bad person in Yemen, via a chat room that is hosted by an American Internet service provider, the only thing American about that conversation is the fact that it's happening on a server on the West Coast of the United States," he says.
I wonder how long before the Tea Party gets blamed for all of these scandals? lol.
Oh, yeah, if the Tea Party wasn’t so evil and dangerous, the government wouldn’t have to take these steps...
human nature: the ends (bush’s need to track bad guys) justify the means (shreding the framers’ explicit limit on blanket search warrants).
the result: now the bad guys are the tea party and conservatives in general so looky what we found in bush’s data.
a madisonian conservative would never had allowed this.
Let's just say that a few years down the road a Supreme Court justice whom we thought was Conservative all of a sudden sides with the lefties (yeah, pretty far fetched right?/sarc) and they decide that the 2nd Amendment doesn't mean what it clearly says and the Founders really meant that only the the gubmint, the military and the police should have guns.
Do you not think that barry sotoero and his fellow travelers won't go through those stored emails, bank records, phone metadata, along with all of the 4473s and find out who bought an evil AR15 or an 80% receiver or a Noveske upper?
As diane feinstein so famously said "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in."
Yeah, we are that close. And yeah, I know they're reading this post.
So Russia calling to say hey you might have a terrorist in Boston is too old fashioned huh? How about the nearly 15000 other foreign students who aren’t where they are supposed to be. I don’t care if a Regean cabinet member says its legal... I don’t like it. Cruz should draft a bill to stop it so we can get a list of the facists on record. Right and left should join the Constitutionalists on this one.
Posted elsewhere on threads; fits here also:
Anyone who doesn’t think that at some point Obama and his regime thugs won’t use the data gathered by the NSA for their own nefarious reasons against individuals or groups of individuals of the opposite political party or religious groups, or pro-Israel groups, has rocks in their heads where a brain should be. The Obama thugs could pluck out info on you or me, on our entire internet lives. They would know everything, our e-mails, our bank accounts and/or credit cards, our health records, everything. Any politically oriented operative within the NSA could do this and bypass any required search warrant needed to do so by simply doing the search on an individual and surreptiously pass it on to whomever wants it, usually a political ideologue of liberal/socialist bent.
The dangers here are tremendous. The government is asking us to trust them on this data mining, that it will not be abused. We already know that the Obama regime is very willing to abuse and use gov’t agencies for their own political purposes. Look to the IRS spying and abuse of citizens of the opposite political party, or wrong religion in their eyes, or those with a pro-Israel bent.
Audits and grant stalling past elections to harm opposition parties from being able to organize and get their word out to educate the public on the constitution, etc., was the norm of this Obama Admin. Look at EPA bullying as a weapon by this Admin, or all the regulations being shoved down our throats, in particular affecting the business community; banks and corporations forced to become crony capitalists used by this crooked regime. Look to Obamacare and its thousands of rules and regulations that were hidden from the public and we are just now finding out what all is entailed in Obamacare.
What in heaven’s name would stop them from having ideologue plants spy on citizens’ e-mails and their backgrounds contained on the internet, basically their whole lives encapsulated therein, to use for their own politically evil intentions? I suspect they have already done this.
SCOTUS John Roberts might have been one of those whose background was looked into by the Obama regime and then used against him to blackmail him into voting for Obamacare. We’ll never know. But I wouldn’t sit here too comfortably and agree that this massive data mining is necessary for our safety rather than using more narrow targeting of data gathering with greater restrictions on its use and how it is mined. I have zero faith in the integrity of the current gov’t and what they would not stoop to in order to further their political cause. We have no true safeguards. Zero.
So, with all that data, and several specific warnings from Russia and Saudi Arabia, we still weren’t able to preempt the Boston bombing?
Apparently, they didn’t have enough data to make the connection. What’s the next level that they will say they have to go to?
Suppression.
Riiight. Wouldn't it have been convenient for the administration to simply consult this NSA database instead of having to go to three judges before finding one who would approve a warrant to get all the phone records of the AP, or Fox News, or individual reporters such as James Rosen in a leak investigation?
Then how far of a leap is it to look up data on a Supreme Court Justice who is ruling on the cornerstone piece of legislation for your administration?
I was unaware Bush's term started in 1999.
IF and this is a huge IF such a system is needed then the right agency with the strictest accountability, non political, and discipline along with specific defense missions should be operating it. In Other Words The Pentagon/DOD {military personnel} should be doing the spooking and processing the INTEL. They are they only one qualified. We do not need a bunch of Boiler Room Political Hacks running amuck using government agency powers. We don't need agencies being used for domestic political gain or political party espionage to obtain political power in our elections process.
I remain opposed to all Bush Administration Acts, Agencies, and Programs, started in which he and both parties in Congress used fear to put into place. Bush and Congress bright ideas added to Obama's and the Democratic Party Radicals have been a huge disaster for our freedoms.
I want to call attention to the word "acquisition". The legally of the acquisition of the information is a minor issue.
What someone can do with the acquired information is more important than what someone will do with it. The reason I say can rather than will is because what someone can do makes what they will do possible.
Collecting the information to protect the nation from terrorist attacks was the reason to grant the power. However, that same power can thwart political opponents as well as thwarting terrorist attacks. That leads to the question; what can those who have access to the information do with the information.
Its not really relevant because the NSA chief is a careerist and not affiliated with a political party.
The irony of the above statement is the following. Not only does Obama refuse to secure the borders to keep terrorists out of the country in the first place, the feds arguably not having the constitutional authority to regulate immigration being another issue, but Obama has also declared the war on terror to be over, at least from PC point of view. So actually doing his job concerning immigration and terror would likely take the fun out of spying on US citizens for Obama.
Otherwise, the information is put away and “not touched,” he says.
It needs to be put away and then erased...purged...destroyed!!
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