Domestic spying lawsuit targets Bush, Cheney, NSA

Domestic spying lawsuit targets Bush, Cheney, NSA

Nick Juliano

Privacy advocates are trying to shut down the US government's "shadow network of surveillance devices" used to spy on its citizens with a lawsuit aimed at President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, the National Security Agency and dozens of current and former government officials.

Plaintiffs who had been pursuing a suit against AT&T have shifted their focus to government officials to circumvent Congress's grant of immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is continuing to pursue its case against AT&T.

"Today we've opened a second front in our battle to stop the NSA's illegal surveillance," EFF attorney Kevin Bankston told reporters during a conference call Thursday.

Based on news reports and information it obtained from former AT&T employee Mark Kline, EFF alleges a massive surveillance apparatus has been trained on Americans to vacuum up information on virtually every telephone call, e-mail and Internet search to feed a massive database maintained by the NSA.

8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.

9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks.

Information on the lawsuit and a link to the 55-page filing is available on EFF's Web site.

The lawsuit outlines 17 counts, including alleged violations of the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws. Additional defendants targeted by the suit include former White House counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former NSA director and current CIA director Michael Hayden, Cheney chief of staff David Addington, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and up to 100 unnamed government or private sector officials who participated in the surveillance.

Bankston said the lawsuit's aim is to "obtain personal accountability from the architects" of the warrantless surveillance and to say to future government officials, "If you break the law and violate people's privacy, there will be consequences."

Bush's decision to ignore FISA's warrant requirements and have the NSA turn its surveillance apparatus on Americans after 9/11 was first revealed by the New York Times in December 2005, leading the president to acknowledge what he called the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" a few months later. The TSP, as Bush described it, authorized eavesdropping on phone calls in which at least one party was located overseas.

Bankston said the illegal surveillance "absolutely" goes beyond that program, citing admissions from government officials that the TSP was just part of the government's post-9/11 surveillance expansion along with subsequent reports in other newspapers outlining government efforts to gather financial records and online transactions to construct data-mining databases.

Whether the latest lawsuit will succeed in ending the NSA's domestic surveillance programs remains to be seen.

Previous efforts to learn more about or achieve judicial overview of the ultra secret programs have been scuttled through a combination of state secrets and executive privilege claims, and EFF expects to face those same types of arguments this time around.

Congress also has been complicit. When it adopted several amendments to FISA earlier this summer, the Democratic-led Congress gave in to Bush's demands that the updated spy law provide immunity for participating telecoms like AT&T.

Bankston said EFF is arguing that the immunity grant itself was unconstitutional and has not given up its original case, Hepting v. AT&T, but the group is pursuing the separate case against the government officials to avoid getting bogged down with the fight over immunity.

The main goal, he said, "is to dismantle the NSA's nationwide spying network."

Bush is committing Political terrorism

Jay Rockefeller on FISA: Bush is committing Political terrorism: Cloture vote fails

By: John Amato

Download | Play Download | Play

Jay: Under the tortured logic of protecting America against terrorism, the WH has decided to exercise frankly its own form of political terrorism and has taken the FISA bill hostage.

Those are powerful words from a man that was helping the telecoms to get immunity. Cheney/Bush and McConnell’s actions have even pushed him over the edge.

Jane Hamsher:

Cloture vote fails, 48-45, with Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor voting with the Republicans.

McCONNELL: Urges everyone to vote against 30 day extension. Said they may have to do a “short extension” but the President has said he will veto a 30 day.

REID: House will pass a 30 day extension tomorrow. People crying “wolf” here a bit too often.

Glenn Greenwald

Victories of any kind are so rare that I’m reluctant to dampen the enthusiasm — and it is notable that, regardless of their motives, Senate Democrats did actually manage to do something different than the White House ordered them to do, so that’s good. But it’s important to emphasize what really happened here today, and what didn’t happen…read on

Chris Dodd: “I Will Continue to Fight Retroactive Immunity with all the Strength Any One Senator Can Muster “

NSA 'may not realize' it collected info on innocent Americans, top US spy says

NSA 'may not realize' it collected info on innocent Americans, top US spy says

David Edwards and Nick Juliano

Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation's top intelligence official said Tuesday.

"You may not even realize it's in the database because you do lots of collection," Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said, referring to the "inadvertent collection" of Americans' communications through a vast surveillance program instituted after 9/11.

An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a National Security Agency database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.

"If it's foreign intelligence, it's treated the way we discussed," and the government works to secure a warrant against anyone within the US it has reason to believe deserves further surveillance, McConnell said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. "If it's now recognized as incidental, it would be expunged from the database."

The full scope of Americans who have been inadvertently and unknowingly snared in the warrantless wiretapping program remains murky and elusive. On Tuesday, Sen. Russ Feingold pressed McConnell on whether recent updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized "bulk collection" on calls from abroad into America.

"It would be authorized, if it were physically possible to do so," McConnell said. "But the purpose of the authorization is for foreign intelligence."

Feingold pressed, "So there is no language actually prohibiting this?"

As long as the communication is "foreign, in a foreign country, for intelligence purposes," there's not, McConnell said.

McConnell told the El Paso Times last month that "100 or less" US persons were targets of foreign intelligence gathering. But that number only represents those for whom the government received a warrant to spy on, McConnell clarified in later congressional testimony.

The intelligence director then insisted that a "small" number of Americans had been spied on -- purposefully or not -- although he noted that designation should be judged in context of the "billions of transactions" monitored by the NSA.

President Bush initiated a warrantless wiretapping scheme he later referred to as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" soon after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Details on the early days of the program and its legal justifications remain out of view as the White House has steadfastly refused to hand over documents on the program requested by congressional judiciary and intelligence committees.

Just before a month-long summer recess -- and in a week when Republicans raised terror fears with a "bogus" bomb plot aimed at the Capitol -- the Democratic Congress approved sweeping new wiretapping powers that critics say sweepingly authorized the extra-legal powers President Bush had claimed for himself.

The Protect America Act, as spying-expansion was called, set a six-month limit on its expansions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. McConnell has been scuffing the corridors of Capitol Hill since early last week pushing Congress to not only make permanent the FISA expansions, but to give the government more authority and immunize telecommunications companies that have helped the government collect data on its citizens.

McConnell's testimony has been carefully crafted to give lawmakers the impression that analysts are accessing little information beyond their specific surveillance of known terror targets, but a careful parsing of his statements reveals a program that could be collecting far more information that the administration has acknowledged.

"They obtain an enormous amount [of information] ... that they can search by computer," Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, told RAW STORY.

McConnell stresses the "minimization" efforts that are in place requiring that information unrelated to terror investigations be expunged from national security databases. But his clarification that NSA analysts must first examine the collected data leaves open the question of how much information on Americans continues to be subject to data-mining efforts of information electronically swept into government databases, Graves said.

Analysts, Graves said, are trying to examine "the ocean of communication, to look in it for grains of said, when the vast, vast, vast majority of communications are innocent." The following video is from C-SPAN 3, broadcast on September 25.

In the following video, Senator Feingold is critical of 'broad and ambiguous' spying law