The bulk collection of phone records of Americans by the National Security Agency has been found to likely violate the Fourth Amendment.
Judge Richard Leon ruled Monday that the NSA’s mass collection of “metadata” falls under the Constitution’s prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. The ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is viewed as a blow to the Obama administration.
Observers say the case will very likely go all the way to the Supreme Court.
“The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” Judge Leon wrote in his decision. “Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
The ruling by the judge says the lawsuit brought by a conservative lawyer and the father of a Navy soldier is likely to be successful. The judge did grant a reprieve to the NSA by placing his order to stop the NSA collection efforts on hold until the government can appeal.
Amid public outrage over reports that the NSA has been collection massive amount of information about average Americans as part of their bulk collection spying efforts, the head of the National Security Agency is asking Congress to not change their ability to spy on a global scale.
General Keith Alexander pleaded with the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that the risk to America from global threats is growing every single day. He said that the bulk collection efforts of the NSA provide vital information that intelligence services can use to stop terrorist activity both at home and abroad.
Gen. Alexander told the Senators that bulk collection was the only way to “connect the dots” between foreign terror threats and any potential terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The program was revealed as part of the massive document release from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Gen. Alexander admitted to Senators the NSA would be open to finding a better solution with the help of technology companies.
Today’s release from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden says that the NSA was spying on users through the cookies that web browsers save to customize commercial space on sites like Google.
According to an internal presentation slide showed that when companies follow internet consumers to better serve advertising it opens the door for government tracking. The slides suggest the NSA was already using the tracking to follow targets.
Online privacy advocates had been claiming for years the tracking tools called “cookies” left open the possibility for violations of web user privacy.
Cookies can allow the NSA to track a single individual’s communications among all internet transactions. Cookies are not just reserved for browsers on desktop or laptop computers. Smartphone apps that run on iPhones and Android devices, even the Apple and Google operating systems, track the location of each device sometimes without alerting the device’s owner.
The slides did not say how the NSA obtained access to Google’s tracking system.
The National Security Agency has been tracking users of online gaming since at least 2007.
A document released by NSA leaker Edward Snowden titled “Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments” says the NSA and their British counterpart would analyze in-game communications for the possibility they were being used by terrorist groups.
“[Certain] games offer realistic weapons training (what weapon to use against what target, what ranges can be achieved, even aiming and firing), military operations and tactics, photorealistic land navigation and terrain familiarization, and leadership skills,” the document reads. “Some of the 9-11 pilots had never flown a real plane, they had only trained using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.”
The Guardian newspaper reports that agents even entered the virtual words as gamers in an attempt to extract information from members. The newspaper said so many agents in different groups were working on the program that they needed a ‘deconfliction’ group to make sure they weren’t spying on each other.
In addition to games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, the NSA reportedly also spied on the XBOX Live network hosted by Microsoft that has over 48 million users.
A report says the National Security Agency has been tracking the website use of anyone they consider having a “radical view” with the intent of releasing the information to discredit them.
A document released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden shows the agency tracking two Muslims with “radical beliefs” and marking websites they visited that are not in line with strict Islamic teachings.
Online privacy advocates Privacy International said the revelations from Snowden of the NSA’s activities should cause major concern.
“This is not the first time we’ve seen [United] States use intimate and private information of an individual who holds views the government doesn’t agree with, and exploit this information to undermine an individual’s message,” the group said in a statement to the BBC.
None of the men listed in the report as being tracked by the NSA were accused of being directly involved in terrorism or with a terrorist group.
After coming out as one of the harshest critics of the United States National Security Agency’s spying revelations, reports have surfaced that Brazil was actively carrying out counter-intelligence activities against the U.S. and others.
Brazil’s justice minister said that his spies were acting in a lawful manner when they followed around diplomats from the U.S., Russia and other nations while they were engaging in daily activities.
Jose Eduardo Cardoso took great pains to say the situations in his nation and the actions taken by the NSA were not the same.
“I see completely different situations. What happened in relation to Brazil and other countries was a violation. Emails and phone calls were violated, which is an affront to Brazilian sovereignty,” Cardoso told a press conference.
The U.S. State Department said the discovery reported in Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo newspaper proves what they’ve been saying all along regarding all nations conducting spy activity on diplomats of other nations.
The National Security Agency recorded information from more than 124 billion phone calls during a 30-day period earlier this year including more than 3 billion calls from sources inside the United States.
Top-secret documents released to various media outlets show details of the NSA’s “Boundless Informant” program. The software permits a user to select any country on a world map and access all of the information regarding calls captured in that region.
European newspapers such as the U.K. Guardian and Der Spiegel showed screenshots of the program highlighting where most of the calls were captured during a 30-day time frame.
Afghanistan led the way with almost 22 billion calls captured followed by Pakistan’s 13.76 billion. The middle east was also a hot spot for captures with 1.74 billion traced to Iran and 1.64 from Jordan.
The NSA also captured more than 6.28 billion calls from India.
The most disturbing part of the program was that along with spying on calls from inside their own country, the NSA was spying on allies including 61 million calls tracked from Spain and more than 70 million in France.
