Monday, December 30, 2013

Democracy Now! Daily Digest - A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Monday, 30 December 2013

Democracy Now! Daily Digest - A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Monday, 30 December 2013
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STORIES:
Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make"
The German publication Der Spiegel has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. In addition, with help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and journalist Glenn Greenwald join us to discuss the latest revelations, along with the future of Edward Snowden.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation about the National Security Agency. On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegel revealed new details about secretive hacking—a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I think everybody knows by now, or at least I hope they do after the last seven months reporting, that the goal of the NSA really is the elimination of privacy worldwide—not hyperbole, not metaphor, that’s literally their goal, is to make sure that all human communications that take place electronically are collected and then stored by the NSA and susceptible to being monitored and analyzed. But the specifics are still really important to illustrate just the scope and invasiveness and the dangers presented by this secret surveillance system.
And what the Der Spiegel article details is that one of the things that the NSA is really adept at doing is implanting in various machines—computers, laptops, even cellphones and the like—malware. And malware is essentially a program that allows the NSA, in the terminology that hackers use, to own the machine. So, no matter how much encryption you use, no matter how much you safeguard your communication with passwords and other things, this malware allows the NSA to literally watch every keystroke that you make, to get screen captures of what it is that you’re doing, to circumvent all forms of encryption and other barriers to your communications.
And one of the ways that they’re doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory-seal it and then send it back to the user. They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they’ve been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, just to be really specific, you order a computer, and it’s coming UPS, or it’s coming FedEx, and they have it redirected to their own—you know, to the NSA, and they put in the malware, the spyware, and then send it on to you?
GLENN GREENWALD: Correct. That’s what the Der Spiegel report indicates, based on the documents that they’ve published. But we’ve actually been working, ourselves, on certain stories that should be published soon regarding similar interdiction efforts. And one of the things that I think is so amazing about this, Amy, is that the U.S. government has spent the last three or four years shrilly, vehemently warning the world that Chinese technology companies are unsafe to purchase products from, because they claim the Chinese government interdicts these products and installs surveillance, backdoors and other forms of malware onto the machinery so that when you get them, immediately your privacy is compromised. And they’ve actually driven Chinese firms out of the U.S. market and elsewhere with these kinds of accusations. Congress has convened committees to issue reports making these kind of accusations about Chinese companies. And yet, at the same time, the NSA is doing exactly that which they accuse these Chinese companies of doing. And there’s a real question, which is: Are these warnings designed to steer people away from purchasing Chinese products into the arms of the American industry so that the NSA’s ability to implant these devices becomes even greater, since now everybody is buying American products out of fear that they can no longer buy Chinese products because this will happen to them?
AMY GOODMAN: The story is reported by Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and a group of Der Spiegel reporters. Is this based, Glenn, on Edward Snowden’s revelations, the documents that he got out and shared with you and Laura Poitras?
GLENN GREENWALD: Der Spiegel doesn’t actually indicate the origin of the documents, so I’m going to go ahead and let them speak to that themselves. What I can tell you is that there are documents in the archive that was provided to us by Edward Snowden that detail similar programs. Whether these specific documents that Der Spiegel published come from them or from a different source is something I’m going to go ahead and let them address.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the beginning of this piece. "In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors." Take it from there, Glenn. Glenn, are you still with us? We may have just lost Glenn. I’ll just read a little more, until we reconnect with Glenn.
“In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn’t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.
“In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States’ foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA’s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.
"It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA’s work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio."
Jameel Jaffer, the significance of this, and the legality of what is happening here?
JAMEEL JAFFER: You know, I think that what bothers me most about these programs is the bulk aspect of it or the dragnet aspect of it. When the NSA has good reason to believe probable cause that a specific person is engaged in terrorism or something like that, it doesn’t bother me that much that the NSA is surveilling that person. I think that’s the NSA’s job. The problem with a lot of these programs is that they are not directed at people thought to be doing something wrong. They’re not directed at suspected terrorists or even suspected criminals. These programs are directed at everybody. Or, to say that a different way, they’re not directed at all. They’re indiscriminate.
And if you think about what the Fourth Amendment was meant to do, what the Constitution was meant to do, it was meant to ensure that the government couldn’t engage in surveillance without some reason. And all of this, all of this surveillance that the NSA is engaged in, essentially flips that on its head. It collects information about everybody in the hope that the surveillance will lead to suspicion about somebody. It’s supposed to be doing it the other way around, starting with the suspicion and then going to the search. It’s starting with the search and going to suspicion. And I think that that’s really, really dangerous, and it’s exactly what the Fourth Amendment was meant to prohibit.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, when it came to the judge’s decision recently, you have the judge that says that this is constitutional, but it followed the judge saying this is Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Why the difference of opinion between these two judges?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think one judge got it right, and the other one got it wrong. I mean, I think that, you know, Judge Pauley—Judge Pauley was not very skeptical towards the government’s claims. The government made claims about the effectiveness of the program, about the necessity of the program, claims that were contradicted by information already in the public record, information put into the public record by government officials. And Judge Pauley nonetheless deferred to the government’s claims in court, which is a disappointment to us.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get back to Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, I just read the first couple of paragraphs of the piece in Der Spiegel about the garage doors that wouldn’t open because the garage door openers were actually operating on the same frequency of the NSA, which was really vastly expanding in San Antonio at the time. But could you take it from there? The significance of this and this Tailored Access Operations, this particular unit, and how significant it is?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, one thing I think that it underscores, this was in a community that had no idea that there was this gargantuan NSA hacking unit that had sprawled up in its community, and it shows just the power of how much they’re doing, that they just simply shut down the electric devices of an entire community that didn’t know that they were even there.
But the TAO, the Tailored Access Operations unit, is really remarkable because the government, the U.S. government, has been warning for many years now about the dangers of hackers, both stateless hackers as well as state-sponsored hackers from China and from Iran and from elsewhere. And the reality is that nobody is as advanced or as prolific when it comes into hacking into computer networks, into computer systems, than the NSA. And TAO is basically a unit that is designed to cultivate the most advanced hacking operations and skills of any unit, any entity on the Earth. And so, yet again, what we find is that exactly the dangers about which the U.S. government is shrilly warning when it comes to other people, they’re actually doing themselves to a much greater and more menacing degree than anybody else is. And that’s the significance of this particular unit inside of the NSA, is they do all of the most malicious hacking techniques that hackers who have been prosecuted by this very same government do and much, much more.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about White Tamale, Glenn Greenwald.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think that—you know, a lot of the—one of the good things about this particular story is that it was—the lead writer on it was Jake Appelbaum, who is, you know, one of the world’s leading experts when it comes to computer program. He’s the developer of the Tor Project, one of the developers of the Tor Project, which is designed to safeguard anonymity on online browsing, to make it impossible for hostile states to be able to trace where people are. And one of the things he did was take some very technical documents and translated it into a way that the public should be able to understand it.
And so, several of these programs, including White Tamale, are about insertions of malware into various forms of electronics. And he actually gave a speech this morning explaining some of this. And what he essentially said is that, with these programs, the government is able to literally control human beings through control of their machines. We hear all of this—these stories about the NSA being very targeted in the kinds of communications that they want to collect and store, and the types of people whom they’re targeting that are very specific and discriminating, and yet what several of these programs are, that are revealed by Der Spiegel, are highly sophisticated means for collecting everything that a user does, and it implicates the people with whom they’re communicating and a whole variety of other types of online activity in which they’re engaging.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, who you were just talking about, who co-wrote the piece for Der Spiegel, who was speaking, as you just said, in Hamburg, Germany, at this conference, the Chaos Communication Congress.
JACOB APPELBAUM: Basically, their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that they are interested in. So there really is no boundary to what they want to do. There is only sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do and to the amount of things they’re able to do at scale. They seem to just do those things without thinking too much about it. And there are specific tactical things where they have to target a group or an individual, and those things seem limited either by budget or simply by their time.
And as we have released today on Der Spiegel's website, which it should be live—I just checked; it should be live for everyone here—we actually show a whole bunch of details about their budgets, as well as the individuals involved with the NSA and the Tailored Access Operations group, in terms of numbers. So it should give you a rough idea, showing that there was a small period of time in which the Internet was really free and we did not have people from the U.S. military that were watching over it and exploiting everyone on it, and now we see, every year, that the number of people who are hired to break into people's computers as part of grand operations, those people are growing day by day.
AMY GOODMAN: Also speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at the Chaos Communication Congress this weekend was WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia and spent four months with him. She spoke after receiving a long standing ovation.
SARAH HARRISON: My name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know. I’m a journalist working for WikiLeaks. This year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison. This act in my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden documents. The U.K. government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Sarah Harrison. Glenn Greenwald, talk more about her significance. She isn’t talked about as much, but she said at this conference that after leaving Russia, she’s now in Germany and cannot go back to England, where she lives, for fear of being arrested.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there’s a lot of people who debate WikiLeaks and the like, but there is no question that WikiLeaks deserves a huge amount of credit for the work they did in saving Edward Snowden from what probably would have been, certainly, ultimate detention by the authorities in Hong Kong, and then extradition or handing over to the United States, which would have put him in prison and silenced him, as Daniel Ellsberg said, pending a trial, and then almost certainly convicted him, given the oppressive laws that prevent whistleblowers who are charged with Espionage Act violations from raising the defense that what they did was justified and they were actually blowing the whistle and not engaged in espionage.
And the person at WikiLeaks who sacrificed the most and who was the most heroic was Sarah Harrison, who flew to Hong Kong, who met Snowden, who traveled with him to Moscow, who stayed with him for several months while first he was in the airport and then he was—he was getting acclimated to his life in Moscow. And not only did she give up those months of her life and put herself at risk, but she’s now in danger of not being able, as she just said in that clip, to return to her own home.
And the terrorism investigation that she was referencing is the one that has arisen and that the U.K. government is conducting in the context of its detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport. And we’ve challenged that detention in court. And in response, the U.K. government has said, number one, they are conducting an investigation, a criminal investigation, under terrorism laws against him, against Laura Poitras and myself, and against anybody at The Guardian involved in the reporting of these stories. And that means that everybody implicated in the reporting of the story, which has caused a global debate around the world and worldwide reform, is now a suspect in a terrorism investigation. That is how radical and extreme the U.K. government, working in partnership with the U.S. government, has become. And every lawyer that Laura and I have talked to has said, "You should not, in any way, put yourself at risk of getting apprehended by the U.K. government." And obviously, as a British citizen, she is well advised not to return to the U.K., for the crime of working in a journalistic capacity to bring these stories to the world. And of all the criminals that we—of all the criminality that we’ve exposed in this case, I think the most egregious is the attempt by the U.S. and the U.K. government to convert journalism not only into crime and not only into espionage, but into actual terrorism. It’s a real menace to a free press in an ongoing way.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you addressed this congress, the Chaos Congress in Hamburg, but you didn’t go. You did it by Skype or by some form of video communication. Do you feel you can travel to Europe? Do you feel you can travel to the United States?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, there’s clearly risk for my doing either. I think the big risk—I mean, I would feel completely free to travel to a country like Germany. The problem is, is that Germany is in the EU, along with the U.K., and there are all kinds of laws and other conventions that govern the ability of the U.K. to claim that somebody has engaged in terrorism and then force other EU states to turn them over. And so, I have very good lawyers who are working to resolve all of these various risks, but every lawyer that I’ve spoken with over the past four months has said that "You would be well advised not to travel until these legal issues are resolved." Laura Poitras has gotten the same advice. Obviously, Sarah Harrison has gotten the same advice.
There are very genuine legal threats that are deliberately being hung over the heads of those of us who have worked on these stories and are continuing to work on these stories, in an attempt to intimidate us and deter us from continuing to report. It’s not going to work. We’re going to report as aggressively as if these threats didn’t exist. But their mere existence does provide all sorts of limitations, not only on us, but other journalists who now and in the future will work on similar stories. It is designed to create a climate of fear to squash a free press.
AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA director, General Michael Hayden, appeared on Face the Nation Sunday and accused Edward Snowden of being a traitor.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I used to say he was a defector, you know, and there’s a history of defection. Actually, there’s a history of defection to Moscow, and that he seems to be part of that stream. I’m now kind of drifting in the direction of perhaps more harsh language.
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Such as?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Such as "traitor." I mean—
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Based on what?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Well, in the past two weeks, in open letters to the German and the Brazilian government, he has offered to reveal more American secrets to those governments in return for something. And in return was for asylum. I think there’s an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it’s treason.
AMY GOODMAN: Hayden also responded to questions about the impact of Snowden’s revelations on the NSA. He was being interviewed by Major Garrett.
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Is the NSA stronger or weaker as a result of Edward Snowden’s disclosures?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: It’s infinitely weaker.
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Infinitely?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Infinitely. This is the most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage. Look, we’ve had other spies. We can talk about Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, but their damage, as bad as it was, was fairly limited, even though in those—both of those cases, human beings actually lost their lives. But they were specific sources, all right? There’s a reason we call these leaks, all right? And if you extend the metaphor, Hanssen and Ames, you could argue whether that was a cup of water that was leaked or a bucket of water that was leaked. What Snowden is revealing, Major, is the plumbing. He’s revealing how we acquire this information. It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I wanted you to respond to that and also the latest request by Edward Snowden to get asylum in, well, the country where you now live, in Brazil, and the significance of the debate, at least reported by The New York Times that’s going on within the intelligence community and the White House about whether Edward Snowden should possibly be granted amnesty.
GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, Michael Hayden, in that clip, as he so often does, just told outright lies. Just anyone who has any doubts should go read the letter that Edward Snowden wrote to the people of Brazil, as well as to the people of Germany, and compare it to what Michael Hayden lied and said that he actually did. He never offered to give documents in exchange for asylum or anything like that. He did the opposite. He has been repeatedly pursued by officials of both countries asking him to participate in the criminal investigations that they are conducting about spying on their citizens. And he was essentially writing a letter to say, "Unfortunately, I’m not able to help, even though I would like to help in any legal and appropriate way, because I don’t actually have permanent asylum anywhere, and the U.S. government is still trying to imprison me. And until my situation is more secure, I’m not able to help." He was writing a letter explaining why he can’t and won’t participate in those investigations, not offering anything in return for asylum or anything else like that.
Secondly, just let me make this point about the complete ignorance of Michael Hayden. He said in that clip that Edward Snowden should now be deemed to be a traitor because he’s engaged in treason by virtue of having offered asylum in exchange for documents. Let’s assume he really did do that. Go and look at what the Constitution defines treason as being. It is very clear. It says treason is the giving of aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States—the enemies of the United States. So, even if you want to believe Michael Hayden’s lie that Edward Snowden offered information and documents in exchange for asylum to Germany and Brazil, are Germany and Brazil enemies of the United States? It’s not treason even if you believe the lies of Michael Hayden.
Thirdly, I think the real question here is: Why do we even have to have the discussion of Edward Snowden needing amnesty and asylum from other countries or needing amnesty from the United States? What he did is not like Aldrich Ames or Hanssen or anybody else like that. He didn’t sell these documents to foreign adversary governments, as he could have, and lived the rest of his life extremely rich. He brought them to some of the leading journalistic organizations in the world and asked that they be published only in a way that will inform his fellow citizens and the rest of the world about what is being done to their privacy. It is classic whistleblowing behavior. And the real question is: Why are whistleblowers in the United States either prosecuted vindictively and extremely or forced to flee the country in order to avoid being in a cage for the rest of their life? That’s the real question.
And the final thing I want to say is, you know, all this talk about amnesty for Edward Snowden, and it’s so important that the rule of law be applied to him, it’s really quite amazing. Here’s Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress. These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they’re not prosecuted. They’re free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that’s why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he’s some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU is the legal adviser for Edward Snowden—Ben Wizner of the ACLU. What is going on behind the scenes right now? Is there a discussion between Snowden and the U.S. government around the issue of amnesty?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think that Edward Snowden has been very direct and very open about his intentions and what he wants from the U.S. government. He would like to come back to the United States. Obviously, he doesn’t want to come back under the conditions that are being offered right now.
I think that Michael Hayden’s statements were really irresponsible and outrageous. I mean, the idea that Edward Snowden has damaged national security is ludicrous. And it’s not that Edward Snowden has exposed just secrets of the NSA; he has exposed, as Glenn says, the lies of the NSA. James—the director of national intelligence, Mr. Clapper, testified to Congress that the NSA wasn’t collecting information about millions of Americans. It turns out that they were. The solicitor general told the Supreme Court that the NSA was providing notice to criminal defendants who had been surveilled. Turns out they weren’t. So it’s all these misrepresentations about the NSA’s activities that Edward Snowden has exposed, and I think that’s a great public service. I think it’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is in Russia. And we’re hopeful that he’ll be able to return to the United States, not in—not to face criminal charges, but rather with the kind of amnesty that he deserves.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story about Edward Snowden, speaking to us from Brazil, now creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Tune in, by the way, to our New Year’s Day show, when we go through the major stories of 2013. Of course, the story about the NSA is top of the list. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
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Orwellian or a Blunt Tool?: Conflicting Rulings on NSA Spying Set Up Likely Supreme Court Showdown
A federal judge has upheld the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone data just days after a separate court reached an opposite opinion. On Friday, District Judge William Pauley dismissed a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. phone records. Pauley said telephone metadata could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks by alerting the government to hijackers who made phone calls from the United States. The issue will likely head to the Supreme Court — Pauley’s ruling comes less than two weeks after another federal judge questioned the program’s constitutionality and described the bulk collection as "almost Orwellian." We’re joined by two guests: Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy; and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to one of the biggest stories of 2013: the National Security Agency and its massive domestic and international surveillance apparatus. The German publication Der Spiegel has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic.
The Der Spiegel report includes a number of new details about the NSA’s hacking abilities. Hackers inside the secretive unit have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. With help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. In one secret operation called White Tamale, the NSA hacked into the communications of Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Security.
These revelations were published just two days after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. phone records. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote, quote, "This blunt tool only works because it collects everything. Technology allowed al Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely. The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the government’s counter-punch," he wrote. The issue will likely head to the Supreme Court. Earlier this month, another federal judge questioned the program’s constitutionality and described it as "almost Orwellian."
We’re joined today by two guests. Here in New York, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. And joining us from Brazil is Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
We’re going to begin right here with Jameel Jaffer. Jameel, talk about the judge’s ruling. What exactly did he rule?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Sure. Well, it’s a ruling that is limited to the bulk surveillance of metadata, telephony metadata. So, as you know, there’s a program that the NSA has in place now—has had in place now for seven years, at least—that collects information about every single phone call made or received on a U.S. telephone network. So that means every time you pick up the phone, the NSA is making a note, in some sense, of who you called, how long you spoke to them, when you called them, every single time you pick up the phone. And the NSA is doing that with respect to every single phone call made in the United States.
So we challenged the constitutionality of that program, and the judge, Judge Pauley here in the Southern District of New York, upheld the program, saying first that Congress had intended to prevent people like us—that is, the targets of this kind of surveillance—from challenging this kind of program in court, and also that the Constitution doesn’t foreclose the government from collecting this kind of information about everybody. Obviously, we disagree strongly with the decision. We think that it’s wrong in multiple respects, and we intend to appeal it.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly who you represented in this lawsuit.
JAMEEL JAFFER: So, we represent the ACLU. I mean, obviously, I work for the ACLU myself, but the client in this case is the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union. And these organizations are the clients because we are Verizon subscribers. And the order that was disclosed by Glenn and by The Guardian is an order that requires Verizon to turn over all of its information, all of this kind of information, to the NSA on a daily—on a daily basis. So, we have evidence now that our own communications were monitored in this way. We know that everybody’s communications are monitored in this way. And we were able to go into court to challenge the program because we have this evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response to the judge’s ruling, this ruling coming right after another judge, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, called the NSA surveillance "almost Orwellian" and "likely unconstitutional"?
GLENN GREENWALD: I think the history of the post-9/11 era has been one of failed institutions, particularly those designed to check abuses by the executive branch and the intelligence community, beginning obviously with the U.S. media, the U.S. Congress, and I think the worst culprit has been the federal judiciary, which really is the most inexcusable because it’s supposed to be immunized from political pressures by life tenure, which Article III of the Constitution vests to federal judges specifically to say to them, "Your duty is to protect people’s rights, no matter how politically unpopular doing so might be." And yet they’ve really led the way, with very few exceptions, in endorsing even the most extreme and radical forms of unconstitutional conduct.
And I think Judge Pauley’s decision is just a continuation of that, very typical. It begins by exploiting 9/11 to justify anything the government wants to do. And the reason why Judge Leon’s decision got so much attention was because it was such an amazing aberration. It was one of the very few ringing endorsements that the Constitution actually still matters in the war on terror. And we’ll have to see how these conflicts play out in the appellate courts.
AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA director, General Michael Hayden, addressed the issue of telephone surveillance in his interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Granted, millions, billions of phone records a day are acquired by the National Security Agency, but what follows, Major, is really important. What happens to that data? How often is that data touched? And the truth is, it’s touched two to three hundred times per year, and only based upon a reasonable, articulable suspicion that that number is affiliated with terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: Jameel Jaffer, your response?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I don’t think that should be reassuring to anyone. I mean, the fact is that this information rests in an NSA database. It is already being used pretty extensively. Three hundred times in a single year, the NSA has conducted what it calls queries into this data. Every time it conducts one of those queries, it looks at not just the information relating to the person who is suspected of being a terrorist, but the information of everybody who’s been in contact with that person, everybody who’s been in contact with those people, and everybody who’s been in contact with those people. So it’s millions of people every single time the NSA conducts a query.
And that assumes that the NSA is using the data only in the way that it says it’s using the data, and that it will use the data only in the way that it says it will use the data. And we know from past experience, we know from history, that that is not going to be the case. We know that this information will be abused, if not by this administration, by the next administration. At some point, a president will see it as politically valuable to have the information that’s in this database and to use it in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go to a clip from, well, at the time, Senator Joe Biden in 2006, now of course vice president. He criticized a similar call record collection program revealed under the Bush administration. He, too, was speaking on CBS.
SEN. JOE BIDEN: I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talk to, I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question here is: What do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al-Qaeda?
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, you know, I think this underscores one of the most amazing things, Amy. As you know, when I began writing about politics in 2005, 2006, I focused on the NSA scandal at that time, which was that the Bush administration was spying on the telephone calls of Americans without the warrants required by law. And by far the biggest support that I got for the work I was doing was from Democrats and progressives and liberals, all of whom almost unanimously were highly supportive of that work because, as we just saw in that clip, Democrats, back then, understood the serious dangers posed by mass surveillance and by even the collection of metadata. And fast-forward now seven years later, when there’s a Democrat in office, and by far the biggest critics of the reporting that we’re doing, the most vehement defenders of the NSA, are people like Dianne Feinstein, but also just liberal and Democratic Party pundits and reporters and journalists all over the Internet who have suddenly decided that they are going to take it upon themselves to be great supporters of the NSA. Polling data reflects massive changes in how Democrats and progressives think about these issues, simply because there’s a new president in office who belongs to their party. And the Joe Biden clip really underscores just how unprincipled and hackish that faction of the Democratic Party has become, radically changing what they think based not on their own beliefs, but who it benefits in terms of power.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Glenn Greenwald, taking it forward to 2013 to President Obama and Vice President Biden right now, their latest responses in dealing with all the revelations around the NSA?
GLENN GREENWALD: What’s clearly underway, Amy, is the same thing that we saw in the 1970s, when the scandal over and concern over abusive eavesdropping powers was at least as great as what we have now, if not greater. And the idea was they needed a way to placate the public and to say, "Don’t worry, we’re putting these great safeguards on these powers, so you don’t have to worry anymore about abuse." And what they really did instead was just created these symbolic gestures that really didn’t change much of anything, that just made the program prettier and then therefore more palatable. They said, "We’re going to create a court to oversee this," and yet the court was created to be a very pro-government court and met in secret. Only the government could show up. And they’ve rubber-stamped everything. They said, "We’re going to create oversight committees in Congress," and yet they installed the most slavish loyalists to the NSA, like Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers, as the committee chair to make sure those committees do nothing but bolster and defend the intelligence community rather than ever checking them or exercising oversight.
That’s what the president is now trying to do with this panel of hand-picked loyalists, to pretend that these reform—that there’s reform going on, and yet most of those proposals, though they sound nice, are actually going to achieve very little, if not make it worse, other than to try and convince the public that they need not worry. That’s the explicit goal of this reform process, to make the public more comfortable with these programs, not to meaningfully reform them.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion and particularly focus on the latest revelations in a piece that just came out from Der Spiegel about TAO and find out just what this is. People ordering online a computer or a cellphone, that computer being sent not to you directly, but detour—making a detour to the NSA, they put spyware in it, and then you get it? Just one of the revelations in this piece. We’re talking with Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story about Edward Snowden, previously a Guardian columnist, now creating his own media venture, and Jameel Jaffer, who is the deputy legal director with the ACLU. This is Democracy Now! We’re back in a minute.
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Jobless Benefits Cut for 1.3 Million, Despite Highest Long-Term Unemployment Since World War II
On Saturday, 1.3 million Americans lost their last lifeline from the federal government: an emergency unemployment insurance program. Although long-term unemployment is still at its highest level since World War II, Congress failed to renew the program in the budget deal it passed just before adjourning for winter recess. The program provided up to 47 weeks of supplemental unemployment insurance payments to jobless people looking for work. Now, just a quarter of unemployed Americans will receive jobless benefits — the smallest proportion in half a century. Allowing the program to sunset is expected to have wide-scale ramifications for the economy at large, axing job growth by around 300,000 positions next year and pushing hundreds of thousands of households to the brink of poverty. We are joined by Imara Jones, economic justice contributor for Colorlines.com.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: On Saturday, 1.3 million Americans lost their last lifeline from the federal government: an emergency unemployment insurance program. Although long-term unemployment is still at its highest level since World War II, Congress failed to renew the program in the budget deal it passed just before adjourning for winter recess. The program provided up to 47 weeks of supplemental unemployment insurance payments to jobless people looking for work. Now, just a quarter of unemployed Americans will receive jobless benefits—the smallest proportion in half a century. Allowing the program to sunset is expected to have wide-scale ramifications for the economy at large, axing job growth by around 300,000 positions next year and pushing hundreds of thousands of households to the brink of poverty.
For more, we’re joined by Imara Jones. He’s the economic justice contributor for Colorlines.com, served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy, recently wrote an article called "The Grinches Who Stole Jobless Benefits."
Imara Jones, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about this, in this holiday season, what’s taken place.
IMARA JONES: Well, in any season it’s a dreadful thing to happen, but it’s even more so now. And the problem is that not only is it the holiday season, but this is the wrong thing to happen at the wrong time for our economy, for all of the reasons that you just laid out. And the problem is that long-term unemployment is still a problem. And in a year in which there’s a lot of talk about the need to focus on equity and inequities in our economy, the loss of over a million benefits for the people just days ago and then up to five million in the year ahead is going to make that infinitely harder.
AMY GOODMAN: How did this happen? And how did—I mean, while the Democrats criticize this, but they signed on to the deal.
IMARA JONES: I think two things happened. The first is that this is not a surprise, given where the GOP has been since it swept to power in 2010. They’ve made a lot of statements, and they believe, right and truly, that it’s not the role of the government to be involved in helping people who are the most vulnerable. And that’s just a declaration that they’ve made and that has been a part of their actions. I think what happened with the Democratic Party is that there probably was a sense that this wasn’t going to happen, that there had always been some brinksmanship around unemployment benefits, but there had always a way that was found. But it probably was just a bridge too far for John Boehner, given the fact that he just cut a deal with the Democrats on the budget at large, and so something else had to be given up.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking on Fox News, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said long-term jobless benefits can create a group of perpetually unemployed people.
SEN. RAND PAUL: I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers. There was a study that came out a few months ago, and it said if you have a worker that’s been unemployed for four weeks and on unemployment insurance, and one that’s on 99 weeks, which would you hire? Every employer, nearly 100 percent, said they will always hire the person who’s been out of work four weeks. When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy. And it really—while it seems good, it actually does a disservice to the people you’re trying to help.
AMY GOODMAN: Imara Jones, respond to Senator Paul.
IMARA JONES: Two things. First of all, that’s just not true. I mean, the Fed—Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco came out with a study and said that unemployment benefits actually have very little impact on whether or not people remain jobless. It only extends joblessness by up to seven days. What it does do is that it allows people to be able to sustain themselves while looking for work. So there’s no impact on jobless benefits on joblessness.
And the second thing is that jobless benefits are actually stimulative to the economy. They are actually—add, for every one dollar we provide to someone of unemployment benefits, it yields $1.60 in economic activity. And that’s why the loss of these benefits is going to rob our economy of $41 billion, at a time when the economy is still very schizophrenic. It can’t figure out whether it’s going to recover and how it’s going to recover. And the problem with selective studies like Senator Paul sort of pulled out is that it’s not about an individual fact, it’s about an assessment. And the bottom line is that we’re not in a good shape on unemployment.
AMY GOODMAN: In the past, the unemployment benefits have been extended. Is it going to happen this time?
IMARA JONES: It’s hard to see how that’s going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are the unemployed in this country? And we just have 30 seconds.
IMARA JONES: They are disproportionately—long-term unemployed are disproportionately people of color. They are across all educational areas and backgrounds. Age-wise, a pretty wide standard age distribution, but the longest of the long-term unemployed are actually older. And so, what’s going to happen is that a lot of these people are either going to be pushed into poverty, they’re going to drop out of the job force and extend that problem, or they’re going to actually file and go on Social Security early, so they’re going to actually push up the cost that the GOP says that it wants to hold down. So, it doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Imara Jones, economic justice contributor to Colorlines.com, served in the Clinton White House.
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HEADLINES:
Opposition Activists: Over 500 Killed in Syrian Attacks on Aleppo
Opposition activists are claiming more than 500 people have died in weeks of Syrian government air strikes on the city of Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the dead includes 151 children. Syrian government helicopters have been hitting Aleppo with highly destructive barrel bombs –- oil drums filled with explosives and sometimes with nails or scrap metal. At least 25 people were reportedly killed on Saturday when government forces bombed a vegetable market. Meanwhile, the Assad regime has evacuated thousands of residents from the town of Adra amidst heavy clashes with rebel fighters.
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31 Dead in Twin Russian Suicide Attacks
At least 31 people have died in two consecutive days of bombings in the Russian city of Volgograd. Seventeen people were killed and 34 were wounded on Sunday when a female suicide bomber hit a train station. Another 14 people were killed earlier today when a bomber hit a packed bus. No group has claimed responsibility, but Russia has faced repeated attacks from Islamist militants in Chechnya and the North Caucasus. Russia is set to host the Winter Olympics in just over a month.
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Crisis Feared as 100,000 Seek Refuge in Central African Republic Capital
Aid workers are warning of a humanitarian crisis amidst sectarian violence in the Central African Republic. The local coordinator of Doctors Without Borders says that more than 100,000 people have now sought shelter at one camp for the displaced in the capital Bangui.
Lindis Hurum: "For three weeks now, these people haven’t received any other assistance but health assistance from Doctors Without Borders and water from the Red Cross. There are no toilets. Water is not sufficient. There’s no food distribution, no distribution of shelter. So there’s so much to do. And first of all, we have to improve the situation with the hygiene as soon as possible, before the situation becomes catastrophic, with 100,000 people in such a small place. It’s an emergency. We must do something quickly."
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Regional Leaders Set Deadline for Talks in South Sudan
African leaders have set a deadline of Tuesday for talks between the South Sudanese government and rebel fighters. More than 1,000 people have died and tens of thousands have been displaced in over two weeks of fighting between government forces and rebels loyal to the country’s ousted former vice president. At a summit in Kenya, Ethiopia’s foreign minister read a statement on behalf of regional countries supporting South Sudanese President Salva Kiir.
Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom: "Welcomed the commitment by the government of the Republic of South Sudan to an immediate cessation of hostilities and called upon Dr. Riek Machar and other parties to make similar commitments. Determined that if hostilities do not cease within four days of this communiqué, the summit will consider taking further measures. Condemns all unconstitutional actions to challenge the constitutional order, democracy and the rule of law, and in particularly condemns changing the democratic government of the Republic of South Sudan through the use of force."
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Judge Upholds NSA’s Bulk Collection of Phone Data
A federal judge has upheld the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone data just days after a separate court reached an opposite opinion. On Friday, District Judge William Pauley dismissed a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the NSA’s mass collection of U.S. phone records. Pauley said telephone metadata could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks by alerting the government to hijackers who made phone calls from the United States. The issue will likely head to the Supreme Court. Pauley’s ruling comes less than two weeks after another federal judge questioned the program’s constitutionality and described the bulk collection as "almost Orwellian."
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Report: Secretive NSA Unit Hacks Into Computers, Intercepts Packages
The German publication Der Spiegel has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. With help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for spies.
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Jobless Benefits Expire for 1.3 Million Americans
Jobless benefits have expired for over 1.3 million Americans after Congress failed to renew them under the recent budget deal. The program provided up to 47 weeks of supplemental unemployment insurance payments to jobless people looking for work. Just a quarter of unemployed Americans will now receive jobless benefits — the smallest proportion in half a century.
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Healthcare Enrollment Jumps in December
The White House says nearly two million people have signed up for health insurance plans through the federal and state exchanges in the first three months of enrollment. Over 1.1 million signed up through the federal website HealthCare.gov, including some 975,000 in December.
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Egypt Faces Violence, Protests After Anti-Brotherhood Crackdown
Egypt is facing continued violence and unrest amidst the latest escalation of the military government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. On Sunday, four soldiers were wounded when a bomb struck a military building north of Cairo. A bombing last week prompted the Egyptian government to deem the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, even though a separate militant group claimed responsibility. One person was killed and more than 100 were detained over the weekend in student protests against the anti-Brotherhood crackdown. Buildings on the Al-Azhar University campus were set on fire during the unrest. Egypt is set to hold a referendum on a new constitution next month.
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4 Al Jazeera Journalists Detained in Cairo
Egyptian forces have arrested four journalists with the news network Al Jazeera in Cairo. Correspondent Peter Greste, producers Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, and cameraman Mohamed Fawzy were detained at their hotel on Sunday. Al Jazeera is calling for their immediate release. Egypt’s military government has repeatedly targeted Al Jazeera, raiding offices, ordering an affiliate’s closure and deporting several staffers.
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Saudi Arabia Grants $3 Billion in Aid to Lebanese Military
Lebanon is receiving $3 billion in aid from Saudi Arabia. The Lebanese government says the money will go to its military, the largest-ever grant for Lebanon’s armed forces. The announcement follows Friday’s bombing in Beirut that killed five people, including former minister Mohamad Chatah, a critic of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
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Thousands Protest Relocation of U.S. Military Base on Okinawa
Thousands of people have rallied on the Japanese island of Okinawa in protest of plans to relocate a U.S. military base. Local officials signed on to a deal last week that will move the base from a densely populated urban area to a more remote location. But a movement of Okinawa residents has opposed the base altogether and pushed for ousting U.S. forces off the island, citing environmental concerns and sexual assaults by U.S. soldiers on local residents. On Friday, thousands of people surrounded a government building and staged a sit-in inside.
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U.S. Intel Warns of Afghan Collapse Without Security Pact
A new U.S. intelligence estimate warns Afghanistan will likely descend into chaos unless the two sides can sign a long-term agreement to maintain American troops. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has delayed ratification of a security pact that would keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014. The National Intelligence Estimate says U.S. gains will be eroded within three years without a large military presence to fight the Taliban.
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Anti-Polio Health Worker Shot Dead in Pakistan
A health worker overseeing a polio vaccination effort in Pakistan has been shot dead. The victim was the latest medical official to be killed in the fallout from the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden. The Taliban began attacking health workers after it was revealed the CIA used a fake vaccination program to help locate bin Laden.
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Report: No Al-Qaeda Role in Benghazi Attack, Video Played Role
A new investigation challenges right-wing claims around the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year. The New York Times reports there is no evidence al-Qaeda or other international militants played a role in the assault that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The attack was coordinated by local militia who in fact benefited from the U.S.-backed NATO intervention against Col. Muammar Gaddafi. It also appears that anger over an anti-Islam film produced in the United States, "The Innocence of Muslims," helped fuel the attack, as the Obama administration initially claimed.
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Parents of NYPD Victims Protest Bratton’s Appointment
Protests are continuing in New York City over incoming Mayor Bill de Blasio’s appointment of William Bratton as the next police commissioner. Bratton returns to the job after leading the New York City Police Department in the mid-1990s, when he embraced a controversial strategy of cracking down on low-level offenses. De Blasio campaigned on a promise to curb the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, but Bratton actually expanded the program while heading the Los Angeles police. On Friday, the parents of victims shot dead by police under Bratton’s watch led a protest march from Harlem to the Bronx. Nicholas Heyward Sr. lost his 13-year-old son after police mistook the boy’s toy rifle for a real gun.
Nicholas Heyward Sr.: "I’m angry today. I’ve been angry since hearing that Bill de Blasio has chosen Bill Bratton to be the next police commissioner again. You see, back in 1994, my son was murdered, and he was gunned down by a New York City police officer. Whether it was housing or just a city officer, you should have addressed that issue. But he failed to do that. This protest is, you have parents and family out here who had their innocent loved ones that were killed. That’s what we’re talking about. We do not wish for William Bratton to be the police commissioner of New York City again."
Organizers say they plan to continue protests at de Blasio’s inauguration on Wednesday.
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