Wiretapped america pdf free download

It tells the story of two Sudanese children who experienced unimaginable hardships and trauma, but persevered through it, in spite of the odds. It would be a great book to read or listen to as a family if you have older kids… I think it would be a springboard for so much good discussion. Kathrynne and I recently watched The Pursuit of Happyness.

Jesse and I had seen it a long time ago, but I loved watching it again. What have you been reading recently? May 16, My Reading Goals for For , I set a goal of reading 3 books per week — 1 fiction book, 1 non-fiction book, and 1 audiobook each week.

Discussion about this post. Anti-vaxx Chronicles: Prosperity gospel preacher demands unmasked congregation. Guess what happens? Supreme Court leaves unconstitutional Texas abortion ban in place for at least another week 13 hours ago. Ted Cruz is really mad the Library of Congress will stop using certain anti-immigrant terminology 14 hours ago.

Login to your account below. Forgotten Password? Fill the forms bellow to register. Third, should Congress shore up the mechanisms for accountability to ensure that the safeguards imposed on government surveillance powers are followed, and to assure everyone—including Americans at home and foreign customers of U.

Constitution, or both. Section is part of that act. Section allows the government to warrantlessly collect, with the compelled cooperation of electronic service providers, the contents of electronic communications, including telephone calls and emails, where the target is reasonably believed to be a non-U. Under section , intelligence agencies obtain broad topical certifications from the FISC to investigate categories of foreign intelligence.

The targets must be non-U. The directives compel those companies to use the listed selectors to search their available data and identify responsive information, including both metadata and the contents of communications. To be sure, foreign intelligence collection serves important national security goals. Terrorism, weapons proliferation, network attacks on government infrastructure, and counterintelligence are critical priorities.

Today, these are diffuse and complex threats. There are newly powerful political actors on the international stage. Organizations that are not governments and have no physical territory can inflict great harm.

And individuals and diffuse coalitions are increasingly able to traffic in military technology, advanced computer malware, and other dangerous, potentially lethal tools. These challenges are real, and overcoming them are legitimate goals of surveillance. But section goes beyond permitting intelligence-gathering on national security topics. The targets of the surveillance need only be non-U. Intelligence analysts need not have any cause to believe that the target is involved in illegal activity, nor working for a terrorist group or foreign government.

However, foreign targets are not necessarily terrorism suspects, or wrongdoers of any kind. The way politicians talk about section masks the true purpose of the statute. When Americans talk to targets, or talk with friends overseas about targets, 28 the government warrantlessly gathers those phone calls, emails, and chats.

Government officials have consistently insisted that section does not impact Americans 29 and to date, officials have repeatedly refused to estimate the number of Americans whose conversations have been collected.

However, there are reasons to be very concerned. The Washington Post studied a sample data set of information it obtained from Edward Snowden. The data had been collected under section and reviewed and minimized by NSA analysts. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.

Many of the people in the data trove are Americans. More than half of the surveillance files contained names, email addresses, or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.

Insider abuse is another huge problem. A network of rules, regulations, and procedures tries but sometimes fails to stop government employees from using sensitive personal information to spy on their spouses or lovers. Harold Thomas Martin, a former NSA contractor, has been accused of stealing highly sensitive government material related to national defense from the U. Ultimately, the reason people worry about broad surveillance is the danger that private information will be abused for political reasons.

Most Americans know that during the J. Edgar Hoover era, peaceful people like Dr. Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali were under surveillance for First Amendment—protected activities, or for no clear reason at all. A common narrative is that J. Edgar Hoover was a particularly power-hungry man, implying that with a different person in office, these surveillance abuses would not have happened. Presidents throughout the ages knew about FBI spying and took advantage of it.

Theodore Roosevelt started the FBI to spy on anarchists. Abusive surveillance did not die with Hoover and President Nixon.

The Snowden documents revealed that the NSA has developed plans to discredit people who hold politically radical beliefs. The NSA delves into its vast databases of Internet content and transactional data for information it can use to discredit those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through speeches promoting disfavored—but not necessarily violent—political views.

One report details vulnerabilities among its targets, such as viewing pornography, using donations for personal expenses, charging exorbitant speaking fees, or contradicting themselves in public. The document identifies six people and their areas of weakness, gleaned from surveillance. These targets were not necessarily criminals, violent, or even foreigners. In the document one of the six examples of people ripe for discrediting was an American.

Some may say that the days of political spying are behind us. That is not the case. There are many documented examples of groups singled out for their religion or because of political beliefs. The Civil Rights Movement was purported to have been directed by Soviet communists.

Black Lives Matter is surveilled because law enforcement argues there may be violence at rallies organized by the group. The Trump administration justifies targeting Muslims on the grounds that citizens of certain countries can pose a higher national security risk. If such abusive surveillance has been less prevalent in recent decades, it is thanks to the legal rules adopted in , after congressional investigations of surveillance scandals of the s and s. But, since the attacks of September 11, those rules have been steadily neutered.

At the same time, surveillance tools and capabilities have gotten far more powerful. Americans must continue to be vigilant to ensure that our laws are impervious as possible to political abuses, because this is still a danger today.

In December of , for example, the statute that the intelligence community had been misinterpreting to justify bulk collection of domestic telephone call records was set to expire. The five-year expiration date had been built into the statute precisely because it was controversial, and legislators wanted to ensure that they would have to reconsider that grant of surveillance authority.

The rare opportunity of expiration forced Congress to do something, and in a last minute showdown, it reformed the law to make clear that bulk collection of documents, tangible things, and metadata under that authority was not allowed. With the FISA Amendments Act, of which section is a part, scheduled to expire, or sunset, on December 31, , Americans and their elected representatives in Congress once again get a rare opportunity to define permissible surveillance.

With that in mind, there are several key issues areas that call out the most for attention. Under U. Rather, statutes protect certain categories of data from collection or use. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. If the Fourth Amendment applies, then ordinarily the government activity requires a judicially issued warrant based on probable cause.

In , in Smith v. To arrive at that conclusion, the Supreme Court harkened back to the days when callers would talk to a live operator and place calls by asking to be connected to a particular number, meaning information was knowingly and voluntarily disclosed to the phone company.

Miller , the Supreme Court had reasoned that a customer has no expectation of privacy in her bank records, because those are created by and managed by the financial institution. In the years since, the Department of Justice has relied on Smith and Miller to argue that—beyond phone numbers and bank records—if your information is exposed to any third party, then you do not have an expectation of privacy in it, and thus the government can get it without a warrant.

If they are right, searches of personal data stored online is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The expiration of the FISA Amendments Act is an opportunity to ensure that online information Internet users expect will remain private receives legal protection. Stored documents, location information, photographs, email, and online chats should receive privacy protection.

Expanding the definition of electronic surveillance to ensure that collecting these kinds of data is covered by the statute would be a huge step toward protecting people from cavalier, opportunistic, and unnecessary government spying.

This is surprising, because section explicitly is not a counterterrorism statute, and is in fact much broader. Intelligence officials reply that, while the statute allows surveillance for such broad purposes, the actual topics for which the community uses section are more narrow.

The FISC is comprised of federal judges who make classified decisions on surveillance applications. One of these judges must approve a certification as a precursor to section collection. Certifications identify categories of foreign intelligence information regarding which the U. Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence authorize acquisition through the targeting of non-U. Experts believe that these certifications are for gathering foreign intelligence information about foreign governments, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and counterproliferation.

There may also be a cybersecurity certification. Thus, the officials imply, section surveillance only takes place for these important purposes. Therefore, section does not have the broad impact on everyday foreigners that critics say. It would be a mistake to put too much weight on the certifications as limiting section Intelligence officials have not confirmed the subject matter of the certifications, and have never represented that these are or will remain the only certification topics.

Nothing in the statute limits acceptable certifications to these national-security related topics. Any foreign intelligence topic will do. Those decisions are within the discretion of the intelligence community. As a result, average foreigners have legitimate concerns about being spied on even though they are neither terrorists nor agents of foreign powers.

The statute allows these people to be targeted for being of foreign intelligence interest, even if they are not working for a foreign government, not engaged in terrorism, and not posing a threat to U.

However, Americans should not be reassured. Those third parties could include Americans. This makes sense. If you are talking to terrorists, agents will listen in. The difference is in the way the government treats these innocent conversations depending on whether it is a criminal investigation or an intelligence effort. In the criminal wiretap context, the agents have to minimize this eavesdropping by only listening to conversations about the criminal activity under investigation.

For example, if investigating organized crime, the agents have to hang up the phone and not record when the suspects are talking to their parents or planning dinner for the evening. But in the foreign intelligence context, agents gather everything they can about the target and then select interesting and relevant intelligence from the collected materials.

Some agencies have access to the raw data and can search it for information—related and unrelated to the foreign intelligence topic for which it was collected.

Thus, the broader the surveillance of foreigners for general foreign intelligence purposes, the more Americans are spied on, too. Moreover, under section , the government is collecting international communications even when the foreign intelligence target is not a party to the conversation. Foreigners who are not targets are being spied on.

While incidental collection of information on Americans may be palatable for criminal or counterterrorism purposes, it is out of line for general foreign intelligence collection.

Invading the privacy of Americans talking with foreigners targeted for their knowledge of topics such as trade disputes and the price of oil goes too far. Invading the privacy of Americans talking with foreigners about foreign intelligence targets is extreme. This is especially true because foreign intelligence targets are not only individuals, but organizations, too. An Internet transaction might contain multiple messages—the agency refers to this bundle of messages as a multi-communications transaction MCT.

An MCT could be something like your email inbox, which contains many, many messages. The collection of MCTs further removes the connection between the communicants and the intended target, because any communication that is embedded within a transaction that happens to include a communication that so much as mentions the targeted selector can get swept up.

Narrow selectors are a good thing. But, email addresses and IP addresses still can lead to very broad collection. Internet protocol addresses may be shared by many individuals or entities who are not themselves foreign intelligence targets. In short, multiple people, none of whom is a target, may nevertheless be monitored because of the topic of their conversation, so long as one of the parties to the conversation is a foreigner located overseas. What is particularly surprising for non-experts is that section collection is not only about broad foreign intelligence interests.

In this way, section gives a great amount of surveillance power to criminal investigators. That means showing probable cause to a judge, demonstrating that the surveillance was necessary, and complying with minimization and reporting procedures. With section , however, that agent can collaborate with an intelligence agent to wiretap the suspect with the intention of bringing criminal charges, so long as another significant reason for the wiretapping is intelligence gathering.

Not only does section enable surveillance about a broad swath of topics, it is also loose about who may be targeted. In the criminal context, courts ensure that people who are wiretapped are the right people.

This oversight serves two purposes. It makes agents explain the reasons for believing that watching the target will reveal information to which the government is entitled. Courts assess whether the targeting procedures fit the statutory definition of targeting procedures, but they do not oversee targeting decisions.

Judicial review is an important check on surveillance power. Without it, improper or ill-advised surveillance is far more likely. For example, the public recently learned that the NSA targeted a peaceful New Zealand pro-democracy activist under the PRISM surveillance program based on erroneous claims by the New Zealand government that the man was plotting violent attacks.

Wiretapping innocent people is nothing new or surprising.