The Lockbox Lie

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 12, 2013

Photo by Yuri Gripas/Reuters

For the past week and a half, U.S. officials have told us that the National Security Agency?s vast collection of phone ?metadata??which numbers have called which other numbers and when?is kept in a ?lockbox.? They?ve implied that the data can?t be searched without court approval. That?s false. The records can be searched without a warrant. The ?lockbox? has no lock.

On June 6, hours after the Guardian reported details of the phone surveillance program, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, issued a statement describing oversight of the program by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. ?By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program,? said Clapper. ?The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.?

Clapper?s terms?specific facts, particular basis?created an impression that the court applied these standards as a gatekeeper, case by case. Rep. Mike Rogers, (R-Mich.,) chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added to that impression three days later. In an interview on This Week. Rogers described the court's role in the phone records program: ?The court said, 'Put all of that information in a box, and hold that information. And when you want to access that information, you have to use this very specific court-ordered approval process.' ?

On June 12, NSA Director Keith Alexander gave a similar account. He told a Senate committee:

?What we create is a set of data, and we put it out here, and then only under specific times can we query that data.? ? So the methodology would be, ?Let's put into a secure environment call detail records. ? We won't search that unless we have some reasonable, articulable suspicion about terrorist-related organizations.? If we see that, we have to prove that we have that.? Then, given that, we can now look and say, ?Who was this guy talking to in the United States and why???

Later in the hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-Calif.,) chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, read from a summary of the phone surveillance program. She said the NSA ?can only look at that data after showing that there is a reasonable, articulable suspicion that a specific individual is involved in terrorism.? Feinstein asked Alexander whether her summary was accurate. He said it was.

The next day, after a closed-door briefing by the NSA, Rogers and Alexander appeared before the press to assure Americans that the database couldn?t be abused. ?It's kept in a lockbox, with the only access? confined to ?a fraction of a fraction of a percent? of the records, said Rogers. ?It can only be used and accessed by a counterterrorism nexus.?

Two hours later, Feinstein came out of another closed-door NSA briefing with the same story. But this time, Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman asked her the salient question:

Q:? Is a court order necessary to query the metadata database?
Feinstein:? Is a court order necessary to query?
Q: The metadata database under 215. An individual court order for each query.
Feinstein: A court order?well, I don't know what you mean by a query. A court order?
Q: To search the database.
Feinstein: To search the database, you have to have reasonable, articulable cause?
Q: Certified by a judge?
Feinstein: ?to believe that that individual is connected to a terrorist group. You cannot?
Q: But does that have to be determined by a judge?
Feinstein: Could I answer? You may not like it, but I'll answer. Then you can query the numbers. The only numbers you have?there's no content. You have the name and the number called, whether it's one number or two numbers. That's all you have. Then you can get the numbers. If you want to collect content, then you get a court order.
Q: So you don't need a court order for the query itself.
Feinstein: That's my understanding.

That exchange punctured the government?s story. The official talking points, recited by Feinstein, emphasized the ?reasonable, articulable cause? standard and the requirement of a court order to get a wiretap. What they glossed over was the disconnect between those two points. The NSA can search the database without proving anything to the court. To extract this confession from Feinstein, Ackerman had to ask his question six times.

If Feinstein?s answer is correct, then everything we?ve been told about the ?lockbox? is a charade. Go back and reread what Clapper, Alexander, Feinstein, and Rogers told us. They said the court allows queries only after the presentation of specific facts supporting a particular basis. The NSA can query the data only at specific times under a very specific court-ordered approval process. It can look at the data only after showing a reasonable, articulable suspicion that a specific individual is involved in terrorism. It must prove that level of suspicion.

Those statements clearly imply that the court screens each data request. But it doesn?t. There?s no lock on the lockbox.

That hasn?t stopped current and former government officials from repeating the lockbox line. Yesterday Rogers used it again on Face the Nation. Dick Cheney, appearing on Fox News Sunday, backed him up. On Meet the Press, Michael Hayden, the guy who ran the NSA when it began collecting phone records, assured Rep. Bobby Scott, (D-Va.,) ?The only way you can access the metadata is through a terrorist predicate.? When Scott asked, ?Where is that written?? Hayden replied: ?It's in the court order.? Really? Where?s the court order? When is it applied, and how?

If the court isn?t screening data requests, that leaves two possibilities. One is that nobody?s screening them. The other is that some other, unknown entity is doing it in a way that nobody has explained. Either way, the answers we?re getting are unacceptable. They betray privacy, public trust, and national security.

Clapper, Alexander, and other officials use Sept. 11 to justify the phone records program. They say we need a complete log of calls so that when we find a terrorist?s number, we can search its history and connect the dots. That?s a sensible idea. But why should the database be searchable without a warrant? Intelligence officials claim that last year, they searched it for fewer than 300 numbers. That?s less than once a day. Local prosecutors get warrants for that kind of thing all the time. Why can?t the feds?

Sept. 11 should have provoked us to think more creatively about security and privacy. We should have realized that we can collect and preserve the phone data without giving the NSA or FBI direct access to it. All we have to do is apply the traditional requirement?a search warrant?to the query process. That would be a real lockbox. It would thwart terrorism while preventing abuse.

It?s particularly rich to see Al Gore, the former vice president, complaining about the phone surveillance program. Thirteen years ago, when he was running for president, Gore promised to put Medicare and Social Security funds in a ?lockbox? so Congress couldn?t spend them on other programs. Critics mocked the idea, pointing out that ?no one has yet designed a lock box that Congress couldn't pick.? In the case of the phone records database, the NSA doesn?t even have to pick the lock. It has the key.

William Saletan's latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/06/surveillance_lockbox_why_can_the_nsa_search_your_phone_records_without_a.html

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Analysis: Hezbollah takes Syrian centre-stage, yet remains in shadows

By Dominic Evans

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The voice crackling over the Hezbollah radios was clear and authoritative, and the guerrillas poised to attack the Syrian border town of Qusair recognized it immediately.

"As I promised you victory before, I pledge you victory now," Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, launching a battle in which his fighters decisively defeated rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Nasrallah told his troops that God was fighting alongside them, one of the fighters told Reuters. "When we heard his voice, we were ready to fight the whole world," he said.

It was a trademark coup de theatre from the reclusive Nasrallah, who has bred an aura of mystique around a force which grew from a shadowy Iranian-backed Lebanese militia into an outfit powerful enough to confront regional superpower Israel.

Hezbollah's victory across the Syrian frontier in Qusair highlighted its pivotal role in Assad's fightback against rebels and yet, as in most of its military operations, it has given few details of its role - or where its next battle may be.

"Wherever we need to be, we will be.... There is no need to elaborate," Nasrallah said in a televised speech on Friday, delivered as ever from a secret location because of fears for his security since Hezbollah fought a war with Israel in 2006.

The need for ambiguity is greater than usual, with Shi'ite Hezbollah's open intervention in a foreign conflict against Sunni Muslim rebels fuelling sectarian tensions and shattering its status across the Arab world as an anti-Israeli champion.

But the movement has always tried to keep its enemies guessing about its strengths.

Estimates of the number of fighters it committed in Qusair vary from the hundreds to several thousand, although most observers put the figure at between 1,500 and 2,500.

Hundreds of other Hezbollah fighters are also deployed in Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. They are stationed around the Shi'ite shrine of Sayyida Zeinab near Damascus with dozens more in two Shi'ite towns in the northern province of Aleppo - mainly training and advising - and in the Zahra quarter of the city of Homs, it says.

The British-based anti-Assad monitoring group says 156 Hezbollah fighters have been killed so far in Syria, most of them in the battle for Qusair.

A security source in Israel said he believed Hezbollah had 4,000-5,000 fighters in Syria and had lost between 180 and 200.

STRONGER THAN BEFORE

Hezbollah's overall strength is also unclear, although analysts and defense experts agree it has grown substantially since it fought the inconclusive 34-day war with Israel seven years ago, firing rockets deep into the Jewish state.

Those kind of cross-border salvoes mean that much of the focus on Hezbollah's military power in the past has been on its missiles, which Nasrallah said last year could hit targets anywhere in Israel.

Its fighters are as well-armed as some regional armies, using anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Hezbollah flew a drone over Israel last year and in the 2006 war was able to hit an Israeli warship off the Mediterranean coast.

But with no shortage of weapons in Syria, Hezbollah's main contribution to Assad's war effort is military expertise.

The movement's military structure is based on an elite force backed by a full time militia and a large corps of part-time reserves who undergo rudimentary weapons training - often in Iran - but have jobs outside the group.

One analyst, who asked not to be named, said that altogether the total force including the part-time men, known as Saraya, reached 50,000, of which 10,000 to 15,000 were elite forces.

A source in Lebanon who has contact with Hezbollah gave a lower figure, saying that top frontline forces and rocket and artillery units combined added up to just 4,000. The force excluding the Saraya was about 10,000 fighters, with a similar number of support personnel.

Since the start of the Syrian crisis, Hezbollah has stepped up recruitment and training for the Saraya, sending thousands of men aged from the 20s to their mid-50s to Iran, say residents in its south Lebanon heartland close to the border with Israel.

"The reality is that Hezbollah is a very dynamic organization," said Ayham Kamel, Middle East analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group. "Over the years in their war with Israel they've been able to mobilize in different ways and adapt their tactics."

UNTESTED IN BATTLE

Aram Nerguizian of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said Hezbollah's forces in Qusair were more disciplined, used superior tactics and communications, and were better coordinated than the Syrian rebels there.

Nevertheless, he said the loss of between 70 and 110 fighters in the first week of the offensive, according to anti-Hezbollah sources, pointed to the fact that many were untested in battle despite their good training.

Those casualties, if confirmed, would be roughly similar to Hezbollah's weekly losses under a blistering onslaught of the Israeli army in the July-August 2006 war.

"The high initial death toll (in Qusair) may also point to the Syrian rebels' use of some of Hezbollah's own sniping and booby-trapping techniques," Nerguizian said. The Shi'ite group shared these techniques with Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian organization which now opposes Assad and which may have passed on the know-how to the rebels.

Fighting away from their "home" turf in south Lebanon is an additional problem for Hezbollah fighters, long accustomed to battling for territory they know intimately.

But the guerrillas have a reputation for learning fast. "This lack of familiarity should not be exaggerated," said an Israeli official, arguing that Qusair was close enough to the Lebanese border for Hezbollah to have had access to the area.

"Elsewhere in Syria, Hezbollah is operating largely alongside local Shi'ite communities, so it has guides with an excellent local knowledge," he said, adding that he believed several thousand from a total Hezbollah fighting force of 10,000 were operating inside Syria.

"They are from the best units, with the best equipment - the kind of fighters who Hezbollah would usually consider its vanguard against Israel," he said. Sources in Lebanon dispute that, saying only a small minority of the Qusair combatants were from the cream of Hezbollah's military units.

The Israeli official said Hezbollah used "standard small arms", anti-tank rockets and even operated Syrian army tanks in the battle for Qusair.

Their presence across Syria, from Damascus to Aleppo in the north, underlines Hezbollah's strategic commitment to Assad, and Kamel said the militant group was likely to play some role in the eventual Syrian army effort to recapture the northern city.

But for now, Nasrallah is unlikely to show his hand. "Every day we increase our numbers and our weapons," he said at the start of the Syrian conflict. "We are tens of thousands of fighters, trained and ready for martyrdom."

"The enemy does not know us, and we will surprise him."

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem and David Cutler in London; editing by David Stamp)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-hezbollah-takes-syrian-centre-stage-yet-remains-171317224.html

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Jet stream changes cause climatically exceptional Greenland Ice Sheet melt

June 17, 2013 ? Research from the University of Sheffield has shown that unusual changes in atmospheric jet stream circulation caused the exceptional surface melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) in summer 2012.

An international team led by Professor Edward Hanna from the University of Sheffield's Department of Geography used a computer model simulation (called SnowModel) and satellite data to confirm a record surface melting of the GrIS for at least the last 50 years -- when on 11 July 2012, more than 90 percent of the ice-sheet surface melted. This far exceeded the previous surface melt extent record of 52 percent in 2010.

The team also analysed weather station data from on top of and around the GrIS, largely collected by the Danish Meteorological Institute but also by US programmes, which showed that several new high Greenland temperature records were set in summer 2012.

The research, published today in the International Journal of Climatology, clearly demonstrates that the record surface melting of the GrIS was mainly caused by highly unusual atmospheric circulation and jet stream changes, which were also responsible for last summer's unusually wet weather in England.

The analysis shows that ocean temperatures and Arctic sea-ice cover were relatively unimportant factors in causing the extra Greenland melt.

Professor Hanna said: "The GrIS is a highly sensitive indicator of regional and global climate change, and has been undergoing rapid warming and mass loss during the last 5-20 years. Much attention has been given to the NASA announcement of record surface melting of the GrIS in mid-July 2012. This event was unprecedented in the satellite record of observations dating back to the 1970s and probably unlikely to have occurred previously for well over a century.

"Our research found that a 'heat dome' of warm southerly winds over the ice sheet led to widespread surface melting. These jet stream changes over Greenland do not seem to be well captured in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer model predictions of climate change, and this may indicate a deficiency in these models. According to our current understanding, the unusual atmospheric circulation and consequent warm conditions of summer 2012 do not appear to be climatically representative of future 'average' summers predicted later this century.

"Taken together, our present results strongly suggest that the main forcing of the extreme GrIS surface melt in July 2012 was atmospheric, linked with changes in the summer North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Greenland Blocking Index (GBI, a high pressure system centred over Greenland) and polar jet stream which favoured southerly warm air advection along the western coast.

"The next five-10 years will reveal whether or not 2012 was a rare event resulting from the natural variability of the NAO or part of an emerging pattern of new extreme high melt years. Because such atmospheric, and resulting GrIS surface climate, changes are not well projected by the current generation of global climate models, it is currently very hard to predict future changes in Greenland climate. Yet it is crucial to understand such changes much better if we are to have any hope of reliably predicting future changes in GrIS mass balance, which is likely to be a dominant contributor to global sea-level change over the next 100-1000 years."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/dsnJrBjm4iQ/130617111255.htm

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Miss Universe contest heads to Moscow

LAS VEGAS (AP) ? This year's Miss Universe pageant will be held in Russia's capital Moscow.

Donald Trump made the announcement Sunday after the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas.

He added that he would be moving Miss USA out of Las Vegas and to his golf resort in Miami for the next three years.

Trump said 18 different countries were vying to host Miss Universe, which is set for Nov. 9.

Miss Universe was held in Brazil in 2011, and there were talks of moving it to the Dominican Republic for 2012 before it was ultimately held in Las Vegas.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/miss-universe-contest-heads-moscow-084142918.html

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The App Store Gold Rush Has Only Just Begun

The app ecosystem is showing no signs of slowing down. That’s what Apple essentially announced today, revealing that there are now 900,000 iOS applications?available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Though the app stores are getting filled up and shifting more of the revenue to top publishers, the market itself is not decreasing as a result. The company added 250,000 more iOS applications to its App Store from 2012 to 2013, in between its annual WWDC announcements. The year before, it had added 225,000 applications (between 2011 and 2012), and before that, some 200,000 new apps?came on board. That’s incredible growth, actually, because you would almost think that App Store growth would have been the other way around – that there would have been an initial gold rush as developers filled its virtual shelves with new apps, then growth would have slowed over the years as all the “good ideas” were taken, so to speak. Even now, it’s harder than ever for indie developers to really make it on the App Store, but that doesn’t seem to be impacting the number of new apps available. And while it’s true that some are just now starting to shift their focus to Android and Google Play (which is starting to see a few success stories of its own), it appears that shift has not come at the expense of Apple’s iOS. The App Store gold rush is clearly still in its early days yet.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dS7F1gNLEhY/

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These New iOS 7 Icons Sure Look Familiar

Apple's new app icons are sure something, aren't they? Each one is so delightful and cheery and vibrant. Who knew shading would look so much better than drop shadows! But wait! I think I've seen some of these before.

That Game Center icon looks a lot like Living Social's color blob. At least we now know what Apple did with that Color acquisition, too! Crazy, I know. This wouldn't be the first time, though. Apple did "borrow" the Swiss National Railway's clock for its new clock icon in iOS 6.

I can't quite put my finger on any of the rest but maybe you're seeing something I'm not?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/these-new-ios-7-icons-sure-look-familiar-512410550

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Valerie Dodds Poses Topless in Front of School in Response to Career Backlash

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/valerie-dodds-poses-topless-in-front-of-school-in-response-to-ca/

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