| Nine Reasons You Should Care About NSA’s PRISM Surveillance!

Nine Reasons You Should Care About NSA’s PRISM Surveillance ~ Sean Rintel, The Conversation Media Group.

You have nothing to hide – but does that mean you have nothing to worry about? JasonDGreat

In the wake of former CIA employee Edward Snowden’srevelations of the PRISM NSA mass surveillance, people are once again asking why the general public should care if they’ve got nothing to hide.

“Nothing to hide” hides a lot behind an absolutist gloss. It puts the focus on the individual rather than on the real problem of a society-wide loss of data control at many levels.

Is this a fair question? Not really. Below, I give nine reasons why we must care – regardless of our innocent intentions.

1) Presumption of guilt

Mass surveillance and data retention overturn the foundation of the modern legal system: the presumption of innocence. Not only is the presumption lost for gathering evidence, it also weakens the effect of that presumption throughout the rest of the legal process.

If there is a normalisation in the public consciousness that there is a weakened presumption of innocence, we have compromised the effectiveness of our legal system.

2) The loss of personal data control

Mass surveillance circumvents our right to personal data control, also known as informational self-determination. As the late Professor of Public Law Alan F. Westin put it in his 1970 book, Privacy and Freedom:

The right of the individual to decide what information about himself [sic] should be communicated to others and under what circumstances.

We have envelopes for our letters and curtains on our windows not because we’re doing something wrong but because our we are choosing how to share (or not) that business. Governments and security organisations should have no part in that choice without a specific, targeted, and legally warranted reason.

3) Transferring power to security organisations

Allowing security organisations to have far-reaching capabilities without strict oversight effectively transfers power from governments to the security organisations themselves.

The power of voting for elected officials is weakened if security organisations make choices based on securing their own position rather the interests of the country.

topgold

Click to enlarge

Vladimir Putin is reputed to be finding the siloviki (the “men of power” from state security) who helped build his regime to now be more demandingthan in the past. Such transfers of power are not limited to a shadowy few in a far-off land, nor just at the highest level.

In this kind of climate, the power to invoke or even just threaten a search from mass surveillance can be devolved to even front-line law enforcement.

4) False positives

Anyone searching for information on “topics of concern” to security agencies, for legitimate reasons (such as researchers, journalists, students) or even personal curiosity, could be falsely identified as a person of interest in an investigation.

As security technologist and author Bruce Schneier argued in a guest blog post last year, this is one of the fundamentalproblems of profiling.

The ramifications for the individual might range from inclusion on no-fly lists, denial of access to some jobs, through to false arrest.

5) Changing definitions of issues of concern

What counts as a problematic topic in the eyes of security organisations changes over time, especially in the wake of an incident. We are all still taking off our shoes at many airports because of one “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid, in 2001.

When something as seemingly benign as shoes is suddenly linked to security concerns, the potential for large retrospective data sweeps – as well as having shoe-related topics then included in future sweeps – increases, with concurrent increases in the possibility of embarrassing and/or gravely serious mistakes.

6) Political corruption

The potential exists for the government of the day to request detailed information that falls well outside the scope of legality.Watergate is the classic example of data-gathering about political adversaries, but compared to the potential corruption made possible by mass surveillance, that was a drop in the ocean.

Mass surveillance could be directed not only at direct political adversaries but also their official supporters and those who mightfall into a demographic of potential support.

7) Personal abuse of power

While most security agents work within the law, there are occasions when they abuse their power. The London Police werefound to be complicit in the News Of The World hacking scandal and, as ABC journalist Nick Ross noted in an article last September, many small-scale examples of abuse of power are captured on the news website Reddit.

Communication data gathered for abusive private purposes could include email, texts, pictures intended for revenge, extortion or prurience.

8) Honeypots

Large collections of telecommunications data – be it the content or the metadata – attract hackers. Unfortunately, governments and their sub-contractors have a poor track record safe-guarding such data.

Even without blunders, the data can be stolen or individuals with direct access can be manipulated to hand over this information through social engineering, bribery, or coercion.

9) Big data and the problem of patterns

The entire premise of “big data” – large and complex sets of computer data – is to find patterns from aggregates. While you may feel that, post-by-Facebook-post, you have “nothing to hide”, mass surveillance creates the possibility of finding patterns that catch the interest of security organisations.

Such patterns have the possibility of including the innocent with the guilty. Worse, there’s the possibility to not just find but “create” patterns from such aggregations that frame the innocent as potentially guilty.

Everything to lose

As security expert Bruce Schneir wrote for Wired in 2006, and is even more true today, we must not “accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong”.

The issue with the NSA PRISM program, and other such programs around the world, is not that we have “nothing to hide” – it’s that we have everything to lose.

______________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• Critiques of mass surveillance and data-mining (boingboing.net)
• Mass surveillance in America (sott.net)
• | Worried about Mass Surveillance? How to Practice Safer Communication! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Mass surveillance in America: A timeline (ProPublica) (syracuse.com)
• Mass surveillance goes global (the-tap.blogspot.com)
• The Dark Future Of America’s Surveillance Culture (personalliberty.com)
• Does the government actually understand the 4th Amendment? (salon.com)
• | Worried about Mass Surveillance? How to Practice Safer Communication! (warcrimesinternational.wordpress.com)
• Nine reasons you should care about NSA’s PRISM surveillance (pcauthority.com.au)

| PRISM UK: MoD serves news outlets with D notice over surveillance leaks!

MoD serves news outlets with D notice over surveillance leaks ~

• Josh Halliday, The Guardian.

  BBC and other media groups issued with D notice to limit publication of information that could ‘jeopardise national security.’

  

  It is not clear what impact the censorship warning has had on media coverage of Snowden’s revelations relating to British intelligence. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

  Defence officials issued a confidential D notice to the BBC and other media groups in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US.

  Editors were asked not to publish information that may “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel” in the warning issued on 7 June, a day after the Guardian first revealed details of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret Prism programme.

  The D notice, which was marked “private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media”, was made public on the Westminster gossip blog, Guido Fawkes. Although only advisory for editors, the self-censorship system is intended to prevent the media from making “inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods”.

  The warning was issued by defence officials in the UK as the BBC, ITN, Sky News and other newspapers and broadcasters around the world covered the surveillance revelations disclosed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks, reported extensively in the Guardian and also the Washington Post, have made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a week.

  However, it is not clear what impact the warning has had on media coverage of Snowden’s revelations relating to British intelligence. William Hague, the foreign secretary, who is reponsible for GCHQ, was not asked when he appeared on Monday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme about reports that the spy agency was involved in monitoring communications made by foreign delegates at the G20 summit in London 2009. Instead the subject was discussed in an item aired towards the end of the programme at 8.45am.

  A BBC spokeswoman declined to comment on the D notice, but pointed out that the broadcaster did cover the G20 surveillance story on its radio news bulletins. She said the BBC believed it had “afforded the story” what the broadcaster described as “the appropriate level of coverage” among other significant news items, “including the ongoing G8 summit, the sentencing of Stuart Hall, the Co-op Bank bailout and the Ian Brady hearing”.

  According to the Guido Fawkes website, the warning said: “There have been a number of articles recently in connection with some of the ways in which the UK intelligence services obtain information from foreign sources.

  “Although none of these recent articles has contravened any of the guidelines contained within the defence advisory notice system, the intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.”

  __________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• UK Government issues a ‘D’ notice to UK media outlets. (politics.ie)
• U.K. government tried to censor coverage of its PRISM involvement (dailydot.com)
• Cisco’s business in China set to suffer from Prism revelations (wantchinatimes.com)
• NSA’s PRISM Program Reveals The Partnership Between US-UK Intelligence Services (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
• Hague Defends GCHQ Over Prism Spying Claims (news.sky.com)
• British Media Threatened with Prosecution for Revealing NSA Leak (darkgovernment.com)
• Paratrooper Paul Biddiss and disabled son kicked out of home by heartless MoD bosses (mirror.co.uk)
• RT: US spied on Russian President Medvedev at 2009 G20 summit – NSA leaks (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Prism: GCHQ ‘penetrated BlackBerry security’ to spy on G20 attendees (itproportal.com)
• Joe A. Wolverton, II ~ Facebook Gives Gov’t Access to Nearly 20,000 User Accounts (shiftfrequency.com)

 

| GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits!

GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits ~

• Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball, The Guardian.

  Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009!

• 
  Documents uncovered by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, reveal surveillance of G20 delegates’ emails and BlackBerrys. Photograph: Guardian

  Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

  The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

  The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance byGCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

  There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

  This included:

  • Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

  • Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

  • Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

  • Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

  • Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

  The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.

  A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The officials summarised Brown’s aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: “The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG’s desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it.” Two documents explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to “ministers”.

  One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianAccording to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.

  One document refers to a tactic which was “used a lot in recent UK conference, eg G20″. The tactic, which is identified by an internal codeword which the Guardian is not revealing, is defined in an internal glossary as “active collection against an email account that acquires mail messages without removing them from the remote server”. A PowerPoint slide explains that this means “reading people’s email before/as they do”.

  The same document also refers to GCHQ, MI6 and others setting up internet cafes which “were able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished”. This appears to be a reference to acquiring delegates’ online login details.

  Another document summarises a sustained campaign to penetrate South African computers, recording that they gained access to the network of their foreign ministry, “investigated phone lines used by High Commission in London” and “retrieved documents including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8 meetings”. (South Africa is a member of the G20 group and has observer status at G8 meetings.)

  Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianA detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.

  Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”

  The operation appears to have run for at least six months. One document records that in March 2009 – the month before the heads of state meeting – GCHQ was working on an official requirement to “deliver a live dynamically updating graph of telephony call records for target G20 delegates … and continuing until G20 (2 April).”

  Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers and officials in his delegation as “possible targets”. As with the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The document explicitly records a political objective – “to establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and their “willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations”.

  The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of GCHQ’s operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45 specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.

  “For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was talking to who that updated constantly and automatically,” according to an internal review.

  A second review implies that the analysts’ findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: “In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential.”

  In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised this live monitoring: “Thank you very much for getting the application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The call records activity pilot was very successful and was well received as a current indicator of delegate activity …

  “It proved useful to note which nation delegation was active during the moments before, during and after the summit. All in all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony plot.”

  _____________________________________________________________________

  

Related articles

• Wanna bet that CESG was using Man-in-the-Middle SSL with a fake cert/CA? (dropsafe.crypticide.com)
• UK Spied on Foreign Politicians at G20 Summit: Leaked Docs (newser.com)
• BREAKING: Snowden Reveals British Government Spied On Officials’ Phone Calls, Emails During G20 Summit (mediaite.com)
• GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits / phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009 (engineeringevil.com)
• US spied on Russian President Medvedev at 2009 G20 summit – NSA leaks (rt.com)
• BREAKING: Snowden Reveals British Government Spied On Foreign Officials’ Emails, Web Browsing, Phone Calls During G20 Summit (patdollard.com)
• Fake internet cafes and keyloggers: British intelligence reportedly spied on major world leaders during 2009 G20 summit (theverge.com)
• Revealed: how the UK spied on its G20 allies at London summits (oddonion.com)
• UK GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits (wikileaks-forum.com)

| Scientists discover an entirely new teeny tiny body part!

Scientists discover an entirely new teeny tiny body part ~ GEORGE DVORSKY,

• Gawker Media.
  

  Throw away your anatomy books, everyone, because they’re now officially out of date. A professor at the University of Nottingham has discovered a layer in the human cornea that was previously unknown to science.

  The discovery was made by Harminder Dua, and he’s calling the new body part — conveniently enough — Dua’s layer. We certainly don’t begrudge him the name. When’s the last time any of us discovered a completely new body part?

  The layer, which is a scant 15 microns thick, rests at the back of the cornea. Previous to this study, only five layers had been identified. Dua’s layer, also called pre-Descemet’s layer, was discovered by injecting air into the corneas of eyes that had been donated to research. An electron microscope was then used to scan and identify each layer.

  Fascinatingly, the discovery is already reaping benefits. Scientists now believe that deformities or tears in this layer cause corneal hydrops, a disorder that leads to fluid buildup in the cornea. The discovery could also result in new techniques to treat patients in need of corneal grafts and transplants.

  Check out the entire study at the Ophthamology journal: “Human Corneal Anatomy Redefined.”

  Top image: Pressmaster/Shutterstock.

  ________________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• Seeing is Believing: New Layer Discovered in Human Eye (geekosystem.com)
• Dua Layer: Discovery Of A New Human Body Part (americanlivewire.com)
• Scientists Discover New Layer of the Human Cornea (sciencespacerobots.com)
• Scientists discovered new layer of human cornea (updatednews.ca)
• Scientists discover new layer in human eye we never knew existed (geek.com)
• Researcher Discovers New Human Body Part (geeky-gadgets.com)
• Scientists discovered new layer in human eye (colloidalsilverpro.wordpress.com)
• Scientists Discover New Layer in Human Cornea: Eye Diseases May Receive Better Treatment (scienceworldreport.com)

| Ho-Hum – Just Another Gorgeous Spiral Galaxy?

~ Phil Plait, Slate.

The beautiful face-on spiral galaxy NGC 3344. Click to galactinate.
Photo by Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

A little while back, I wrote an article about some new results dealing with the structure and formation of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. While I was digging through my emails looking for news about those studies, I found an unrelated note sent earlier from astronomer Adam Block, who frequently lets me know when he has cool pictures he’s taken. I had overlooked it somehow, but I’m glad he found it.

Because this:

Wow. That’s NGC 3344, photographed by Block using the 0.8 meter (32 inch) Schulman Telescope (RCOS) on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona. It’s a magnificent face-on spiral galaxy about 20 million light years away… and when I saw that was the distance, my scientist-alarm pinged inside my brain. It seemed like an odd distance. Why, you ask?

Our galaxy is in a small collection of 50 or so galaxies called the Local Group, and it’s a few million light years across (the Andromeda Galaxy is the only other big galaxy in the group, and it’s less than three million light years distant). The M81 Group is another small clot of galaxies about 10 million light years away, for example. The nearest actual cluster to us is the Virgo Cluster, about 50 million light years away, and it has well over 1000 galaxies in it.

Just for comparison, this is Hubble’s view of NGC 3344. Click to embiggen.
Photo by ESA/Hubble & NASA

So the distance to NGC 3344 is a bit weird; it’s neither here nor there. It’s apparently part of a small spur off the big Virgo Supercluster, a huge collection of clusters themselves, which contains the Virgo cluster, the Local Group, the M81 Group, and many more. Still, this means NGC 3344 is relatively isolated, off more-or-less by itself.

It’s a fantastic example of an intermediate spiral; the arms not too tightly wound, not too flung open. It has a mild bar in the center, a rectangular extension of stars commonly seen in spirals; the Milky Way has one.  In Adam’s picture you can see dozens of pinkish clumps indicating the presence of warm hydrogen; a dead giveaway that those are sites of ongoing star formation. The bright star just above the galactic center is most likely one inside our own galaxy, fortuitously and coincidentally placed.

If I had to pick a favorite type of object in our Universe, it may very well be grand-design spiral galaxies. They posses grace, beauty, and hold a vast amount of scientific interest. Even if we didn’t live in one, I suspect they would still hold a very special place for me.

 ___________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• Astronomers Refine Distances to our Closest Spiral-Galaxy Neighbors (universetoday.com)
• Two Galaxies Are Colliding In Space And NASA Has AMAZING Photos! (fox41blogs.typepad.com)
• 500 Billion –A Universe of Galaxies: Some Older than Milky Way (dailygalaxy.com)
• 500 Billion – A Universe of Galaxies: Some Older than Milky Way (vineoflife.net)
• Nasa (hightechscience.wordpress.com)
• One-armed spiral galaxy NGC 4725 (educacaoespacial.wordpress.com)
• Crashing Spiral Galaxies (ritholtz.com)
• Oh, Sweet Spiral Of Mine (galaxyzoo.org)
• “BX442″ –The First Spiral Galaxy in the Universe? (dailygalaxy.com)
• Hubble Sees the Messy Result of a Galactic Collision (spaceref.com)

| UK weather: Forecasters warn jet stream plunge may cause unsettled wet weather till August!

Get ready for a typically damp British summer as forecasters warn jet stream plunge could lead to unsettled wet weather into August ~  AMANDA WILLIAMS, Daily Mail.

• Last two weeks of hot, clear days have been replaced by erratic conditions
• Rain and winds of up to 40mph set to hit the coast over next few days
• It is being caused by a south shifting jet stream - fast flowing air currents
• Jet stream sitting further south than is normal for this time of year
• It means the UK is experiencing unsettled and fast moving weather

Britain’s fine weather looks set to be over for the foreseeable future as forecasters warn the unsettled and wet conditions could last until the end of July and into August.

The last two weeks of hot, clear days have been replaced by erratic conditions, including rain and high winds of up to 40mph, interspersed with pockets of warm, sunny and dry periods.

Forecasters have attributed the unpredictable stretch – which is being caused by a south shifting jet stream – to just another ‘typical British summer’.

The Great Marquess steam locomotive cuts her way across gloomy skies on her maiden ‘Fellsman’ voyage of the year over Ribblehead Viaduct in North Yorkshire. It comes as forecasters warn the unsettled and wet conditions could last until the end of July and into August

 

It is one of the most scenic railway routes in Britain, the Settle to Carlisle line. But passengers would have been able to see little of their beautiful surroundings thanks to the ‘typically British’ summer we have been experiencing – caused by a south shifting jet stream

Jet streams are belts of fast flowing, narrow air currents found in the atmosphere, formed near air masses with significantly different temperatures

 

 

The ‘blink and you’d miss it summer’ is the latest in six months of unsettled weather, including a particularly bitter winter, and unseasonably cold Spring – which saw the coldest Easter Sunday on record.

Jet streams are belts of fast flowing, narrow air currents found in the atmosphere, formed near air masses with significantly different temperatures.

They are responsible for moving weather around the latitudes.

The Polar jet stream, which is the most northerly jet stream, affects the UK, and tends to be further south in the winter and further north in the summer.

But it has been sitting further south than is normal for this time of year, which is why the UK looks set to experience a wet summer.

 

More…

• The underwater village: Burst dyke leaves entire German town submerged as aerial shots reveal devastation of recent heavy rain

 

BBC weather forecaster Paul Hudson wrote on his blog about the work of Professor Hubert Lamb, who noted a yearly change of pattern from around the middle of June. He called it the ‘return of the westerlies’; and means a ‘typical British Summer’ sees unsettled weather last well into July and August.

He wrote: ‘Lamb’s work effectively describes a typical British summer; one in which long spells of fine settled weather are the exception rather than the rule.

An aerial view over the town of Fischbeck, near Magdeburg in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt after flooding from the river Elbe

The bursting of a dyke, top has led to the flooding of the village. Weeks of heavy rain this spring have sent the Elbe, the Danube and other rivers such as the Vltava and the Saale overflowing their banks, causing extensive damage in central and southern Germany

‘Although it’s early days, there are already indications that this summer is starting to resemble one of Professor Lamb’s typical British summers.’

A Met Office spokesman said what we were experiencing was indeed a ‘typical British summer’.

He said: ‘The weather can be best summed up over the course of the day as quite unsettled, a few places experiencing dry, bright spells, and temperatures will be quite decent when the sun does come out – with highs of around 22 degrees.

‘There is rain clearing out of Scotland, heading into the South West moving along the south coast into the afternoon – turning into heavy rain throughout the evening.

‘There will also be more rain overnight in places and it will windy as well along the western coast, with gusts of between 35-40mph.

A sea of red as giant poppies shine in the sun at Bamburgh in Northumberland. The glorious conditions experienced last weekend, however, already seem like a distant memory

 

But Met forecasters say there will still be some ‘pockets of fine weather’, it just depends ‘where and when you ‘catch them

‘There is a lot of weather going on and it is looking quite unsettled.

JET STREAM: WHY THE WEATHER IS SO UNSETTLED AND WET

 Jet streams are belts of fast flowing, narrow air currents found in the atmosphere, formed near air masses with significantly different temperatures.

They are responsible for moving weather around the latitudes.

The Polar jet stream, which is the most northerly jet stream, affects the UK, and tends to be further south in the winter and further north in the summer.

Recently, the jet stream has been further south – which is why the UK has experienced such wet summers.

A band of high pressure is blocking the path of the jet stream, meaning that the present weather conditions will stay until this pressure moves.

‘The jet stream is a narrow band of fast moving wind high up in the atmosphere, which effectively can steer in low pressure systems off the Atlantic which then get caught up in this area

‘Where that jet stream sits is important. If it is to the north, we get settled conditions.

‘To the south we get unsettled conditions sent to us.

‘At the moment it is sitting more or less over us or just to the south.

‘We will see some bright spells in between, where it is sunny with some pretty decent temperatures, but the weather is moving through quite quickly.

‘It really depends on ‘where and when’ if you are hoping to see better weather.

‘It is typical British weather -  with areas of sunshine and showers.’

Britain’s wheat harvest this year could be almost a third smaller than it was last year due to extreme weather, the National Farmers’ Union has warned.

It said the reduction came after arable crops had been hit by severe snow, rain and flooding since the autumn.

In Europe the torrential weather this spring has sent the Elbe, the Danube and other rivers such as the Vltava and the Saale overflowing their banks, causing extensive damage in central and southern Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary.

So far, the flooding in Europe has claimed at least 22 lives.

___________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• The jet stream and why it’s too early to write-off summer (metofficenews.wordpress.com)
• Jet stream to blame for coldest spring in 50 years (express.co.uk)
• Weather brings flooding and snow to parts of Wales as signs of summer retreat (walesonline.co.uk)
• Cold and wet month looming for Scotland (thescottishsun.co.uk)
• Another washout summer on its way as forecasters predict grey skies and more rain (thefreedomagenda.wordpress.com)
• Cold and wet month ahead in Britain’s summer of glove (thesun.co.uk)
• Summer is looking miserable…again (express.co.uk)
• Another washout summer on its way as forecasters predict grey skys and more rain (express.co.uk)
• Britain’s summer of glove (thesun.co.uk)
• Washout fears for Glastonbury, F1 and Wimbledon as Britain braces for another soggy summer to follow last year’s (thesun.co.uk)

| UK Economy: Must we live with a post-truth media?

Must we live with a post-truth media? ~ Simon Wren-Lewis,

Mainly Macro. 

Something odd but familiar was going on when I wrote this post on Labour’s economic record. The Labour leader and shadow chancellor both made speeches that had apparently been months in the making, and which were (I think intentionally) spun as trying to convince voters that they could trust a future Labour government with fiscal management.

Why odd? Because it presumes that there is some real problem to solve. It presumes that the last Labour government managed the nation’s fiscal affairs very badly, and so today’s politicians have to show they would be different. Yet the paper I wrote tells a very different story. The previous Labour government set up fiscal rules that were both responsible and better than rules subsequently adopted elsewhere. Until the financial crisis, they kept to those rules. Here is the basic data: the top line is the debt to GDP ratio, the bottom line a scaled up current balance to GDP ratio.

Labour Government’s Fiscal Record: source OBR Of course it is possible to find fault, and I do. In hindsight it would have been better if the debt to GDP ratio had been kept nearer 30% of GDP, or even reduced further. But debt to GDP was lower before the recession than when Labour took office, and the current balance was almost zero. Hardly a profligate government. Indeed one of the faults I find, over optimism in Treasury forecasts, has been fixed, to the Conservative party’s credit, with the creation of the OBR. With the financial crisis everything changed, because this produced the Great Recession. Deficits go up in recessions. There was a small contribution from the government’s attempt to reduce the impact of the recession, an attempt which analysis suggests was successful, so they should take credit for that. It is pretty obvious that you cannot use the fact that the deficit rose in the recession to argue that Labour cannot be trusted with the public finances. Again, the data speaks – look at when the deficit rose in the past. Of course you could say that the Great Recession was the government’s fault. It should have foreseen the financial crisis coming. It should have known that levels of GDP in 2007 were going to be interpreted, five years later, as a massive economic boom rather than as they appeared at the time as something close to trend. It should have known this, despite the advice it was getting to the contrary from the Bank of England, the IMF, OECD, most economists …. and Her Majesty’s opposition! You can take that idealist view – but not if you were agreeing with all this advice at the time. So the idea that the last Labour government seriously mismanaged the nation’s finances is a myth. What is more, unlike older myths like the earth is flat, as these charts show it is not something that is generated by perception and which requires expertise to unravel. Unless you are completely naive about the impact of recessions on deficits, a quick look at the data tells the true story. So it is a manufactured myth that distorts what the numbers appear to show. The problem with myths is that after a time, even otherwise good journalists at good places like the Financial Times start believing them. Now we all know who manufactured the myth. Yet I think most people believe that if a political party started telling a story that was clearly at variance with the facts, it would be found out. In short, people expect journalists and economic commentators to confront politicians who attempt to create and perpetuate myths. In this case they did not. Its also pretty obvious why they did not. The incentive for organisations like the BBC is to stay out of trouble. And who has been making most noise about bias in economic reporting – the government. As any economist will tell you, its all about incentives. So it really is the duty of academics to speak to truth, as loudly as they can, when it is being ignored by the media. On this topic, the media in general and the BBC in particular have been hopelessly biased in allowing the government to get away with this myth. They have some serious explaining to do.

Related articles

• Did the welfare bill really get out of control under Labour? (leftfootforward.org)
• Ed Balls clarifies Labour position over pension spending (guardian.co.uk)
• The two Eds take the first painful steps on a long and hard road (guardian.co.uk)
• Labour to examine housing benefit and retirement age in event of election win (guardian.co.uk)
• Nigeria’s debt-GDP ratio now stands at 20.77% – DMO (vanguardngr.com)
• Cap or no cap? (rhystaylorld.wordpress.com)
• Balls: I’d restrict winter fuel cash (themexicanpost.wordpress.com)
• Eat your Gruel Labour: Of Labour governments and difficult inheritances. (hopisen.com)
• Fiscal Death Watchlist (worthwhile.typepad.com)
• Groundhog day as Labour backs cuts (socialistworker.co.uk)

| Radioactive Mountain is Key in US Rare-Earth Woes!

Radioactive Mountain is Key in US Rare-Earth Woes ~ Becky Oskin, LiveScience Staff Writer.

Bokan Mountain in Southeast Alaska is the proposed site of a heavy rare earth element mine. CREDIT: Susan Karl, USGS  View full size image

Red state or blue state, liberal or libertarian, Americans share an addiction to rare-earth elements imported from China.

Green technologies such as electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels and fluorescent light bulbs rely on rare-earth metals. The military depends on rare earths for guided missile systems, satellites and unmanned drones. NASA’s spacecraft carry powerful rare earth magnets to Mars and outer space. The magnets also miniaturized iPads, computers and high-tech headphones.

China controls 95 percent of the world’s rare-earth supply. The key to this monopoly isn’t an abundance of rare-earth deposits, but its expertise in processing ore into oxides and pure metal. The ore tends to carry uranium and thorium, the most radioactive element on the planet, and extracting the metal is typically a long, multistage process involving toxic chemicals.

“We know where the deposits are. Having them end up in your iPhone is not a straight or simple process,” said Brad Van Gosen, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver.

A few years ago, China showed its power, and cut the supply of rare earths to a trickle. The move sent the United States and other countries scrambling to end their reliance on China. Prices soared, drawing new investors and mining companies into the rare earth market. Now, the United States has one new mine nearly finished and two more in the permitting stages. But the crucial element in escaping China’s rare-earth rule isn’t new mines, it’s rebuilding the expertise and infrastructure to process the finicky metals, experts say.

Price war

In 2010, China spiked the cost of rare-earth elements when it started restricting exports and charging foreign companies higher prices. The price bubble sparked a worldwide frenzy to escape China’s control. A new Australian-owned processing plant just opened in Malaysia. Others are planned in Canada, Europe and Africa. Several companies are also trying to develop an American supply for rare earths, some with support from the Department of Defense. [Infographic: Energy-Critical Elements to Watch]

“The rare earths are very much strategic metals, and particularly very much of strategic importance to the defense industry,” said Curt Freeman, president of Avalon Development Corp. in Fairbanks, Alaska, a mining consulting firm. “There’s a queasy feeling in Congress and the Department of Defense,” he said.

In the United States, California’s Mountain Pass mine reopened in 2010 and is expected to start producing light rare-earth elements this year. The mine was once the world’s biggest producers of rare earths, but shut down in 2002 because of environmental problems and falling prices. Another mine is proposed in Wyoming, by Canadian company Rare Element Resources, but faces opposition from local residents.

Alaska’s newest resource

Rare-earth elements are found in veins at Bokan Mountain in Alaska.
CREDIT: Ucore

View full size image

One of the biggest rare-earth gambles is at Alaska’s Bokan Mountain. Once mined for uranium, the granite peak on Prince of Wales Island contains rich veins of the harder-to-find heavy rare-earth elements. The project has strong support from Alaska’s legislature and from nearby communities. A Canadian company plans to extract the ore and transform it into oxides with a custom-built processing plant. Therein lies the challenge.

Despite their name, rare earths are actually common in Earth’s crust, though in low concentrations. The moniker is a holdover from the 19th century, when researchers discovered the oddly named elements in rarely found minerals. The 17 elements share a close affinity, with similar chemical properties and atomic weights. Bokan Mountain is one of the few spots on Earth with a bounty of heavy rare-earth elements, which have higher atomic weights. It’s especially elevated in yttrium, which appears in everything from cubic zirconia and car pollution sensors to lasers, rockets and jet engines.

Because rare earths are often all mixed together in one rock, separating the heavy rare earths usually requires removing the lighter ones first. This is typically done with a series of chemical tanks and solvents. Plus, there’s the radioactive uranium to dispose of. But mine owner Ucore says it has a new solid-extraction technology that greatly simplifies this process. The technique relies on nanotechnology to remove impurities and concentrate the heavy rare earths into oxides, according to Ucore. The Department of Defense funded Ucore’s ore extraction research with a contract in October 2012.

Costly withdrawal

But a USGS-funded study found Bokan Mountain’s vein system is very complex, with a mix of at least two dozen ore minerals, the agency’s Van Gosen said. The study was published Jan. 22 in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

“It’s getting more and more complicated the more we look at it,” Van Gosen said.

Metals industry consultant Gareth Hatch notes that processing is the biggest hurdle forrare-earth mining companies.

The separations facility at Molycorp’s Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California.
CREDIT: Molycorp

View full size image

“Processing is the key challenge for deposits that particularly are skewed toward the middle and heavy rare earths, because they have some unusual minerals that haven’t been processed before,” said Hatch, founding principal of Technology Metals Research. Hatch is helping develop a rare earth processing company in Canada.

The USGS has several ongoing projects examining the geology of Bokan Mountain, to better understand how the minerals appeared.

“The idea is to develop a fundamental understanding of how these deposits get started in the first place in Earth’s crust, and use it to go look for resources that the U.S. public needs,” said Susan Karl, a USGS geologist based in Anchorage.

Ucore board member Jaroslav Dostal, an emeritus professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was lead author of the Bokan Mountain study. The grant program that provided funding for the study, the USGS Mineral Resources External Research Program, has awarded projects to private industry and foreign recipients in the past.

Investing in processing

The USGS also has projects exploring the geology of other rare-earth deposits. Since 2010, the House of Representatives has introduced legislation to curb mining regulations and fund rare-earth research and development, which have yet to pass the Senate. Recycling of rare-earth metals, which is not always made possible with high-tech gadgetry, is another way to reduce dependency on China’s supply. Earlier this year, the Department of Defense recommended stockpiling $120 million of critical heavy rare-earth elements. But industry experts say money would be better spent on building American expertise and infrastructure in processing rare earths. [The Common Elements of Innovation]

“In terms of full-blown capacity, Molycorp [in California] does have its light rare-earth separation facility, but other than that, there is really nothing in North America,” Hatch, the industry consultant, said.

“The capability to process and convert [rare earths] from minerals into compounds that go into high-tech equipment is the key bottleneck not just in the U.S., but also the world,” he said.

• 50 Interesting Facts About The Earth
• Is China Mining a Rare Earth Monopoly?: Op-Ed
• Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies

_______________________________________________________________________

 

 

Related articles

• Wyoming: America’s New Source for Rare Earth? (dailyresourcehunter.com)
• US Dept. of Energy scientists discover new family of rare-earth quasicrystals (mining.com)
• Wyoming releases new study on rare earth elements (mining.com)
• Rare earth metals: will demand be in line with supply? (rbth.asia)
• The Future Global Supply of Rare Earth Elements (visual.ly)
• Pacific Ocean rich in gold, rare earths (mining.com)
• Brace Yourself For 3 More Years of Heavy Rare Earth Shortages (etfdailynews.com)
• China plans new round of rare earth industry consolidation (wantchinatimes.com)
• Stabila 29924 – 3 Level Magnetic Pro-Set Includes 48-inch , 24-inch and Die-cast Torpedo with Rare Earth Magnets (stabila29924magneticincludded6.wordpress.com)
• Rare Earth Magnets (machinemakers.typepad.com)

| Put the NSA on trial!

Put the NSA on trial ~  DAVID SIROTA, Salon.

With potential perjury by top officials, and new questions about spying, let’s stop assuming everything is legal!

James Clapper, Keith Alexander(Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Ann Heisenfelt)

“When the president does it that means it is not illegal.” These infamous words from Richard Nixon appear to summarize the public legal justification for the Obama administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance operation. Perhaps worse, Permanent Washington would have us believe that this rationale is unquestionably accurate and that therefore the National Security Administration’s surveillance is perfectly legal.

For example, Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations said of Edward Snowden: “‘Whistleblower’ is person who reveals wrongdoing, corruption, illegal activity. none of this applies here even if you oppose U.S. government policy.” Likewise, the Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender insists, “I wish media would stop calling Snowden a whistleblower — it maligns those who truly reveal corrupt or illegal activity.” And the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin definitively states: “These were legally authorized programs.”

The idea here, which has quickly become the standard talking point for partisans trying to defend the NSA program and the Obama administration, is that while you may object to the NSA’s mass surveillance system, it is nonetheless perfectly legal as is the conduct surrounding it. Therefore, the logic goes, Snowden isn’t an honorable “whistle-blower” he’s a traitorous “leaker,” and the only criminal in this case is Snowden and Snowden alone.

The first — and most simple — way to debunk this talking point is to simply behold two sets of testimony by Obama administration national security officials. In one, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper categorically denies that the government “collect(s) any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” In another, the Guardian reports that NSA Director General Keith Alexander “denied point-blank that the agency had the figures on how many Americans had their electronic communications collected or reviewed.”

Both of those claims, of course, were exposed as lies by Snowden’s disclosures. So at minimum Snowden deserves the title “whistle-blower” (and the attendant protections that are supposed to come with such a title) because his disclosures outed Clapper and Alexander’s statements as probable cases of illegal perjury before Congress. In other words, in terms of perjury, the disclosures didn’t expose controversial-but-legal activity, they exposed illegal behavior.

That’s not some technicality, by the way; the whole reason perjury before Congress is considered a serious crime is because if executive branch officials like Clapper and Alexander are permitted to lie to the legislative branch, then that branch cannot exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities. Harsh punishment for perjury is considered a necessary deterrent to such deception.

There’s also the issue of whether the NSA’s surveillance itself is legal, and whether Snowden’s disclosures show the NSA is continuing to break U.S. federal statutes (we’ll get to the Constitution in a second). Yes, you read that right: The word “continuing” is appropriate because back in 2009, NSA officials admitted they were breaking the law.

As the New York Times reported at the time, the agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress.” Additionally, the Times noted that “several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed” about the illegal activity “described the practice as significant and systemic.” Meanwhile, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., yesterday declared that his review of the program proved it violates federal statutes.

“When I saw what was being done, I felt it was so out of sync with the plain language of the law,” he told MSNBC.

In light of the NSA itself already admitting it broke the law in “systemic” fashion; in light of a prominent senator saying the program is illegal; and in light of the “Boundless Informant”disclosure showing the NSA may be broadly surveilling domestic (rather than exclusively foreign) communications as statutes are supposed to curtail: In light of all that, why would anyone simply assume at face value that the program Snowden exposed is perfectly legal?

Finally, over and above whether the NSA program is complying with federal statutes, there’s the issue of the program’s constitutionality — aka the ultimate definition of “legality.”

Permanent Washington and Obama partisans who support the NSA surveillance program cite the Patriot Act and the fact that NSA obtained a FISA warrant as proof that the program is legal and as a way to ignore the constitutional questions. They would have us not only ignore the NSA’s own aforementioned admissions of illegal behavior, but additionally have us believe the constitutionality of NSA’s unprecedented surveillance and of such a broad-sweeping “ongoing”FISA warrant has already been definitively established, even though, of course, it hasn’t. Not even close.

Four cases are particularly relevant here. In the first two (ACLU vs. NSA and the al-Haramain charity case), district courts ruled for plaintiffs in their arguments that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance is illegal. There was also the Clapper vs. Amnesty International case, which challenged the constitutionality of the underlying FISA law, which authorizes the kind of surveillance that Snowden’s disclosures document. And, according to Mother Jones, there is “an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.” In that latter case, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence actually admits that the NSA has engaged in behavior that is “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” and that “circumvented the spirit of the law.”

In the first three cases, technicalities won the day when they were all eventually overturned not on grounds that the NSA’s mass surveillance is constitutional, but on grounds that the plaintiffs supposedly didn’t have standing. Summing it up, Reuters reports, to date, “The (Supreme Court) has refused to review government surveillance practices adopted since the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Why weren’t all these plaintiffs granted standing, you ask? As legal expert Marcy Wheeler notes, it’s all related to — you guessed it! — secrecy.

“The government has gone to great lengths to say because this is all secret, no one can prove they’ve been surveilled, so (plaintiffs) can’t make a harm argument,” she said.

Put another way, it’s difficult to prove a case against the government when the government is allowed to keep case-critical information classified.

Meanwhile, on the fourth case reported by Mother Jones, the government is still fighting to keep the court ruling secret.

All of that brings us back to Snowden’s disclosure. With his whistle-blowing, more germane details about the NSA’s entire surveillance operation are now public, meaning other plaintiffs may now have access to information necessary to achieve standing. And there are, indeed, already other plaintiffs: For instance, Sen. Rand Paul (R) is promising to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the constitutionality of the broad FISA warrant at issue in Snowden’s disclosure (at issue will be the yet-to-be-adjudicated question of whether such an “ongoing” warrant that allows spying on millions of Americans really comports with the Fourth Amendment’s “probable cause” precept). Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation already has a case against NSA surveillance pending.

Those cases coupled with the information from Snowden could, in turn, compel an explicit Supreme Court ruling on the entire surveillance system’s legality.

Looked at from a constitutional perspective, then, we shouldn’t simply assume Snowden’s disclosures are about a controversial-but-legal NSA program, as NSA defenders and Obama loyalists assert. Instead, it’s quite possible they may help definitively prove the illegality of the surveillance operations.

No doubt, all these statutory and constitutional questions surrounding the NSA’s surveillance operations are why when publicly claiming that the program is perfectly legal, Obama officials also, according to Businessweek, refuse to make public their jurisprudential justifications for such a claim. They clearly fear that when subjected to scrutiny, the program will be shown to be, as Sen. Merkley put it, “Out of sync with the plain language of the law.”

Thus, the administration’s strategy is to at once stonewall on the details and insist ad nauseam that everything is perfectly legal, when that assertion is, at best, a fact-free assumption, and more likely a devious misdirect. That Permanent Washington and so many Obama loyalists would nonetheless echo such a misdirect is a commentary on how political self-interest and partisanship now trumps everything else — even the law of the land.

_____________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• Who are the real criminals in NSA case? (salon.com)
• Booz Allen Fires NSA Whistle-Blower Following Leaks (washington.cbslocal.com)
• Information chiefs worldwide sound alarm… (guardian.co.uk)
• Legal, but not constitutional: how the government is weasel wording the public about Edward Snowden and the NSA (scholarsandrogues.com)
• Why Edward Snowden Is A Hero (newyorker.com)
• | NSA surveillance: The US is behaving like China! (warcrimesinternational.wordpress.com)
• Overlooked reasons why NSA secrecy is senseless and offensive (constitutioncampaign.org)
• Washington attempts to contain fallout from NSA surveillance leaks, Clapper apparently lied under oath (silveristhenew.com)
• White House sidesteps Snowden ‘traitor’ debate (voicerussia.com)
• Former CIA man Edward Snowden faces backlash after turning whistleblower on US data-mining operation PRISM (independent.co.uk)

| The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Snooping!

The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Snooping ~ Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica.

Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.

But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered.  Here’s what we still don’t know:

 The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?

It’s not entirely clear.

The Guardian published a court order that directed a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone metadata — the time and duration of calls, as well as phone numbers and location data — to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported the program also covers AT&T and Sprint and that it covers the majority of Americans. And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself acknowledged that the “collection” is “broad in scope.”

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said last week that the NSA has been collecting the records going back to 2006. That’s the same year that USA Today revealed a similar-sounding mass collection of metadata, which the paper said had been taking place since 2001. The relationship between the program we got a glimpse of in the Verizon order and the one revealed by USA Today in 2006 is still not clear: USA Today described a program not authorized by warrants. The program detailed last week does have court approval.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?

That’s classified.

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records – “any tangible things” – as part of a “foreign intelligence” or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.

As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman recently wrote, the details of that interpretation matter a lot: “Read narrowly, this language might require that information requested be shown to be important or necessary to the investigation. Read widely, it would include essentially anything even slightly relevant — which is to say, everything.”

In the case of the Verizon order – signed by a judge who sits on the secret court and requiring the company to hand over “all call detail records” — it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don’t know the specifics.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told CNN on Sunday, “It’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we could [not] have developed through other data and other intelligence.”

He said he could not elaborate on his case “without further declassification.”

Sen. Feinstein told ABC that the collection of phone records described in the Verizon order had been “used” in the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi. Later in the interview, Feinstein said she couldn’t disclose more because the information is classified. (It’s worth noting that there’s also evidence that old-fashioned police work helped solve the Zazi case — and that other reports suggest the Prism program, not the phone records, helped solve the case.)

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?

It’s not clear.

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description that the government can’t get information using Prism unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

One thing we don’t know is how the government determines who is a “foreign target.” The Washington Post reported that NSA analysts use “search terms” to try to achieve “51 percent confidence” in a target’s “foreignness.” How do they do that? Unclear.

We’ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don’t know how broad they are. The Post reported that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”

So, how does Prism work?

In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap “directly into the central servers” of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies denied giving the government “direct access” to their servers. In a later story, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

_____________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• | Exposed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Feinstein: ‘Protecting America’ (politico.com)
• Colorado’s Sen. Mark Udall says U.S. surveillance tramples rights (denverpost.com)
• How America Became Orwellian: A Short History of Big Brother Sam (ProPublica) (juancole.com)
• NSA snooping has foiled multiple terror plots: Feinstein (usnews.nbcnews.com)
• Senator Feinstein: NSA phone call data collection in place ‘since 2006′ (guardian.co.uk)
• Rand Paul vows supreme court challenge to NSA surveillance – live – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
• Rep. Ron Paul Calls NSA Spying a Victory for Terrorists, Some Senators Say It’s Fine (dailytech.com)
• Verizon phone records seizure: An ‘Orwellian’ intrusion (voxxi.com)
• Report: NSA seizing Verizon phone records (newsday.com)