Darren Samuelsohn
Politico
2/25/2014
The National Security Agency’s top watchdog slammed Edward Snowden on Tuesday for failing to follow official protocol in relaying his concerns about wayward intelligence gathering and also faulted Congress for not vetting the details of post-9/11 surveillance programs.
“Snowden could have come to me,” George Ellard, the NSA’s inspector general, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Georgetown University Law Center.
Ellard, making his first public comments in seven years working for NSA, insisted that Snowden would have been given the same protections available to other employees who file approximately 1,000 complaints per year on the agency’s hotline system…
The article, with video, continues at Politico.
Related: NSA Wants to Expand Phone Database—Because of Privacy Suits
The Obama administration asked a federal surveillance court on Wednesday for permission to hold millions of phone records longer than the current five-year limit.
The Justice Department argued that data needs to be maintained as evidence for the slew of privacy lawsuits filed in the wake of the Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are suing to shut the program down, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of millions of Americans…
Update: Government agents are infiltrating online communities (video)
If you have been following Glenn since his days at Fox News, you may remember the expose he did on Obama ‘regulatory czar’ Cass Sunstein and his nudge theory. One of Sunstein’s more disturbing ideas involved government operatives infiltrating online communities in order to disseminate false information. As Glenn describes it, the goal was to “pose, infiltrate, and discredit.” Anyone who actually took Sunstein’s words at face value were mocked and labeled conspiracy theorists. But, as it turns out, it was all true.
“The English version of the NSA is the GCHQ… The English NSA has now revealed that that’s exactly what our government is doing,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “What Cass Sunstein proposed in a purely academic setting – that was his excuse – the British NSA has now verified. That’s exactly what we are doing. And so there are operatives posing as regular citizens on our web sites and in our organizations. I mean how crazy is that? Wake up, America! Wake up!”
Glenn Greewald – the former Guardian reporter who worked to publish the material exposed by Edward Snowden – released a thorough report on his new website, FirstLook.org, dissecting the data…
