Fresh revelations about the scale of U.S. surveillance programs reveal Barack Obama’s broken promises

William Marsden, Postmedia News | 13/06/07 | Last Updated: 13/06/08 2:04 AM ET

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. President Barack Obama answers a question during a press briefing following a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California, on June 7, 2013. Obama, with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping by his side, called Friday for common rules on cybersecurity after allegations of hacking by Beijing.

• http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/07/prism-u-s-surveillance-programs-reveal-barack-obamas-broken-promise/

In 2008, a small legal foundation in San Francisco launched a civil action for AT&T customers against the U.S. National Security Agency, claiming it was illegally obtaining their phone records.
The aim was to test the legal boundaries of what staffers believed was a vast government surveillance program of Americans’ private communications.

President Barack Obama promised the American people “nobody is listening to your telephone calls” as he faced tough questions Friday over whether he had allowed U.S. surveillance to run out of control.
Speaking on the eve of a major U.S.-China summit in California, Obama was forced to answer accusations that his administration had expanded on Bush-era surveillance systems that he had once campaigned against.
Under intense fire from both the liberal Left and libertarian Right for trampling on constitutional freedoms, the president defended secret programs that collect data on hundreds of millions of US phone calls and harvest huge amounts of online information about foreigners. “In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother or how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details I think we’ve struck the right balance,” Obama said, insisting that they were vital in the fight against terrorism.
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Since then, federal and appeals courts have kicked the little-known case around, never killing it, just letting it flounder against a wall of claims the information was “classified” and “top secret.”
“The government has raised every legal privilege it could possibly muster to block a regular federal court from hearing the case,” said Mark Rumold, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which launched the case.
The EFF lawyers were trying to put an end to a nationwide domestic surveillance program they had no real proof even existed.
“I kind of hoped that we were wrong, that the government wasn’t doing what we alleged,” he said. “But we were right, unfortunately.”
In fact, the U.S. government is not only obtaining the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, it is also operating a covert program, called Prism, which obtains email and other electronic data records from Internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Apple.
The revelations have cast doubts on President Barack Obama’s campaign promises to champion civil liberties and greater transparency.
His pledges to end the surveillance sins of the Bush administration now seem shattered. The phone spying — together with the secret combing of journalists’ phone records and the vigorous prosecution and jailing of whistleblowers — has led to claims Mr. Obama has eclipsed George W. Bush and Richard Nixon in spying on Americans and a police state is emerging as a spillover from the war on terrorism.
Beyond the immediate furor, the episode is another indication that when it comes to national security and thwarting terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama has reached some of the same conclusions as Mr. Bush.

There isn’t as much difference as the president originally suggested there would be — that’s not right or wrong, it’s just a fact

“There isn’t as much difference as the president originally suggested there would be — that’s not right or wrong, it’s just a fact,” said Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.
For instance, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama followed through on the commission’s recommendation to create a civil liberties panel at the White House that would weigh in on issues such as the secret order revealed this week that demanded phone company Verizon hand over its records.
When the EFF began its legal challenge it didn’t have much to go on except leaks about a post-9/11 program called Total Information Awareness and some cloudy admissions by officials in 2005 the government was using the Patriot Act to data-mine citizens’ phone records.
Over time, these alleged spying programs multiplied, identified by murky acronyms, as the government struggled to give legal cover to its information gathering.

Justin Lane-Pool/Getty ImagesU.S. President Barack Obama, right, first Lady Michelle Obama and former President George W. Bush, left, walk past the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial during the tenth anniversary ceremonies of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center site, September 11, 2011 in New York City.

What it called the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) eventually was institutionalized into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
After 9/11, no president wanted to risk a terrorist attack on the U.S. on his watch. If that meant trampling on Americans’ constitutional rights against unwarranted search and seizure, so be it. Every American became a potential terrorist.
There was never, however, any confirmation of the full extent of the programs, or if they continued and under what name.
But this week Americans suddenly realized the fine details of their daily lives were under a microscope controlled by the White House and Congress.

The secret court order directed at Verizon came from an obscure, secret judicial body, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This was created by Congress in 1978 after the Watergate scandal, involving then- president Richard Nixon’s covert domestic spying activities.
Its intention was to lay down the rules of the spy game and give it the stamp of legality.
Verizon’s records include the time and duration of phone calls, the origin and destination of the call, location identifiers and telephone calling card numbers.
Not included are the content of the calls or the names or addresses of the callers. Experts say, however, the identities could easily be discovered from the phone tracking information.

Your cellphone tracks you everywhere you go

“Your cellphone tracks you everywhere you go,” Mr. Rumold said. “So you follow who I call. You follow where I go. You find out where I am at what time at night in what part of the city and whom I’m talking to.
“That provides a really intimate portrait about who I am, about what my political beliefs might be, about who my associates might be, what type of religion I practise. Any and all of those things are constitutionally protected rights.”

Making sense of this stylistic shift in surveillance, from top-down secret observation by authorities to “lateral surveillance” of the people by the people, requires a refreshed perspective, according to David Lyon, professor of sociology and director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
In a plenary lecture for this week’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Victoria — known as the Learneds — he calls it the shift from “fear” to “fun,” from surveillance as a security tool to a social media pastime.
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Mr. Obama said Friday the whole thing had been “hyped.” But that was not what he said on the campaign trail.
Mr. Bush “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Mr. Obama said in an Aug. 1, 2007, speech in Washington.
“We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary. This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not. There are no shortcuts to protecting America.”
Mr. Obama was able to go unchallenged for so long on security matters because as a Democrat, he has faced less scrutiny for his counter-terrorism policies than his Republican predecessor, said Mr. Kean.
“It’s much easier for a Democratic president, because many of the civil libertarians are Democrats — although we have found some libertarians now on the Republican side who are willing to question these things.”
Colin Bennett, a privacy expert at the University of Victoria, said we make ourselves vulnerable because we give up so much information through digital media.
“The previous thinking about surveillance was you had to have done something wrong to be under surveillance. But now surveillance is pervasive, it’s routine, it’s normal and it’s something that a lot of people are becoming used to. And that’s the real danger here. To be under surveillance these days you don’t have to be a suspect.”