contemplative
The Obama administration has been characterized by media such as the New York Times as being much more aggressive than previous administrations (including the Bush administration) in their reaction to whistle-blowing and leaks. At least three news correspondents have called this the Obama administration's "war on whistleblowers." The vehicle for taking action against these persons has been the Espionage Act of 1917, which had rarely been used in recent times. Eight people have been charged under the Espionage Act. These include:
1. Thomas Andrews Drake, a former NSA employee who was critical of his agency's surveillance of Americans
2. Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contractor who allegedly had a conversation about North Korea with James Rosen of Fox News Channel
3. Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly was a source for James Risen's book State of War
4. Shamai Leibowitz, a contract linguist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was convicted of leaking information from embassy wiretaps
5. John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst plead guilty to passing classified information
6. James Hitselberger, a former contract linguist for the US Navy in Bahrain is charged with possessing classified documents.
One of the most famous of those charged was Private Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning), an intelligence analyst for the US Army, who plead guilty to passing classified information to the Wikileaks organization. Edward Snowden, a technical contractor for the NSA and former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is currently at large and has been charged with theft and the unauthorized disclosure of classified information to columnist Glenn Greenwald.
It was Snowden's disclosure that exposed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Snowden revealed this to the public in a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents beginning in June 2013. The leaked information disclosed that the NSA was in possession of intercepts telephone and internet communications of over a billion people worldwide. The stated objective of its possessing this information was to obtain information on terrorism as well as foreign politics, economics and "commercial secrets". The documents Snowden disclosed revealed that 17,835 phone lines were on an improperly permitted "alert list" from 2006 to 2009 and were marked for for daily monitoring.
A dedicated unit of the NSA exists to locate targets for the CIA for extrajudicial assassination in the Middle East. The NSA has also spied extensively on the European Union, the United Nations and numerous governments including allies and trading partners in Europe, South America and Asia. The revelations included information that the NSA had obtained data from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone as part of the surveillance.
The NSA tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of cellphones per day, allowing them to map people's movements and contacts in detail. It reportedly has access to all communications made via Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk, and it collects hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts each year. It has also managed to weaken much of the encryption used on the Internet and the majority of Internet privacy is now vulnerable to the NSA.
The NSA collects and stores metadata records of phone calls, including over 120 million US Verizon subscribers as well as internet communications. To authorize this, the NSA relies on an interpretation of the Patriot Act which considers the entirety of US communications to be "relevant" to its terrorism investigations. The NSA supplies foreign intercepts to the DEA, IRS and other law enforcement agencies, who use these to initiate criminal investigations.
The NSA also spies on influential Muslims, even if the targets are not suspected of any crime. The justification is that these groups hold religious or political views deemed "radical" by the NSA.
According to a report in The Washington Post published in July 2014, based on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper claimed to have examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts, that support the claim.
President Obama has defended these programs on the basis that they have congressional oversight. But members of Congress from both parties claim to be unaware of the existence of these NSA programs and have been denied access to basic information about them. President Obama has claimed that there are legal checks in place to prevent inappropriate access of data and that there have been no examples of abuse. Once again this is a claim which many in the media dispute. The Foreign Intelliegence Surveillance Court (FISC) tasked with regulating the NSA's activities is regarded to be incapable of investigating or verifying how often the NSA breaks even its own secret rules. For example, NSA officers have even accused of using data intercepts to spy on love interests. A March 2009 opinion of the FISC court, released by court order, states that protocols restricting data queries had been "so frequently and systemically violated that it can be fairly said that this critical element of the overall regime has never functioned effectively."
Legal opinions on the NSA's bulk collection program have differed. In mid-December 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that the "almost-Orwellian" program likely violates the Constitution. He wrote:
"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast."
But also in December of 2013, U.S. District Judge William Pauley ruled that the NSA's collection of telephone records is legal and valuable in the fight against terrorism. In his opinion, he wrote:
"A bulk telephony metadata collection program a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data."
An October 2014 United Nations report condemned mass surveillance by the United States and other countries as violating multiple international treaties and conventions that guarantee privacy rights.
On March 20, 2013 the Director of National Intelligence, Lieutenant General James Clapper, testified before Congress that the NSA does not intentionally collect any kind of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. But he corrected this in June after details of the PRISM program were published, Clapper stated instead that meta-data of phone and internet traffic are collected, but no actual message contents. This was corroborated by the NSA Director, General Keith Alexander, before it was revealed that the XKeyscore program collects the contents of millions of emails from US citizens without warrant, as well as "nearly everything a user does on the Internet". Alexander later admitted that "content" is collected, but stated that it is simply stored and never analyzed or searched unless there is "a nexus to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups".
Alexander stated on June 27, 2014, that the NSA's bulk phone and Internet intercepts had been instrumental in preventing 54 terrorist "events", including 13 in the US. He said that in all but one of these cases it had provided the initial tip to uncover the threat. On July 31 NSA Deputy Director John Inglis conceded to the Senate that these intercepts had not been vital in stopping any terrorist attacks, but were "close" to vital in identifying and convicting four San Diego men for sending US $8,930 to Al-Shabaab, a militia that conducts terrorism in Somalia.
But President Obama continues to defend the NSA activities. In June of 2013 he issued a strong statement in support of the controversial surveillance programs. He said "You can shout Big Brother or program run amok, but if you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.” He added “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about."
Following is a YouTube video with the President's statement on this controversial subject.