Lights Out For NSA? Maryland Lawmakers Push To Cut Water, Electricity To Spy Agency Headquarters By Steven Nelson Feb. 10, 2014
The National Security Agency’s headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md., will go dark if a cohort of Maryland lawmakers has its way. Eight Republicans in the 141-member Maryland House of Delegates introduced legislation Thursday that would deny the electronic spy agency “material support, participation or assistance in any form” from the state, its political subdivisions or companies with state contracts. The bill would deprive NSA facilities water and electricity carried over public utilities, ban the use of NSA-derived evidence in state courts and prevent state universities from partnering with the NSA on research. State or local officials ignoring the NSA sanctions would be fired, local governments refusing to comply would lose state grant funds and companies would be forever barred from state contracts. The bill was filed as emergency legislation and requires support of three-fifths of delegates to pass. It was referred to the chamber’s judiciary committee. NSA facilities in Maryland use a massive amount of water and electricity, the supply of which might be jeopardized by the legislation.
The agency signed a contract with Howard County, Md., for water to cool a computer center under construction at Fort Meade, The Washington Post reported Jan. 2. The deal reportedly involves up to 5 million gallons of water a day for nearly $2 million a year. As of 2006 the agency headquarters purchased as much electricity from Baltimore Gas & Electric as the city of Annapolis, The Baltimore Sun reported. The proposal is the latest in a series of state bills aiming to cut off the NSA one jurisdiction at a time for allegedly ignoring the Fourth Amendment with its dragnet collection of phone and Internet records. The legislative wave is spearheaded by the Tenth Amendment Center, which along with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee launched the OffNow coalition last year seeking to cut off water to the NSA’s just-built Utah Data Center. Legislation hasn’t yet been introduced in Utah, but lawmakers in Arizona, California, Tennessee, Washington and other states have filed bills based on model legislation from the Tenth Amendment Center. Several of those bills were introduced with bipartisan sponsorship. The Arizona bill has been the most successful to date, winning 4-2 approval by the state Senate Government and Environment Committee on Feb. 3. The Maryland bill would almost certainly have the largest impact of any of the proposed state bans, some of which were introduced in states with either nonexistent or minimal known on-theground agency presence. “Maryland has almost become a political subdivision of the NSA,” Tenth Amendment Center Executive Director Michael Boldin said in a statement. “The agency relies heavily on state
and local help. This bill bans all of it." As of late 2012, around 30,000 people worked for the NSA, many of them at Fort Meade. The state bills do not refer to the NSA by name, but rather “any federal agency” that seizes metadata without an individualized warrant. The proposed state NSA bills are a reaction to the slow pace of proposed reform at the federal level following the June 2013 disclosures about mass domestic surveillance by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Three pending federal lawsuits seek to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone metadata and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., plans to file a fourth. So far, judges have had mixed rulings. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D.C., handed legal activist Larry Klayman a preliminary win Dec. 16 after deciding the phone program is an “almost Orwellian” violation of the Fourth Amendment. U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley of New York disagreed, finding the program “lawful” on Dec. 27 and dismissing a challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is appealing. Klayman is also suiting to halt the NSA’s PRISM Internet program. President Barack Obama announced Jan. 17 he plans to discontinue the NSA’s inhouse retention of phone metadata, but expressed an interest in either phone companies or a new third-party retaining the information. Phone companies are reportedly uninterested in doing so and it’s unclear what reforms, if any, will be
implemented. Critics say the NSA phone record dragnet has been demonstrably worthless at preventing terror attacks against the U.S. and should be terminated in its entirety. Lights Out for NSA? Maryland Lawmakers Push to Cut Water, Electricity to Spy Agency Headquarters VIDEO BELOW http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/10/lights-out-for-nsa-maryland-lawmakers
NSA Picking Drone Targets Based On Bad Data: ‘Death By Unreliable Metadata’ Mike Masnick techdirt.com February 10, 2014 Late last night, the new publication from Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill launched. It’s called The Intercept, and I imagine that it’s going to be a must-follow for a variety of reasons. Its first major article digs deep into the NSA’s role in killing people with drones (often innocent people) based on questionable metadata. Remember how NSA defenders kept insisting that “it’s just metadata” as if that was no big deal? Well, what about when that metadata is being used to kill people? Just last week, we wrote about Rep. Mike Rogers complaining about new “red tape” that was making it more difficult to indiscriminately kill people with drones. That “red tape” is actually just a new set of guidelines designed to try to prevent more killing of innocent people with drones. This new report highlights how the US government’s infatuation with drones, combined with the NSA’s obsessive collection of metadata, means that drones are frequently used to kill people based on very little evidence that the people being killed are actually terrorist threats. One noteworthy point about this article: it relies on two new sources, one named, one kept secret, backed up by Snowden documents. That is, it appears that at least one other source (in this case, a recent member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force — the group that’s in charge of figuring out who to capture and kill) has come forward to Greenwald and others, calling foul on what the US government is doing. This person was privy to how targets are selected, and it’s pretty scary how little info they’re going on. The fact that the NSA was heavily involved in picking targets was revealed a while back, but this person explains how much those choosing targets rely on bad metadata from the NSA to kill people — often revealed later to be totally innocent. In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device. The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for
taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic. One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members. Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.” The guy also points out that the metadata is often somewhat questionable in itself: What’s more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.” You would think that someone like Rep. Rogers would be happy that we were trying to improve our targeting and to stop killing innocent people, but apparently making sure the people we target are actually guilty is just too much “red tape.” But it hasn’t stopped these killings. The source in the article notes that the “overwhelming majority” of the strikes they’re doing these days are based almost entirely on the NSA’s signals intelligence. The report also reveals that the NSA has a program in which the drone itself has what’s basically its own phone cell attached to the drone, in order to better target a particular phone (note: not person, but phone) when dropping a bomb. The report also reveals another program, this one from the CIA, called SHENANIGANS (really), that maps out WiFi networks from the sky and tries to suck up any data it can. When this program was used in Yemen, the mission was called (again, no joke) VICTORYDANCE. There’s a lot more in the article, which is well worth reading. It’s good to see more sources who are uncomfortable with what the NSA, CIA and others are doing getting in touch with Greenwald and others. It’s also worth noting that this guy claims he tried to raise these issues through the “proper channels” and was rebuffed.
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