Using a phone to do political phone banking - NSA revelations should concern you [View all]

[truedelphi]

As the election day nears, many of us at Du are doing phone banking. One way we can contribute to whatever cause or person we deem worthy of our efforts is by doing phone banking.

Ten years ago, this meant meeting up inside a campaign office and using the candidate's phones. But these days, more and more of us are using our own phones, while we lounge on our comfy family room couch or sit in the backyard, weather permitting.

But in calling hundreds of phone numbers, we make it more likely that we inadvertently will hit a number that is now being monitered by the NSA. This puts us those "six degrees from Kevin Bacon" except it is not Kevin Bacon I am worried about, but what happens to you when you dial the ph number for Rasheed Navi Sumar, and it turns out that individual is being watched by the NSA.

Now you are among his phone contacts, and that allows the NSA to follow YOU! (And you may not even be trying to call that person's phone, as the name on the list you're trying to reach is Mary O'Brien's, but when Mary's home was foreclosed four years ago, she quit payng for her phone, and now Rasheed has her number.)

The TV show "The Good Wife" had several plots based on these notions. Alicia Florrick tried very hard to help a young woman in trouble with immigration. That young woman happened to be of Middle Eastern decent, and she was related to an indiviudal on the NSA watch list. So in making several calls to this young woman, Alicia now became a target of the NSA. And so, when one of ALiia's other clients, a king pin in the drug trade, needed to talk to Alicia, his conversations were noted by the NSA, and now they could legitimately follow him as well.

Recently EFF has had a column up and running about other insidious business in light of what Greenwald has had to say in his book about the NSA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/how-nsa-transforming-law-enforcement

The NSA’s role in ordinary investigations is not new information. But every document that expands on the NSA’s involvement in anything domestic, and not national security related, should ring alarm bells for everyone in the United States. We know now that:

The NSA data is fed to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “Special Operations Division.” The DEA in turn uses this information in ordinary investigations, while cloaking the source– even from judges and prosecutors.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the NSA to share unminimized data with the FBI, as well as the CIA, with the “Raw Take” order. Prior to this “agencies [had] to 'minimize' private information about Americans — deleting data that is irrelevant for intelligence purposes before providing it to others.”

Information sharing between the FBI, NSA, and CIA has been routinized through “software which would automatically gather a list of tasked PRISM selectors every two weeks to provide to the FBI and CIA.” (slide31.jpg). Similarly, the NSA sends “operational PRISM news and guidance to the FBI and CIA so that their analysts could task the PRISM system properly, be aware of outages and changes, and optimize their use of PRISM.”

And, most recently, we learned that the NSA partners with the DEA to record nearly all cell phone calls in the Bahamas– but not for national security purposes. This surveillance helps “to locate ‘international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers’—traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, a 2004 memo discusses the NSA’s integral role in the war on drugs.


#####

There is much other decent information contained by going to the link above.