Bên ngoài mặt, trong nỗ lực lôi kéo và đánh lạc hướng quần chúng, nhà nuớc Mỹ và đám quốc hội trình diển màn kịch "vận- động- đạo -luật- giảm -quyền- NSA- nhưng-đành- thất- bại- vì- thiếu- số- phiếu khít khao", ra vẻ rằng "đại biểu dân đã quan tâm và rất dân chủ". Đồng thời "giải mật" một số thông tin tài liệu à Snowden đã tung ra truớc đó !!! Với lời thú nhận chính thức "lỗi nói dối" của giám đốc cơ quan NSA- nhưng không bị phạt hay cách chức.
Mặt khác lặng lẽ thay đổi phương pháp và kỹ thuật theo dõi nghe lén trộm cắp một cách chặt chẽ kín đáo hơn với dáng vẻ và ngôn ngữ "phù thủy" hơn, tạo ấn tượng rằng Nhà Nuớc đang lặng lẽ "thu hồi hành động tội phạm"... Nhưng chúng ta có ngây ngô cả tin đến vậy chăng?
Govt Quietly Prepares for NSA Power to Be Curbed
 | US Senators Rail Against NSA Practices | |
| Feds Declassify Court Order on NSA Surveillance as Pressure Builds | |
| For Congress, 'It's Classified' Means 'None of Your Business' Dù như thế nào, cho đến nay chúng ta cũng thấy rõ CHÍNH SỰ THỨC TỈNH và ĐỒNG THUẬN ỦNG HỘ CÔNG KHAI của QUẦN CHÚNG ĐẾN VỚI VIỆC LÀM CỦA SNOWDEN, đã buộc bọn nhà nước phải TẠM DẤU LẠI NANH VUỐT CHÓ SÓI... Nhìn lại tiến trình từ Hong Kong, chúng ta thấy: Thứ nhất Trung Quốc lặng lẽ giãn nở gọng kềm thông tin với quần chúng sau khi mặc nhiên để báo chí chính qui lên án Mỹ và ca ngợi hành động của Snowden, đồng thời vội vã tiễn chân Snowden để tránh "hậu họa" dấy lên từ bên trong xã hội Trung Quốc! Thứ hai, Nga khác Trung Quốc, đang trên đà dân sự hóa xã hội và chính trị duới áp lực của quần chúng nhận thức sau sự sụp đổ của Soviet và sự sai lầm của chế độ Boris Yeltsin, buộc Putin và Nga vào thế phải dùng "đòn ông đập lưng ông" (nhân quyền pháp trị) để ứng xử với Mỹ thay vì dùng Snowden để "trao đổi quyền lợi" với Mỹ, một điều quá hấp dẫn với Putin và giới chính trị Nga, nhưng đành cắn răng không thể thực hiện, và phải đóng vai trò trả lời lấp lung vừa "tôn trọng nhân quyền pháp trị -công pháp vừa bảo vệ vị thế quyền lực nhà nuớc Nga Mỹ". Vấn đề then chốt còn lại, là liệu áp lực quần chúng có gia tăng cường độ đủ mạnh để buộc nhà nuớc phải mặc nhiên để Snowden tự do như Daniel Ellsberg hay không? Vì thế lực nhà nuớc, Mỹ nói riêng và tất cả nói chung, không thể buông tha Snowden như một chiến thắng trong hành động thách thức quyền lực quốc gia nhà nuớc.Chúng phải có phương pháp và mức độ trừng trị để làm điển hình; và đây là "trọng tâm thuơng luợng phía bên trong giữa Mỹ và Nga hay giữa Obama và Putin" trong những ngày sắp đến Đối với cao trào tự do công lý dân quyền, chỉ có sự tự do của Snowden mới xác định đúng mức một chiến thắng. Bất cứ hệ quả nào xấu hơn sự tự do bình thuờng của Snowden đều là mầm của thất bại, vì đó chính là buớc củng cố vị trí nhà nuớc của bọn cầm quyền. Chiến thắng này chỉ có đuợc khi quần chúng cương quyết bảo vệ Snowden với một cao trào rộng lớn và mạnh mẽ hơn, một điều khó có thể xảy ra trong tương lai gần dựa theo phản ứng của quần chúng hiện nay đối với sự kiện Manning cũng như nỗ lực đánh lạc thông tin của guồng máy báo chí chính qui khổng lồ Âu Mỹ đang thực hiện. Nhưng ai biết đuợc sức mạnh quần chúng khi họ thức tỉnh thì chỉ cần qua một đêm, và rạng sáng là một trang sử mới. Gia đình Shuharto, gia đình Mubarak, Morsi của Ai Cập đã chứng kiến sức mạnh này. Và Mỹ đang chứng kiến truớc sức mạnh của con nguời mảnh mai Edward Snowden! Và mỗi cá nhân chúng ta có thể kiểm nghiện sức mạnh của sự tỉnh thức này: Động lực nào khiến chúng ta dám đang làm một cách thản nhiên những gì ngày truớc chúng ta phải lo sợ, do dự, cân nhắc, và chùn chân không thể thực hiện? nkptc ------------------------  With a chart listing thwarted acts of terrorism, Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein question top Obama administration officials on Capitol Hill. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP A surveillance document declassified on Wednesday details the ability of National Security Agency algorithms and "technical personnel" to search through the NSA's vast databases of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans. Disclosed before the contentious Senate judiciary committee hearing on Wednesday, the April 25 document from the secret surveillance court known as the Fisa court bolstered assertions made by top intelligence officials about the restrictions on their ability to sift through the so-called "metadata" they collect in bulk. But civil libertarians criticized the court's finding that mass collection of Americans' phone records is "relevant" to a terrorism investigation – the central contention for the legality of the bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The heavily redacted document, from April, sets out the rules that govern a related order covering the Verizon telephone provider, published by the Guardian in June and provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. "NSA shall ensure, through adequate and appropriate technical and management controls, that queries of the BR [business records] metadata for intelligence analysis purposes will be initiated only using a selection term that has been RAS-approved," former Fisa court judge Roger Vinson wrote on April 25, using an acronym for "reasonable articulable suspicion", the legal standard NSA must meet to search the database – a standard judges do not certify the NSA has met before each search. Senior US intelligence officials have repeatedly cited that standard of evidence as proof that they do not actually spy on Americans, claiming that the actual spying occurs when NSA searches through its database, rather than the basic fact of the bulk records collection. But Vinson also wrote that the NSA's "technical personnel may query the BR metadata using selection terms that have not been RAS-approved … and may share the results of those queries with other authorized personnel responsible for these purposes, but the results of any such queries will not be used for intelligence analysis purposes". A footnote in the document specifies that "technical personnel responsible for NSA's corporate infrastructure and the transmission of BR metadata" may handle the phone records data without the "special training" in court-ordered restrictions undergone by NSA intelligence analysts. They do not require "reasonable articulable suspicion" to do so. NSA algorithms, and not just human analysts, search through the databases. Vinson specified that searches through NSA's phone records database can occur "either by manual analyst query or through the automated query process described below." "This automated query process queries the collected BR metadata (in a 'collection store') with RAS-approved selection terms and returns the hop-limited results from those queries to a 'corporate store,'" Vinson wrote. "Hops" is a technical term to describe degrees of connectedness between people or their data. The specifics of the automated process were not disclosed in the public document. Among the oversight mechanisms spelled out in the Fisa court's order is a requirement that during the 90-day lifespan of each such order, the NSA provide the court with a "statement of the number of instances … in which NSA has shared, in any form, results from the queries of the BR metadata that contain US person information, in any form, with anyone outside NSA." Successive Fisa court judges have permitted the program's renewal for seven years. NSA statements on disseminating US person information remain secret. Vinson's order also accepted a key legal claim of the government: that the bulk, ongoing collection of millions of Americans' phone data was relevant to ongoing terrorism and espionage cases, the standard spelled out under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. "It can be things that will lead you to things you need," Cole said, arguing that the actual surveillance occurs not when NSA collects the phone records but when NSA analysts sift through it. Senators of both parties on the Judiciary Committee criticized that logic. "I assure you as a recovering lawyer myself there is no context in civil discovery or otherwise to take in information from each and every American who owns a telephone," senator Mike Lee (Republican, Utah) said. Leahy questioned the "limits under this theory" and wondered why they permit NSA to also collect firearms records, bookmarked Internet searches, medical records or credit card information. "I may not need to collect all the credit card numbers" to know if a terrorist suspect is purchasing something potentially dangerous, Cole answered. In addition to calling the bulk surveillance "relevant" to an investigation, Vinson also accepted the government's claim that the bulk, ongoing phone records collection amounted to "tangible things [that] could be obtained with a subpoena duces tecum issued by a court of the United States in aid of a grand jury investigation. Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, criticized Vinson's reasoning. "Saying that the metadata of all Americans' phone calls, including ones that haven't happened yet, are 'relevant' to an investigation stretches that word beyond any meaning," Jaffer told the Guardian. "Clearly Congress intended for Section 215 of the Patriot Act to be a tool for investigating terrorists and spies, not for tracking the communications of all Americans. No prosecutor would seek a grand jury subpoena of this scope and no judge in a criminal or civil procedure would enforce one." --  NSA deputy director John C Inglis testifies during a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images The bipartisan leaders of a powerful Senate committee questioned the truthfulness of the US intelligence community in a heated Wednesday morning hearing as officials conceded that their controversial bulk phone records collection of millions of Americans was not "the most important tool" – contradicting statements they previously gave to Congress. Two senators said they now planned to introduce new legislation before the August recess that would significantly transform the transparency and oversight of the bulk surveillance program. The chairman of the committee has already advocated for ending the bulk phone records collection and plans his own legislative push to shut it down. Just before the hearing began, the US director of national intelligence declassified and released documents shedding more light on how the bulk surveillance occurs. Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, denounced the move as "ad hoc transparency." Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said: "We need straightforward answers, and I'm concerned we're not getting them." Leahy, joined by ranking Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, criticised director of national intelligence James Clapper for making untruthful statements to Congress in March about the bulk phone records collection on Americans, and NSA director Keith Alexander for overstating the usefulness of that collection for stopping terrorist attacks. Grassley called Clapper's recent apology to senator Ron Wyden and the intelligence community "especially disturbing". "Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official," Grassley said. "Especially on a matter of such importance." Clapper was not at the hearing. Instead, NSA deputy director John Inglis, deputy attorney general James Cole and FBI deputy director Sean Joyce strongly defended the bulk phone records collection. "We must have the dots to connect the dots," Joyce said. Dianne Feinstein, a judiciary committee member who also chairs the Senate intelligence committee, defended the officials. "We would place the nation in jeopardy if we were to end these two programs," she said. But Leahy pressed the intelligence and law enforcement officials to detail how many terrorist plots the bulk phone records collection on millions of Americans, first disclosed by the Guardian thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, had disrupted. "That's a very difficult question to answer," Inglis testified. "That's not how these programs work." Yet two of the three documents declassified by Clapper on Wednesday claim the phone records database was critical to stopping terrorist attacks. The documents, four-page summaries of the bulk collection programmes provided to Congress in 2009 and 2011 before key votes on surveillance laws, state that the bulk phone records collection and a separate internet communications collection effort "significantly strengthen the intelligence community's early warning system for the detection of terrorists and discovery of plots against the homeland." The NSA has previously claimed that 54 terrorist plots had been disrupted "over the lifetime" of the bulk phone records collection and the separate program collecting the internet habits and communications of people believed to be non-Americans. On Wednesday, Inglis said that at most one plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone. "There is an example that comes close to a 'but for' example," Inglis said. "Each tool plays a different role," Joyce said. Discussing the phone records bulk collection, he said: "I'm not saying it's the most important tool." Senators Wyden and Mark Udall, members of the intelligence committee, have repeatedly said that there is no evidence that the controversial bulk phone records collection has disrupted any terrorist plots. They criticized intelligence officials for conflating to Congress the value of the phone records database and the internet communications surveillance. Last week, the House of Representatives came within seven votes of defunding the program. "We are open to re-evaluating this program in ways that creates greater public confidence and trust," testified Robert Litt, the top lawyer for the US intelligence community. After the hearing, Wyden said he remained deeply concerned. "On issue after issue, too many of the leaders in the intelligence community have not just kept the Congress in the dark," he said in a CNN interview. "Congress have been given inaccurate statements and in effect been actively misled." Wyden and Udall argued Tuesday night on the Senate floor for ending the bulk phone records collection. They accused intelligence officials, including Clapper, of deceiving Congress about the extent of abuses of NSA's databases, which Clapper described as accidental. The White House, which condemned disclosures in the Guardian on Wednesday about another NSA program, said Barack Obama would meet personally with a group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress on Thursday to discuss "key programs under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act". Before the Wednesday hearing, the first in the Senate on the bulk NSA surveillance, Clapper declassified new documents about the programs. One of them was a heavily redacted April order from the Fisa court on the rules for NSA to handle the bulk phone records it collects, complementing the one published by the Guardian in June. The order obliges the NSA to ensure that it has a "reasonable articulable suspicion" before making any query of the phone records database. Judges are not required to certify that the NSA has met that standard before each search. The order also authorizes the NSA's "technical personnel" to query the database using terms that fall outside the definition of reasonable articulable suspicion, "but the results of any such queries will not be used for intelligence analysis purposes". A footnote in the document specifies that "technical personnel responsible for NSA's corporate infrastructure and the transmission of BR metadata" may handle the phone records data without the "special training" in court-ordered restrictions undergone by NSA intelligence analysts. They do not require "reasonable articulable suspicion" to do so. The order also authorises searches by automated means. Two senators said they would introduce legislation as early as Thursday that would change the transparency rules and the structure of Court oversight around the bulk surveillance. Franken said he would introduce a bill forcing the NSA to disclose how many Americans have had their data collected, and how many Americans' data the NSA has analysed once placed in its databases. Last year, the NSA denied it had any way of estimating that number, and told Wyden that providing it would violate Americans' privacy. Documents published by the Guardian that Snowden provided, however, revealed an NSA analytic tool called Boundless Informant that displays the country of origin of collected communications. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said he would also submit a second bill on Thursday to significantly reform the Fisa court process, including the introduction of security-cleared special advocates, to challenge the position of the administration. He said the Fisa court needed to become more adversarial. "I think the current design of the Fisa courts is stacked against the protection of our civil liberties and can be improved and enhanced, without sacrificing either speed or security." Govt Quietly Preparing for NSA Powers to Be Curbed Posted By Jason Ditz On July 31, 2013 @ 7:06 pm In News | No Comments Publicly the Obama Administration continues to insist that there is nothing untoward about the massive NSA surveillance schemes, and that every bit of it is absolutely vital to national security.  Privately, however, the administration sees the writing on the wall. Public outrage at the surveillance is already trickling into Congressional votes, with Justin Amash (R – MI) nearly getting an amendment to defund NSA surveillance put into the military spending bill. Sooner or later, the NSA’s wings will be clipped.Officials are gearing up for the day when the NSA schemes, uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden, will have some actual limitations associated with them, and are cozying up to some in Congress trying to keep the juiciest of the powers intact. And even before that day of reckoning comes in Congress, some of the most obscene excesses are already being trimmed back a bit, with the Justice Department finally admitting in a filing this week that if they intend to use NSA surveillance against someone in court they would have to tell the defendants about it. That should be obvious, as that’s how pre-trial disclosure has always worked. The Justice Department had previously argued that disclosing information about the evidence to be used against detainees would threaten the secret surveillance schemes. Analysts familiar with the situation say that the courts probably would’ve eventually shot down the Justice Department’s old position, which it now claims was “never the government’s position” to begin with, though they say without the Snowden leaks it could’ve been quite some time before the government stepped back from that stance. Either way, the government is trying to get out of doing so in the current case by promising not to use that evidence |
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