more surveillance power! more!

1-25-14    The Central Intelligence Agency is building a vast database of international money transfers that includes millions of Americans' financial and personal data, officials familiar with the program say.

The program, which collects information from U.S. money-transfer companies including Western Union, is carried out under the same provision of the Patriot Act that enables the National Security Agency to collect nearly all American phone records, the officials said.     https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-headline-available-1384473347

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3-7-17  Laughing when asked about it, Hayden denied the claims.  “I can tell you that these tools would not be used against an American,” he said.  Colbert continued to press, asking why these measures wouldn’t be used against the country’s citizens.

“There are some bad people in the world who have Samsung TVs too,” retorted Hayden.  “There are people out there that you want us to spy on.  You want us to have the ability to actually turn on that listening device inside the TV to learn that person’s intentions.”  http://ew.com/tv/2017/03/07/late-show-former-cia-director-tvs-americans/

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   So we decamped down there and got on with the war.  About 11:00 that morning, [CIA Director] George Tenet called me, said, "Mike, what do you got?"  I said, "George, it's Al Qaeda."  He says, "You have that firm?"  I said, "George, we're already picking up the celebratory gunfire, so to speak, in the Al Qaeda networks.  " Look, anybody who was doing this knew that it was Al Qaeda, but we began to get the confirmatory reporting.  -Gen. Michael Hayden on 1-2-14, remembering 9-11 when he was CIA chief    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-michael-hayden/      good old honest michael hayden
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3-8-17    "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in an email....

If the CIA could break into a phone's operating system, it wouldn't have to break the encryption; it would simply gain the same access to messages and data that regular users would have when unlocking a phone or computer. 

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment on the leaks. 

Google and Motorola declined to comment on WikiLeaks' claims.  Samsung said it was investigating the CIA's hacking tools.

"Protecting consumers' privacy and the security of our devices is a top priority at Samsung.  We are aware of the report in question and are urgently looking into the matter," Samsung said in a statement....

Telegram said on its website that the problem lies with operating systems, not encrypted messaging apps, and that naming specific encrypted services is "misleading." WhatsApp declined to comment. 

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked documents detailing NSA spy programs to journalists in 2013, wrote about the WikiLeaks documents Tuesday on Twitter (3-7-17).  He said hacking the operating system is actually "worse" than hacking encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp.    https://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-cia-hacking-tools-phones-apple-samsung-microsoft-google/

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’ communications — listens to their calls and reads their emails — without a judicial warrant of any kind:

The way it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners and then [NSA] listens to Americans.  It is a backdoor search of Americans.  And because they have so much data, they can tap — type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls.

And so they did this to President Obama.  They — 1,227 times eavesdrops on President Obama’s phone calls.  Then they mask him.  But here is the problem. And General Hayden said this the other day.  He said even low-level employees can unmask the caller.  That is probably what happened to Flynn.

They are not targeting Americans.  They are targeting foreigners.  But they are doing it purposefully to get to Americans.

Paul's explanation is absolutely correct.  That the NSA is empowered to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant — in direct contravention of the core Fourth Amendment guarantee that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” — is the dirty little secret of the U.S. Surveillance State.

As I documented at the height of the controversy over the Snowden reporting, top government officials — including President Obama — constantly deceived (and still deceive) the public by falsely telling them that their communications cannot be monitored without a warrant.  Responding to the furor created over the first set of Snowden reports about domestic spying, Obama sought to reassure Americans by telling Charlie Rose:  “What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause.”...

How do we know that a key purpose of the 2008 law is to allow the NSA to purposely monitor Americans’ communications without a warrant?  Because NSA and other national security officials said so explicitly.  This is how Jameel Jaffer, then of the ACLU, put it in 2013:

On its face, the 2008 law gives the government authority to engage in surveillance directed at people outside the United States. In the course of conducting that surveillance, though, the government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans.  The government often says that this surveillance of Americans’ communications is “incidental,” which makes it sound like the NSA’s surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails is inadvertent and, even from the government’s perspective, regrettable.

But when Bush administration officials asked Congress for this new surveillance power, they said quite explicitly that Americans’ communications were the communications of most interest to them.     -G. Greenwald       https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/