NSA statement does not deny 'spying' on members of Congress
...In its statement, which comes as the NSA gears up for a make-or-break legislative battle over the scope of its surveillance powers, the agency pointed to “privacy protections” which it says it keeps on all Americans' phone records.
The statement read: “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons. NSA is fully committed to transparency with Congress. Our interaction with Congress has been extensive both before and since the media disclosures began last June....
Unintended Consequences: How NSA Revelations May Lead to Even More Surveillance
...For example, just weeks ago, and shortly after a high level French ex-intelligence official was quoted as saying essentially that "we don’t resent NSA, we simply envy them!" France passed legislation legalizing a vast range of repressive domestic surveillance practices.
News stories immediately proclaimed this to be an enormous expansion of French spying. But observers in the know noted that in reality this kind of surveillance had been going on by the French government for a very long time -- the new legislation simply made it explicitly legal.
And therein is the key. Counterintuitively perhaps, once these programs are made visible they become vastly easier to expand under one justification or another, because you no longer have to worry so much about the very existence of the programs being exposed....
...This then may be the ultimate irony in this surveillance saga. Despite the current flood of protests, recriminations, and embarrassments -- and even a bit of legal jeopardy -- intelligence services around the world (including especially NSA) may come to find that Edward Snowden’s actions, by pushing into the sunlight the programs whose very existence had long been dim, dark, or denied -- may turn out over time to be the greatest boost to domestic surveillance since the invention of the transistor.
By creating pressures for a publicly acknowledged, commercially operated, "privatized" but government mandated data collection and retention regime, the ease with which new categories of long-sought data could be added to this realm -- especially in the wake of a terrorist attack that could be used as an ostensible justification -- seems significant to say the least.
Without having to worry so much about surreptitious programs being discovered, the government can concentrate on making its public case for the mandated retention of ever more forms of data -- which is already typically being collected in the course of business -- while vastly reducing or eliminating firms’ flexibility to delete and destroy such data on a more rapid and privacy-friendly schedule.
This would be a true privacy tragedy....
Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit
...If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer. ...
