Two Obama Lies Leave Little Room for Privacy Rights

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

20 January 14

ne of the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar – made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe-house in Yemen,” said the president in his speech on surveillance. “NSA saw that call, but it could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States. The telephone metadata program under Section 215 was designed to map the communications of terrorists so we can see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible.”

One of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon, Mihdhar personifies the new lie Obama is telling about the most contentious single issue that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden brought to light. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the electronic wizards at the National Security Agency vacuum up every – or virtually every – phone call made in and from the United States.

Mihdhar similarly featured when former FBI director Robert Mueller testified last year in federal court, leading Judge William H. Pauley III to conclude that metadata collection would have allowed the Bureau to prevent 9/11. Pauley then found the dragnet “constitutional,” one of a growing list of judge-made exceptions to the Fourth Amendment, which plainly rejects general search warrants and prohibits searches unless the government shows a court probable cause that a specific person or place is breaking the law.

The truth about Mihdhar differs in the details and in what it tells us about the NSA. In 2008, in his best-seller “The Shadow Factory,” journalist James Bamford reported how both the NSA and CIA knew Mihdhar was al-Qaeda, knew he was in San Diego, and repeatedly withheld the intelligence from the FBI.

“In the NSA’s Ops 2B building counterterrorism specialists continued reading the cryptic conversations between Mihdhar and the Yemen ops center that had been picked up while targeting the center,” Bamford revealed. “But inexplicably, the fact that the calls from Mihdhar had a U.S. country code and a San Diego area code – something that should have been instantly obvious to the NSA’s signals intelligence experts – was never passed on to the FBI, CIA, or anyone else.”

So, contrary to Obama’s telling, the NSA recorded and transcribed at least some of Mihdhar’s calls and would have known he was calling from San Diego. They just did not tell the other intelligence bureaucracies. This proved tragic since – according to Bamford – Mihdhar was living in the home of an FBI informant. Add this to the Bureau’s failure to act on repeated reports from its field offices that young Arabs were attending private flight schools, where they raised suspicions.

To be fair, Obama’s account did contain a kernel of truth. Listening to Mihdhar’s calls broke the law, as NSA director Michael Hayden would finally decide, and for reasons that went far beyond legal niceties. With the end of the cold war, the NSA faced drastic downsizing. Members of Congress and the European parliament were attacking the agency for massively invading privacy with Echelon, the Fives Eyes program that coordinates electronic snooping by the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. High on his list of priorities, the ever-cautious Hayden wanted to avoid any repeat of the Church Committee’s revelations in the mid-1970s that the NSA had flagrantly broken the law by spying on American citizens.

All this came to a head when Hayden “secretly pulled the plug on intercepting all international communications to and from the U.S., even those involving terrorism.” So a gap in legal authorization did exist, which Section 215 over-corrected, enabling the NSA to use fear of “another 9/11” to take on a new mission, win larger budgets to buy powerful new technology, and stage what is arguably the greatest invasion of privacy ever, both in America and around the world.

Did Obama know he was telling a lie? What he said and did not say about Mihdhar suggests he knew. Without question, some of his senior national security advisors would have read Bamford, checked out any details they did not already know, and told Obama what they found.

Besides the Mihdhar fable, Obama repeated a second lie. “This program does not involve the content on phone calls, or the names of people making calls,” he claimed. “Instead it provides a record of phone numbers and the time and lengths of calls – metadata that can be queried if and when we have a reasonable suspicion that a particular number is linked to a terrorist organization.”

Or, as he promised the American people on June 7 in his initial response to Snowden’s whistleblowing, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” That is simply not true, at least as Snowden tells it.

“Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?” asked a Guardian reader in an online session on June 17.

“If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want,” Snowden replied. “Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (MEI), and so on – it’s all the same.”

“Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant,” he went on. “They excuse this as ‘incidental collection,’ but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications.”

“Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content,” asked journalist Glenn Greenwald.

“Both,” said Snowden. “All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything.”

Sadly, as Snowden’s flood of NSA documents confirms, we can believe him where we cannot believe Obama. The NSA does suck up content, which at least some analysts can access. With all his cosmetic reforms and talk of finding a new place to store the data, Obama is fighting to preserve the invasion of the data-snatchers. We need bulk collection, he repeats the party line, to protect us from any new terrorist attack.

No matter that neither the NSA nor any other agency has produced a shred of evidence that collecting metadata – and its accompanying content – has prevented a single terror attack in the United States. Presidents and their intelligence agencies naturally want to have every tool they can to gobble up as much information as they can get away with. Their motives vary. In America’s corporate state, they have supporters who sell goods and services to expanding intelligence bureaucracies, which have their own internal drive to expand their empire and feather their own nests, as the NSA did. They can honestly believe that the latest technological twist will produce results even it hasn’t yet. And they know that they will be the ones the rest of us blame if we suffer another 9/11, and that they will have to show that they did everything they could to prevent it. All good reasons that we – and, in some cases, they – need the plain language of the Fourth Amendment to limit what they are permitted to do.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

What Obama Really Meant Was...

By Chris Hedges, TruthDig

20 January 14

small, secret surveillance committee of goons and thugs hiding behind the mask of patriotism was established in 1908 in Washington, D.C. The group was led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover, and during his reign it became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agents spied upon and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African-Americans—anti-war groups and the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices, illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps. Bureau leaders created blacklists. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. They demanded loyalty oaths. By the time they were done, our progressive and radical movements, which had given us the middle class and opened up our political system, were dead. And while the FBI was targeting internal dissidents, our foreign intelligence operatives were overthrowing regimes, bankrolling some of the most vicious dictators on the planet and carrying out assassinations in numerous countries, such as Cuba and the Philippines and later Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Throughout American history, intelligence services often did little more than advance and protect corporate profits and solidify state repression and imperialist expansion. War, for big business, has always been very lucrative and used as an excuse to curtail basic liberties and crush popular movements. “Inter arma silent leges,” as Cicero said, or “During war, the laws are silent.” In the Civil War, during which the North and the South suspended the writ of habeas corpus and up to 750,000 soldiers died in the slaughter, Union intelligence worked alongside Northern war profiteers who sold cardboard shoes to the Army as the spy services went about the business of ruthlessly hunting down deserters. The First World War, which gave us the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act and saw President Woodrow Wilson throw populists and socialists, including Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, into prison, produced $28.5 billion in net profits for businesses and created 22,000 new millionaires. Wall Street banks, which lent $2.5 billion to nations allied with the United States, made sure Wilson sent U.S. forces into the senseless trench warfare so they would be repaid. World War II—which consumed more than 50 million lives and saw 110,000 Japanese-Americans hauled away to internment camps and atomic bombs dropped on defenseless civilians—doubled wartime corporate profits from the First World War. Why disarm when there was so much money to be made from stoking fear?

The rise of the Iron Curtain and nuclear weapons provided the justification by big business for sustaining a massive arms industry, for a huge expansion of our surveillance capabilities and for more draconian assaults against workers and radicals. The production of weapons was about profits rather than logic. We would go on to produce more than 70,000 nuclear bombs or warheads at a cost of $5.5 trillion, enough weapons to obliterate every Soviet city several times over. And in the early days of the Cold War, with Hoover and Joe McCarthy and his henchmen blacklisting anyone with a conscience in government, the arts, journalism, labor unions or education, President Harry S. Truman created the National Security Agency, or NSA.

READ MORE: What Obama Really Meant Was...