NSA Never Stopped Intercepting Foreign Leaders' Communications, Swept Up Congress Members In Its Collection
from the another-shitload-of-empty-assurances dept
The Wall Street Journal is reporting the NSA is in the middle of another "incidental collection" mess, this time involving Congress.
The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.Technically, spying on Congress is off-limits. In reality, the NSA can grab anything involving conversations with foreign citizens, provided it feels the content of the communications contains "significant foreign intelligence." Even so, the NSA is required to inform oversight committees when it has released unminimized, Congress-related communications to the executive branch. In this case, that information was never turned over to the oversight committees, and the executive branch deferred entirely to the NSA's judgment on the withholding of this information.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
That's the little-b bombshell in the Wall Street Journal piece. The capital-B Bombshell is this: despite President Obama's public assertions in the wake of the Snowden leaks, the NSA never turned off its intercepts in foreign countries.
Instead of removing the implants, Mr. Obama decided to shut off the NSA’s monitoring of phone numbers and email addresses of certain allied leaders—a move that could be reversed by the president or his successor.The very public indignation of German Chancellor Merkel and other NATO allies led to a quasi-promise: the NSA would no longer listen in on their conversations. But President Obama never specifically named which foreign leaders would be exempted from the NSA's surveillance. Merkel was namechecked and the administration agreed to stop surveillance of certain foreign leaders, but anyone below them (advisors, cabinet members) was still considered fair game. And other leaders, like Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, were never considered for exclusion from NSA snooping.
There was little debate over Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S. official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.The shocking thing here isn't the surveillance of foreign leaders. That's what we expect agencies like the NSA to do. The shocking thing is the duplicitous nature of the Obama administration, which allowed Congress to be swept up by intercepts that were publicly claimed to have been shut off, as well as allowing behavior it promised to end to continue under its tacit blessing. The administration wanted intelligence it felt would be valuable while simultaneously wanting to protect itself from further blowback.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”Cowards.
Further making a mess of things is the NSA's long-running, begrudging intelligence partnership with Israel. As was revealed by the Snowden leaks, the NSA considers its partnership -- in which unminimized US citizen data and content are handed over to Israeli intelligence -- with the country to be lopsided. Israel is viewed as a needy partner which often takes much more than it gives.
However, Unit 8200 (the Israeli NSA) did gift the agency with a surveillance tool. But true to form, the gift horse was more of a Trojan.
Early in the Obama presidency, for example, Unit 8200 gave the NSA a hacking tool the NSA later discovered also told Israel how the Americans used it. It wasn’t the only time the NSA caught Unit 8200 poking around restricted U.S. networks.The multiple levels of hypocrisy and deception are breathtaking. The administration was never truly interested in reigning in the NSA's activities. It was only interested in minimizing the damage it would sustain from the Snowden leaks. It allowed the NSA to do what it wanted while absolving itself of any responsibility. And it never held the agency up to the accountability standards the administration and the intelligence community repeatedly referred to when responding to each successive leak.
On top of it all, the NSA continued to use a surveillance tool it knew was compromised, rather than lose access to the information it obtained with it. And it shrugged off intrusions by a foreign surveillance agency because it's all just part of the spy game -- like telling world leaders you'll do one thing while never actually doing anything at all.
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Filed Under: angela merkel, benjamin netanyahu, congress, israel, mass surveillance, nsa, surveillance
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One second of worry followed by five minutes of laughter
... followed almost immediately by a large sigh of relief, and a hearty chuckle, when they realized that no-one in congress had the spine to actually do anything about it even if they had incontestable proof that the NSA was spying on them directly.
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Re: One second of worry followed by five minutes of laughter
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Of course there are repercussions...
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Re: One second of worry followed by five minutes of laughter
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Are they sure it wasn't just Windows 10 Telemetry? Some of that shit is *real* sneaky! lolz.
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Defender of the Constitution?
Too bad he seems to have an edited version that he feels is worthy of protecting. Sounds like the office is no longer fulfilling its responsibilities and therefor has become null and void. Time for to renew the revolution to demand exactly the same rights over again only this time specifying that digitizing something or calling it terrorism doesn't change the rights one little bit.
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Re: Re: One second of worry followed by five minutes of laughter
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Re: Re: One second of worry followed by five minutes of laughter
Safer by far to make empty, blustery denunciations about the mass spying before sitting down, shutting up, and approving the next budget request for the spy agencies like good little overpaid cowards.
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NSA out of control
So the NSA is no longer under administration control; it is a law unto itself.
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Re: Defender of the Constitution?
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(I just want this to go on your records of me at the NSA that I don't believe a word of those accusations. So we are good, right?
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Re: Defender of the Constitution?
He never said he will "enforce" the Constitution. He said he would protect it.
I assume he placed a copy of the text in a safe and moved on to other tasks. Like not taking responsibility for anything that happens around him.
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In other shocking news: Water is wet!
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Rain, reign, rein
This "reigning in" thing is becoming quite intolerable. Queen Elizabeth is reigning in the UK. But there is no g in "reining in the NSA." To "rein in" is a prepositional phrase & the metaphor is properly to reining in horses (or reindeer).
I beg of you to stop confusing reigning & reining. They are two different animals.
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