Secret Police Chief Feinstein Betrays Democratic Roots Herds Comitttee To Endorse And "[P]reserve" NSA's 2006-Present "Call Log" Of All Of Every American's Phone Calls

       Friday, 27 September 2013, SAN FRANCISCO - Dianne Feinstein has come (excuse us, "gone" apparently) far away since her heart's start as a San Francisco city councilperson and Mayor before the big one-way trip to Waxhington, D.C. She always has may we say appeared to have a proclivity for the more refined circles. Certainly even in bearing alone her she has seemed well-suited ( yes, pun, good) to her regal stature. Senator Feinstein has good posture.
       Oddly in this case that stature compared to at least sheer height though perhaps with more awkwardness would be President Obama thus making her somehow somewhat comparable to the early President Obama in the case at hand.  That is here in the NSA case that it seems to us she has taken a step reminiscent of an earlier in his term Barack Obamism.
       We wish to emphasize our disappointment with Senator Feinstein's apparent  apologism for the National Security Agency and indeed her even apparent ratification, verification, legitimization, there are a lot of words which seem uncomfortably close to fitting this situation of the NSA's operation "Prism". Well at least it sounds a lot closer than the "Patriot" Act which President Obama endorsed to that for which it might be suited should the need arise.
      Senator Feinstein's avowed and/or at least otherwise obvious purpose apart from "preserving" the components of this blanket surveillance which she sees as "lawful" (a very good start) is not necessarily going to raise the public's "confidence" in something which has pushed beyond the limits of the public's trust for seven years already with some blanket surveillance program of which the public has had no knowledge whatsoever.
       Difficult at best to raise a person's confidence in something which they did not even know existed but was intentionally kept hidden doubtless because of its "slap you in the face" overarching invasion of your privacy until the dark secret slipped out. Of what kind of confidence is one speaking in which the only evidence held up to bolster this massive systematic invasion of the privacy of all is the young man who told you about it and apparently two persons in the United States who broke the law in giving thousands of dollars to a "forbidden" Somali group presumably of "terrorists".
      Whoa! Seven years of our national government by whatever means necessary directly collecting and keeping sorted specifically identifying records of every one of each of our telephone calls for our doing nothing at all except dialing and/or speaking on the phone, and that is all they have to show for the blanket surveillance of their own people. And one General who says he thinks this system would have averted the 9/11 attacks had it then been in place.
       God Bless America.  For readers interested in seeing the New York Times articles related to this matter please click the link below, which is also followed by the text and further New York Times links. All material below Copyright The New York Times Co.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/us/politics/senators-push-to-preserve-nsa-phone-surveillance.html?hp

Senators Push to Preserve N.S.A. Phone Surveillance

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: September 26, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to be moving toward swift passage of a bill that would “change but preserve” the once-secret National Security Agency program that is keeping logs of every American’s phone calls, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the panel, said Thursday.

Related

• Judge Urges U.S. to Consider Releasing N.S.A. Data on Calls (September 14, 2013)

• Court Upbraided N.S.A. on Its Use of Call-Log Data (September 11, 2013)

• N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web (September 6, 2013)

Ms. Feinstein, speaking at a rare public hearing of the committee, said she and the top Republican on the panel, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, are drafting a bill that would be marked up — meaning that lawmakers could propose amendments to it before voting it out of committee — as early as next week.

After the existence of the program became public by leaks from the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, critics called for it to be dismantled. Ms. Feinstein said her bill would be aimed at increasing public confidence in the program, which she said she believed was lawful.

The measure would require public reports of how often the N.S.A. had used the calling log database, she said. It would also reduce the number of years — currently five — that the domestic calling log data is kept before it is deleted. It would also require the N.S.A. to send lists of the phone numbers it searches, and its rationale for doing so, to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for review.

By contrast, a rival bill drafted by skeptics of government surveillance, including two members of the committee, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, would ban the mass call log collection program.

That more extensive step is unlikely to pass the committee. Ms. Feinstein contended that “a majority of the committee” believed that the call log program was “necessary for our nation’s security.”

Ms. Feinstein said her bill with Mr. Chambliss would also require Senate confirmation of the N.S.A.’s director. At the same time, it would expand the N.S.A.’s powers to wiretap without warrants in the United States in one respect: when it is eavesdropping on a foreigner’s cellphone, and that person travels to the United States, the N.S.A. would be allowed to keep wiretapping for up to a week while it seeks court permission.

That step would remove the largest number of incidents in which the N.S.A. has deemed itself to have broken rules about surveillance in the United States. Those incidents were identified in a May 2012 audit leaked by Mr. Snowden.

The rival proposals pushed by Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall would also ban the N.S.A. from warrantless searches of Americans’ information in the vast databases of communications it collects by targeting noncitizens abroad. And it would prohibit, when terrorism is not suspected, systematic searches of the contents of Americans’ international e-mails and text messages that are “about” a target rather than to or from that person.

Still, most of the senators on the Intelligence Committee, which had received briefings about the call log program and other surveillance even before Mr. Snowden’s leaks, used the hearing on Thursday to largely defend the programs and criticize the disclosures.

Mr. Chambliss suggested that people could die because of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, and he pressed Gen. Keith Alexander, the N.S.A. director, to describe the program’s value.

“In my opinion,” General Alexander said, “if we had had that prior to 9/11, we would have known about the plot.”

Officials have struggled to identify terrorist attacks that would have been prevented by the call log program, which has existed in its current form since 2006. The clearest breakthrough attributed to the program was a case involving several San Diego men who were prosecuted for donating several thousand dollars to a terrorist group in Somalia.

Mr. Wyden pressed General Alexander about whether the N.S.A. had ever collected, or made plans to collect, bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data.

General Alexander replied that the N.S.A. is not doing so as part of the call log program, but that information pertinent to Mr. Wyden’s question was classified.

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