Several lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, questioned the legality of the phone records program. Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, questioned how many criminal cases federal investigators have filed using information from the phone records program.
There “may be one,” said James Cole, deputy attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice.
“One criminal case?” Poe said. “The program is an invasion of personal privacy, and it’s justified on the idea that we’re going to capture these terrorists. The evidence that you’ve told is all this collection has resulted in one bad guy having criminal charges filed on him.”
Cole defended the phone records program, saying the information it provides helps with large investigations. “The point of the statute is not to do criminal investigations,” he said. “The point of the statute is to do foreign intelligence investigations.”
Officials with the Obama administration haven’t accurately described the NSA programs to Congress, said Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican. “We feel that we have been blatantly deceived on what some of these programs have done,” he said.
Congress should pass the USA Freedom Act, an NSA reform bill that has several Judiciary Committee sponsors, said David Cole, a constitutional law professor at the Georgetown University Law School. The bill would allow the DOJ and NSA to collect U.S. phone records only when they are connected to a suspected terrorist.
“That is how the administration sold what they were asking Congress to do” when it asked for new authority in the Patriot Act to collect information relevant to a terrorism investigation, he said. “I don’t think a single member of Congress thought, ‘what we mean by that is there are no limits on the business records that you can get.’”
But Steven Bradbury, a former DOJ official, defended the phone records program. Some NSA reform proposals “would expose the nation to vulnerability by substantially weakening or even destroying outright the effectiveness” of the phone records program, he said.
Proposals to add a civil liberties lawyer at the surveillance court would slow down the collection-approval process there, and “would, I fear, prove dangerously unworkable in the event of the next catastrophic attack on the United States,” he added.
“Made in the U.S.A. is no longer a badge of honor, but a basis for questioning the integrity and the independence of U.S.-made technology,” Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council said. “Many countries are using the NSA’s disclosures as a basis for accelerating their policies around forced localization and protectionism.”
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2094420/nsa-surveillance-already-hurting-us-vendors-trade-group-says.html
NSA admits to spying on members of Congress:
The National Security Agency “probably” collects phone records of members of Congress and their staffs, a senior Justice Department official conceded Tuesday.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole buckled under questioning from multiple lawmakers during a House Judiciary Committee hearing reviewing proposals to reform the NSA’s surveillance activity.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, began by asking Peter Swire, a member of the president’s handpicked surveillance review board, whether lawmakers’ numbers are included in the agency’s phone-records sweeps. Swire protested that he was not a government official and couldn’t best answer the question, but said he was unaware of any mechanism that “scrubbed out” member phone numbers from the agency’s data haul.
Lofgren’s time expired and Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, then put the question to Cole.
“Mr. Cole, do you collect 202, 225, and four digits afterwards?” Issa asked, referring to the prefixes used to call congressional offices.
“We probably do, Mr. Congressman,” Cole responded. “But we’re not allowed to look at any of those, however, unless we have reasonable, articulable suspicion that those numbers are related to a known terrorist threat.”
http://www.nationaljournal.com/technology/feds-nsa-probably-spies-on-members-of-congress-20140204
Schools are encouraging kids to spy on parents:
Marinette, WI – Some parents of students at Marinette Middle School are upset after they say their kids were forced to play an inappropriate game at school.
The game is called “Cross the Line” and many outraged parents believe that it does just that.
Getting a group of 5th-8th graders together and organized to participate in a fun (spying) game that asked students to step forward to answer “yes” to a series of highly personal questions.
Questions like…
Do your parents drink?
Do you cut yourself?
Has anyone in your family been to jail?
Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?
Do you or your parents do drugs?
Unbelievably, school administrators believed that this “game” would help the kids to be better and kinder friends. “The intent of this activity was to build stronger, more respectful relationships among students,” said Principal Shawn Limberg. The “game” was part of an anti-bullying program.
Of course, Limberg also said the “game” was completely voluntary, an assertion that was disputed by one young girl who told her mother she’d have to go to in-school suspension if she didn’t participate.
http://wtaq.com/news/articles/2014/feb/01/marinette-middle-school-parents-upset-over-game-at-school/
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-great-lie-nsa-phone-spying-have.html