NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A...
NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special ProsecutorBy Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman - Forbes
8/14/2013 @ 2:54PM
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It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue Service, which, as you might imagine, is always looking for information on tax cheats.
The Obama Administration repeatedly has assured us that the NSA does not collect the private information of ordinary Americans. Those statements simply are not true. We now know that the agency regularly intercepts and inspects Americans’ phone calls, emails, and other communications, and it shares this information with other federal agencies that use it to investigate drug trafficking and tax evasion. Worse, DEA and IRS agents are told to lie to judges and defense attorneys about their use of NSA data, and about the very existence of the SOD, and to make up stories about how these investigations started so that no one will know information is coming from the NSA’s top secret surveillance programs.
“Now, wait a minute,” you might be saying. “How does a foreign intelligence agency which supposedly is looking for terrorists and only targets non-U.S. persons get ahold of information useful in IRS investigations of American tax cheats?” To answer that question, let’s review this week’s revelations.
Back in 2005, several media outlets reported that NSA has direct access to the stream of communications data, carried over fiber optic cables that connect central telephone switching facilities in the U.S. with one another and with networks in foreign countries. Reports suggested that the NSA had installed equipment referred to as “splitter cabinets” at main phone company offices, where they make a copy of all data traveling on the fiber optic cable and route it into a secret room where computers scan through the information – searching for names and terms that are themselves secret — as it goes by. For years, the federal government refused to comment on these reports. But on August 8, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed this practice to the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?ref=global-home
We also learned that the NSA can grab information off these fiber optic cables in near real time using a tool called XKeyscore (XKS). Searching the firehose of Internet and telephone data as it flows takes an immense amount of computing power. The XKS system dumps a portion of the communications information NSA snatches into a truly immense local storage “cache.” This cache can keep network information for a few days, depending on the amount of traffic. This gives the NSA’s computers time to search through what otherwise would be an unmanageable torrent of emails, phone calls, chats, social network posts, and other communications. And importantly, XKS searches do not involve just communications “metadata”. The XKS system searches the contents of our Internet and telephone communications. Which is directly at odds with repeated Administration statements suggesting that NSA mass surveillance was limited to metadata.
To seize and search through all of this information without a warrant, the agency must...
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More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/08/14/nsa-dea-irs-lie-about-fact-that-americans-are-routinely-spied-on-by-our-government-time-for-a-special-prosecutor-2/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Eric Holder! 
And the common thread with the knee-jerk defenders is, they lurrrrv them some authoritarianism. 
the "h" word in my post. I meant in general, of course. 
Just sayin...
Just like my credit cards... NEVER.
On the hopeful side.. I am NOW !!!
Thank you Edward Snowden.
Do you seriously expect Obama to know anything about the Constitution?
"By hiding the fact that information comes from NSA surveillance, the government both masks the extent to which NSA’s domestic spying is used to trigger investigations of Americans, and prevents legal challenges to highly questionable surveillance practices like bulk phone record collection, warrantless access to American communications with friends and family overseas, and retention and use of illegally obtained domestic calls and emails.
This is outrageous conduct. It is the sort of thing you expect from the Chinese government, or one of the now-vanished governments of the Warsaw Pact. And there is no stronger proof of the dangers of the NSA’s domestic spying effort than the fact that the government has consistently lied about it and attempted to cover it up. Think for just a moment about the stories J. Edgar Hoover could have plausibly concocted about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or any other civil rights activist with this kind of detailed information. The Obama Administration has gone after leakers, and the journalists at outlets like the Associated Press or the New York Times who use them as sources, with unprecedented force. Think about what the current Attorney General, Eric Holder, could do to bring down these reporters who cover – sometimes in ways the Obama Administration doesn’t like — the conduct of American foreign policy. At this point, it’s plain to see that the Obama Administration has no intention of honestly fixing this mess. So it’s time now for Congress to act. A good first step would be to appoint a Special Prosecutor with wide power to subpoena Administration officials, and to bring criminal indictments where appropriate. Congress should then begin the process of reforming surveillance law to make absolutely clear that the NSA has no power to conduct warrantless mass surveillance of Americans.
First they came for the terrorists and the foreigners, and no one did anything. Then they came for the drug dealers. Then the tax cheats. Then the journalists. And that’s just what we know about. How much worse does it have to get before we say enough is enough?"
Why let us all go out to the crooked-ass, corrupt and shitty governmental system lawyer store -- and we find ourselves a good clean and ethical lawyer (ha-ha) and hire her/him as our shoot em' up, clean em' up special prosecutor. Eeeeee-haaaa!!!
And s/he'll make it all better. Just like all those other special prosecutors did in the past. Yessireebob, that's what this sitch calls for, don't it? More of the same.
What is it called when you keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again expecting a different outcome????
- America.
Welcome to DU.
Take a look at her bio on the site:
I am the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. I returned to Stanford after working with the internet boutique firm of Zwillgen PLLC. Before that, I was the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I practice, speak and write about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. From 2001 to 2007, I was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. Before teaching at Stanford, I spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California. I was selected by Information Security magazine in 2003 as one of 20 "Women of Vision" in the computer security field. I earned my law degree from University of California, Hastings College of the Law and my undergraduate degree from the New College of the University of South Florida.
"Reports suggested that the NSA had installed equipment referred to as “splitter cabinets” at main phone company offices, where they make a copy of all data traveling on the fiber optic cable and route it into a secret room where computers scan through the information"
The Internet is really just a series of TUBES 
I guess the reporter was too lazy to google what an optical splitter actually does. They don't sit in "cabinets" either. Well I guess you could, but that would be a cabling nightmare. I just stick them on the same rack as FDP panels. I think NetOptics you can get 12 splitters in a 1 RU 19" rack. Do the people that write these stories even consult somebody in telecommunications? Do they have any idea how many fucking splitters you would have in a single CO to "capture all Internet traffic"? You know how many different fiber routes I have coming into one office in Chicago? Any idea how many DWDM systems we have running? CLUELESS!
Not to mention you can't "get the data" if you put a tap on a multiplexed optical path. You have to actually hang off the router interfaces. And no, we don't build redundancy into networks at all LOL
But it's just a series of a couple of tubes, thanks Stevens for that!
http://lbcommuter.com/2013/01/15/series-of-tubes-4-ways-to-deal-with-facebook-overload/
Um, those cabinets are what you see at the end of an alley that Verizon would put in to deliver their FIOS service-
This is what an optical splitter looks like that you would put in a Central Office or Data Center
Dimensions:
0.81" high x 4.25" deep x 5.5" wide
Or this-
takes up .5RU
Yes, the NSA has links on some of the circuits going overseas- Not all traffic in the World...
not a portion, LOL, that wouldn't work-
All telecom rooms are secure. Go to the Infomart in Downtown Dallas and try to get into Equinox. They make the TSA look like kids play 
Reccing your deconstruction.
