Whistleblowers Should Be Allowed A 'Public Accountability' Defense

from the great-ideas dept

We've written numerous times about how one of the major problems of the Espionage Act, which the Obama Administration has used more than twice as many times as all previous administrations combined, is terrible in part because there is no whistleblowing defense. In fact, any and all evidence of the public interest in revealing the information is inadmissible as evidence. Instead, the Act just focuses on whether or not information was released. For hopefully obvious reasons, this has tremendous (and dangerous) implications for free speech and whistleblowing (something President Obama claims to strongly support).

However, Harvard Law professor/Berkman Center guru, Yochai Benkler, has proposed creating a special Public Accountability defense for national security leakers and whistleblowers, which he outlines in a recently published paper. The proposal is well worth reading. As Benkler notes, there is evidence that the most recent round of leaks are important for democracy, because they are challenging the legitimacy of intelligence community and government policies.

If legitimacy crisis, rather than technological change, is the primary driver of the increase since 2002 of the particular class of leaks that is most important in a democracy, then the present prosecutorial deviation from a long tradition of using informal rather than criminal sanctions represents a substantial threat to democracy. In particular, it threatens public accountability for violations of human and civil rights, abuses of emergency powers, and unchecked expansion of the national security establishment itself. Seen in that light, aggressive prosecutions are merely a symptom of the self-same post-9/11 national security overreach that instigated the legitimacy crisis: they manifest the government’s need to shield its controversial actions from public scrutiny and debate.

The deep degree of secrecy and lack of accountability means that these leaks are incredibly important in actually making sure that these government efforts are, in fact, aligned with democratic values:

Secrecy insulates self-reinforcing internal organizational dynamics from external correction. In countering this tendency, not all leaks are of the same fabric. “War story”-type leaks that make an administration look good or are aimed to shape public opinion in favor of an already-adopted strategy or to manipulate support for one agency over another, trial balloons, and so forth, are legion. While these offer the public color and texture from inside the government and are valuable to the press, they do not offer a productive counterweight to internal systemic failures and errors. Some leaks, however, provide a critical mechanism for piercing the national security system’s echo-chamber, countering self-reinforcing information cascades, groupthink, and cognitive biases that necessarily pervade any closed communications system. It is this type of leak, which exposes and challenges core systemic behaviors, that has increased in this past decade, as it did in the early 1970s. These leaks are primarily driven by conscience, and demand accountability for systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance. Their critical checking function derives from the fact that conscience is uncorrelated with well-behaved organizational processes. Like an electric fuse, accountability leaks, as we might call them, blow when the internal dynamics of the system reach the breaking point of an individual with knowledge, but without authority. They are therefore hard to predict, and function like surprise inspections that keep a system honest. By doing so, these leaks serve both democracy and security.

To deal with this, Benkler says that Congress should act and clearly create that "Public Accountability" defense.

Aggressive prosecution of national security whistleblowers and accountability leaks threatens to undermine the checking function that whistleblowing provides. To address this threat, I propose that Congress adopt a new Public Accountability Defense as a general criminal defense, on the model of the necessity defense. The defense would be available to individuals who violate a law on the reasonable belief that by doing so they will expose to public scrutiny substantial violations of law or substantial systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance even where it falls short of formal illegality. It is most important to the leakers themselves, but would also be available to journalists and others who participate in disseminating the leaked information. It would provide a defense not only against specific criminal provisions protecting classified materials, but also against any charge brought for actions arising out of the same set of facts involved in the leak.

The full paper goes into much more details and is well worth the read. It makes it clear that this is not the only, or even the best, way to protect whistleblowers. In fact, more direct whistleblower protections could be quite valuable. But, in general, adding this public accountability defense, similar to a "necessity" defense, both makes sense and would be a useful tool for many people who have good reasons for what they're doing when it comes to leaking information.

Filed Under: chelsea manning, ed snowden, espionage act, leaks, public accountability, public accountability defense, whistleblowing, yochai benkler

Germany's Latest Half-Hearted Response To Snowden's Revelations: Asking Officially For The Names Of All Spies Working At Foreign Embassies

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Germany has had perhaps the hardest time coming to terms with Edward Snowden's revelations of massive spying by the US and its Five Eyes allies. On the one hand, Germans are acutely sensitive to surveillance because of their country's recent history, giving rise to some of the strongest public reactions against US spying amongst any nation. On the other hand, the German government has doubtless benefitted from information gathered by the US, and is therefore reluctant to complain too much about the NSA's activities.

This has led to a curious series of feeble protestations and largely symbolic actions. Now the German government has come up with another weird idea: asking every foreign country to provide a list of their spies that are operating from embassies within Germany:

German newsmagazine Der Spiegel said that the German Foreign Office has been systematically contacting consular authorities from every foreign nation located in Germany. In each case, the foreign consular representatives have been issued formal requests to release "through official diplomatic channels" an exhaustive list of names of their intelligence operatives operating in Germany under diplomatic cover.

Of course, there's no way of knowing whether a country has fully complied with that request, since by definition the spies are currently secret. Well, most of them are; as the post on Intelnews.org quoted above points out:

A small number of these intelligence officers voluntarily make their presence known to the corresponding intelligence agency of their host country, and are thus officially declared and accredited with the government of the host nation. They typically act as points-of-contact between the embassy and the intelligence agency of the host nation on issues of common concern requiring cross-country collaboration or coordination. But the vast majority of intelligence personnel stationed at a foreign embassy or consulate operate without the official knowledge or consent of the host country. Governments generally accept this as a tacit rule in international intelligence work, which is why Berlin's move is seen as highly unusual.

I imagine many countries will simply add a few more names to the list of intelligence officers that they officially acknowledge as a token measure of compliance, and will then go back to spying with the rest (or just bring in some new ones that they don't declare.) All-in-all, this seems yet another move designed to prove to German citizens that their government is "taking things seriously", and "doing something", while at the same time ensuring that the "something" is largely ineffectual and doesn't harm their relationship with the US.

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Filed Under: diplomacy, ed snowden, espionage, germany, spies

Business Insider Ridiculously Blames Ed Snowden For All The Damage The NSA Has Caused

from the blame-the-messenger dept

Business Insider isn't exactly known for its hard hitting journalism, but it takes a fairly special level of ridiculousness to take the Open Technology Institute's report from earlier this week, covering just how much damage the NSA has done to our economy, and blame the whole thing on Ed Snowden. Yet that's exactly what BI's Eugene Kim has done. The title is particularly ridiculous:

New Report Shows Edward Snowden's Revelations Are Seriously Damaging U.S. Tech Firms

It's not Snowden's revelations that are the problem here, it's the NSA's actions. But Kim has no time for that. Let's blame the messenger everyone!

The nonprofit New America Foundation released a new report this week that summarizes the impact of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelation on U.S. tech firms.

Because, you know, it's not like anyone should actually put any of the blame on the folks who, you know, actually caused all of that loss in trust by hacking into networks and services and spying on everyone. No, let's blame the guy who blew the whistle on it. Incredible.

Filed Under: damage, ed snowden, eugene kim, journalism, nsa, surveillance, torture report

Former CIA/NSA Boss Michael Hayden Admits Ed Snowden Was A Whistleblower

from the freudian-slip? dept

Ever since Snowden first leaked the documents he took from the NSA, there's been a (somewhat ridiculous) debate over whether or not he was a "whistleblower" or "a traitor" (or potentially somewhere in between). However, it seems like many fall into one of those somewhat polar opposite positions. To many of us, it's been quite clear that he's a whistleblower. However, to folks like former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden, the view has been somewhat different. After all, Hayden has directly called Snowden a traitor, claimed that he was worse than a variety of spies (including the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen), and publicly fantasized about killing Snowden.

So it seems at least somewhat noteworthy that, in a moment of what appears to be accidental honesty, Hayden admitted that Snowden was really a whistleblower (spotted by Snowden legal advisor Jesselyn Radack). The video above should start at about 21 minutes and 50 seconds. It's of a panel at the Aspen Security conference, and Hayden clearly states:

"When Snowden blew the whistle on the 215 program... that's the metadata stuff, the phone bills up at Ft. Meade...."

Of course, he goes on to insist that the program was clearly perfectly legal based on all of the supposed "oversight." He conveniently leaves out the fact that many of the details of the program were not actually known by those who did the approving. For example, he leaves out that the FISA Court's approvals did not involve a full judicial analysis of the program until after the Snowden revelations (7 years after the program started), and that the original approval was based on a twisted interpretation of an approval of a very different program. He leaves out that the approval in Congress was done with most of Congress not being told how broad the program was and that it captured phone records on just about every phone call. He leaves out that the evidence of abuse of the program or the lack of a working audit system to prevent abuse weren't widely known.

But, still, he does appear to be admitting that Snowden was, in fact, a whistleblower. Even if it's something of a Freudian slip, it's still telling. Furthermore, at the end of his statement, he does further admit that even those approvals across the branches of government is viewed by many in the public as "consent of the governors, not consent of the governed" and seems to at least acknowledge that this is a legitimate concern. I doubt we'll see Hayden coming around to the views of many of us concerning the gross abuses by the intelligence community (many of which happened under his watch), but these do seems like baby steps in the right direction.

Filed Under: cia, ed snowden, michael hayden, nsa, section 215, whistleblower

NSA On Snowden's Claims Of Passing Around Nudie Pics: We Totally Wouldn't Allow That... If We Knew About It

from the but-they-don't,-so dept

Following on the news that Ed Snowden told the Guardian how NSA employees routinely passed around pictures they had intercepted of "extremely attractive" people who were naked, the NSA has issued one of its typical non-denial denials. In an email to Forbes' Kashmir Hill, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines basically said, "If we knew about it, that wouldn't be allowed":

“NSA is a professional foreign-intelligence organization with a highly trained workforce, including brave and dedicated men and women from our armed forces,” said spokesperson Vanee Vines by email. “As we have said before, the agency has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities or professional standards, and would respond as appropriate to any credible allegations of misconduct.”

Except, of course, what nearly every story talking about this has left out is that this is hardly the first such revelation. The NSA has a history and pattern of this kind of thing. Back in 2008, it was revealed that NSA analysts had been listening in on and passing around tapes of Americans having phone sex:

Not only were calls between Americans listened to and recorded on a regular basis, the "good parts" (i.e., phone sex) were sent around to other operators to listen to as well. One of the operators said that on a regular basis messages would be sent around with messages like: "Hey, check this out. There's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out."

Even if we take the NSA at its word that it has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of thing, that actually makes the story even worse. Because it just shows how weak (to non-existent) the NSA's "100% auditability" really is. Keith Alexander insisted that everything done by people with access to these databases was tracked and audited. But it's becoming increasingly clear that that's not true at all. And it makes you wonder just how much abuse is going on that the NSA has no idea about -- potentially for things even worse than listening in on phone sex or passing nudie pics around the office.

Filed Under: abuse, auditability, audits, ed snowden, nsa, nudie pics, surveillance, zero tolerance

Snowden Says NSA Employees 'Routinely' Passed Around Naked Photos That Had Been Intercepted

from the because-of-course-they-would dept

One of the repeated talking points by the NSA for years has been about how there are all these "strict controls" on who has access to data and how it's used. We've seen pretty clear evidence that the NSA's definition of "strict controls" (like so many NSA definitions of plain English words and phrases) is different than what most people consider "strict controls." After all, it insisted for months that Snowden didn't have any access to actual surveillance data... until it was revealed that he did. There were also all those cases of flagrant abuses of the NSA's system that were revealed last fall. The NSA pretended this showed how good they were at catching anyone who abused the system, but the details suggested otherwise. Many of the "caught" abuses only came out years later when the people who abused the systems to spy on lovers and friends admitted to it during interviews.

Keith Alexander insisted that the NSA had "100% audibility" of the actions of their employees and they made sure that no one abused their powers:

"The assumption is our people are just out there wheeling and dealing. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have tremendous oversight over these programs. We can audit the actions of our people 100%, and we do that," he said.

Addressing the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, an annual gathering for the information security industry, he gave a personal example: "I have four daughters. Can I go and intercept their emails? No. The technical limitations are in there." Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility."

Of course, that doesn't explain why so many of the "LOVINT" cases only came out after people self-confessed many years later, rather than through any audits.

Meanwhile, in the latest Ed Snowden interview (done with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger), Snowden reveals that NSA employees routinely would share naked photos that had been intercepted:

“You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they're extremely attractive.

“So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that's great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It's never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?”

Then Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, asked: “You saw instances of that happening?”

“Yeah,” Snowden responded.

“Numerous?”

“It's routine enough, depending on the company that you keep, it could be more or less frequent. These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions."

Of course, none of this is really that new. Way back in 2008, you may recall, that it was revealed that NSA analysts were listening in on pillow talk phone calls between Americans overseas and loved ones back home... and sharing those recordings around the office:

Not only were calls between Americans listened to and recorded on a regular basis, the "good parts" (i.e., phone sex) were sent around to other operators to listen to as well. One of the operators said that on a regular basis messages would be sent around with messages like: "Hey, check this out. There's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out."

That was revealed years before Snowden even worked for the NSA. It would appear that little has changed.

Filed Under: audits, controls, ed snowden, naked pictures, nsa, surveillance

UN Human Rights Commissioner Says Snowden Shouldn't Face A Trial

from the disclosing-human-rights-violations dept

We just noted that the UN has made it clear that mass surveillance and broad data retention likely violates international law. Given that, perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay has said that Ed Snowden should not face a trial, since he was revealing human rights violations:

"Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them," Pillay told a news conference.

"I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation," she said. "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."

While this is unlikely to lead the US to suddenly drop its Espionage Act charges against Snowden (when has the US ever cared about what the UN has to say?), it's yet another example in a growing list of people recognizing just how extreme and isolated the US government's kneejerk reaction was to the Snowden revelations. If the US government were actually willing to be self-critical, it might realize what a mistake it's doing in trying to string up the messenger. We should be examining the appropriateness of the surveillance state, not whether the person who revealed the details should spend the rest of his life in jail.

Filed Under: ed snowden, human rights, navi pillay, un, whistleblowing

NSA Confirms It Has More Snowden Emails; It Just Isn't Going To Release Them

from the stop-asking,-agency-reps-explained dept

Ed Snowden claims he made multiple attempts to bring his concerns about the NSA programs to those occupying "proper channels" positions, only to be ignored or told everything was perfectly legal and to stop worrying about it.

In response, the ODNI (James Clapper's office) released an email from Snowden to the NSA's General Counsel, asking for clarification as to where Executive Orders stood in the legal authority pecking order. This, it was claimed, was Snowden's only attempt to have his concerns addressed and Clapper used this statement/release to portray Snowden as an analyst who simply gathered documents and leaked them, rather than someone who found his whistleblowing routes closed off.

Of course, this statement came from an agency that admitted it couldn't even search its own internal email system. The fact that reps for the agency (Clapper himself for one) had lied about or obscured elements of the NSA's collection programs several times in the recent past made this statement even more questionable.

Journalist Matthew Keys appears to have obtained evidence that the agency has more Snowden emails, including some addressing his concerns, but isn't willing to release them.

In a letter responding to a June 27 FOIA request from The Desk, the NSA’s chief FOIA officer Pamela Phillips wrote that while the agency has retained records related to Snowden’s employment as a contractor, they are being withheld from public examination because, among other things, releasing the records “could interfere with law enforcement proceedings, could cause an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, could reveal the identities of confidential sources or would reveal law enforcement techniques and procedures.”

Other records are being withheld because those documents were “also found to be currently and properly classified…and remains classified TOP SECRET, SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL.”

Interestingly, although Keys' FOIA request did not specify emails dealing with whistleblowing attempts (it simply asked for all emails from Snowden's email address to other government email addresses), the NSA went ahead and preemptively denied this in its FOIA response.

[P]hillips wrote that “there are no e-mails indicating that Mr. Snowden contacted agency officials to raise concerns about NSA programs.”

That's not strictly true, unless the NSA is deciding to read the previously released Snowden email as just a procedural question, rather than considering the question in the context of the leaks.

But there's obviously more information out there. It just seems the NSA will not be releasing it anytime soon. The NSA could clear up this "did he/didn't he" question with a (redacted) dump of Snowden's email account, but it has chosen to hide behind exemptions instead. As long as it considers nearly everything to be critical to "law enforcement proceedings," it is just the NSA's word against Snowden's -- and the NSA's word isn't worth all that much these days.

Clearly, there's more to the story than just Snowden's side. The NSA has gathered plenty of documentation about Snowden's tenure at the agency, but what that actually includes is still limited to speculation. Keys is planning to appeal this decision, but the NSA generally doesn't hand over disputed documents until a federal judge orders it to. The harder the NSA holds onto Snowden's emails, the less trustworthy it appears. If it's so certain Snowden bypassed the proper channels, why not provide evidence to back that assertion up?

Filed Under: ed snowden, foia, matthew keys, nsa

Latest Snowden Revelations Suggest GCHQ Is Just Like 4Chan Trolls, But With More Firepower

from the 4chan-gone-professional dept

So you misspent your teenage years as a 4chan troll and are trying to figure out what to do for a career? Given the latest revelations from the Snowden Files by Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept, you might want to consider taking a job for the UK's equivalent to the NSA, better known as GCHQ. As Greenwald details (and the embedded document below reveals), among GCHQ's capabilities in its Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) are a bunch of things that sound quite a bit like traditional internet trolling efforts. These include juicing internet polls to vote for GCHQ's favorite candidate (remember when moot was voted Time's Person of the Year in an online poll?) as well as flooding email inboxes or websites and even connecting two people on the phone and listening to the conversation. Here are the programs Greenwald highlights:

• “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS)
• “Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH)
• “Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal.” (SILVERLORD)
• “Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.” (MINIATURE HERO)
• “Find private photographs of targets on Facebook” (SPRING BISHOP)
• “A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE)
• “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM)
• “Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR)
• “Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)
• “A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE)
• “Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING)
• “For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE)

Of course, this is not the first time that JTRIG has been called out by Glenn Greenwald for its sneaky online practices. Last time, Greenwald highlighted its practice of putting a bunch of false info online about someone to destroy their reputation. This just digs deeper into some of the other "tricks" in JTRIG's trick bag. Still, it is rather astounding to me just how similar many of the items sound to the kinds of things generally associated with trolling behavior. It really makes you wonder if the folks working in JTRIG are just 4chan trolls who never really had to grow up.

Filed Under: ed snowden, gchq, glenn greenwald, jtrig, surveillance, trolling, uk

FBI Directly Spying On Prominent Muslim-American Politicians, Lawyers And Civil Rights Activists

from the because-of-course-they-did dept

For a little while now, Glenn Greenwald has been promising the next big scoop from the Snowden files, and it came out last night, with detailed reporting on how the FBI was directly spying on a bunch of prominent American politicians, lawyers and civil rights activists... who happened to be Muslim.

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;
• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;
• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;
• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;
• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

This certainly harkens back to the days of spying on Martin Luther King and other human rights activists -- the kind of thing that was supposed to have stopped decades ago. In fact, the driving reason for setting up the FISA Court was to prevent this kind of thing. As Greenwald's report notes, these individuals were on a list of folks who the DOJ had convinced the FISA Court that there was "probable cause" were engaged in terrorism.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

The spreadsheet shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008. Many of the email addresses on the list appear to belong to foreigners whom the government believes are linked to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Among the Americans on the list are individuals long accused of terrorist activity, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

But a three-month investigation by The Intercept—including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process—reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.

Reading through the report, it becomes quite clear that the main reason these individuals on the list is solely because they're Muslim. Of every lawyer who has helped represent defendants in terrorism-related cases, the only one on this list just happens to be Muslim. As the article reminds us, a few years back, Spencer Ackerman did some great reporting, revealing how the FBI was being trained to believe all Muslims were "violent" and "radical" and the impact of that ridiculous training appears to be clear in what this latest report finds. Perhaps the most chilling example of this anti-Muslim attitude is found in a training document revealed in this new report, showing intelligence community members how to "identify" targets for the FISA court. The "placeholder" name says it all: Later in the report, the government tries to deny that there was a FISA Court order concerning at least one of the individuals listed above, even though they were in the spreadsheet. But that level of confusion only suggests that the process is even more of a mess. Whether or not this complied with the law is a distraction. The law shouldn't allow this kind of thing.

A former Justice Department official involved in FISA policy in the Obama Administration says the process contains too many internal checks and balances to serve as a rubber stamp on surveillance of Americans. But the former official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about FISA matters, acknowledges that there are significant problems with the process. Having no one present in court to contest the secret allegations can be an invitation to overreach. “There are serious weaknesses,” the former official says. “The lack of transparency and adversarial process—that’s a problem.”

Indeed, the government’s ability to monitor such high-profile Muslim-Americans—with or without warrants—suggests that the most alarming and invasive aspects of the NSA’s surveillance occur not because the agency breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the law’s permissive contours. “The scandal is what Congress has made legal,” says Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU deputy legal director. “The claim that the intelligence agencies are complying with the laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to the breadth of the laws themselves.”

Much of the rest of the story involves a detailed look at the men listed above, all of which is worth reading, demonstrating just how ridiculous it was to be spying on their communications. The video of Faisal Gill is really worth watching:

Filed Under: agha saeed, americans, asim ghafoor, civil rights, doj, ed snowden, faisal gill, fbi, fisa, fisa court, free speech, glenn greenwald, hooshang amirahmadi, lawyers, muslims, nihad awad, nsa, politicians, surveillance