US legalizes spying on its own people

In the wake of two separate and back-to-back revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureaus of Investigation (FBI) are spying on millions of Americans, officials are now engaged in a damage control campaign.

They are seeking to determine how the lid has been blown off two super-secret telephone and the Internet spying programs of the American government.

To quell the uproar over spying, government officials launched an aggressive justification of the previously undisclosed programs shortly after the disclosures.

The US spy chief said the programs are legal. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has stressed that the Congress had “fully debated” it and that it was recently reauthorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A day before Clapper’s comments, US President Barack Obama rushed to the defense of the top-secret programs saying, “They help us prevent terrorist attacks” despite their “modest encroachments on privacy.”

He condemned the “hype” over the massive NSA and FBI spying on Americans’ phone records and internet communications. Moreover, in order to ease concerns over the erosion of civil liberties, he said, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls” or “reading the e-mails” of American people.

The first disclosure came on Thursday when the British newspaper The Guardian published a top secret court document, issued in April, under which the US government has been furtively collecting phone records of millions of Americans who are customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecommunications provider companies. The program is called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA.

The order compels Verizon to give the NSA “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

But what is metadata? Washington Times provides further details about the term. “Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.”

The paper quotes Stephen B. Wicker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University as saying, “The metadata available is now so fine-grained that it reveals where we’re going, what we’re doing, what our preferences and beliefs might be and who our friends are.”

The man behind the disclosures, the 29-year old Edward Snowden, is a former CIA employee working at the NSA. He said he leaked documents because he felt the US is building an unaccountable and secret espionage machine that spied on every American.

Despite Obama’s reassurance that nobody is reading the e-mails of American people, Mr. Wicker depicts a very different picture. He said using analytical software, the NSA could use mobile phones’ metadata over time to paint a picture of where their users went, who they talked to and what their habits were.

Hours later after the revelation on FISA, came the second leak, this time by The Washington Post. It divulged the Internet spying program or “PRISM”. It’s a 6-year-old program designed to rake in vast amounts of data, from emails to chat records.

The program allowed the NSA and FBI to gain access as much as possible to the servers of major U.S. Internet companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL.

Like the phone-records program, PRISM was approved by a judge in a secret court order. Unlike that program and contrary to Obama’s assertion that “nobody is reading the e-mails of American people,” PRISM allowed the government to seize actual conversations: emails, video chats, instant messages and more.

Scope of phone and Internet surveillance has caused alarm among privacy advocates with some observers suggesting that it is only the tip of the iceberg. A former NSA official has staggering figures.

William Binney estimates that the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by US citizens. According to Washington Times, Binney says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In July 2008, Larry Chin wrote an article for the Global Research website predicting the events of past few days. “It gives the US government unprecedented new spying powers and sweeping new legal cover for spying that goes well beyond even the original FISA law – which itself was an abomination that already permitted the US president broad surveillance powers.”

PRISM was initially established under former US President George W. Bush in 2007. The program however has grown exponentially during Barack Obama’s administration, just as other similar programs have including the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which gives the government the power to arrest indefinitely American citizens to without habeas corpus for mere suspicions of ties to terrorism.

Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research says Obama “justifies the signing of the NDAA as a means to combating terrorism, as part of a counter-terrorism agenda. But in substance, any American opposed to the policies of the US government can – under the provisions of the NDAA – be labeled a “suspected terrorist” and arrested under military detention.”

Chossudovsky adds: “The signing of NDAA (HR 1540) into law is tantamount to the militarization of law enforcement, the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Inauguration in 2012 of Police State USA.”