Verizon to Publish Reports on NSA Data Requests

The NSA’s ability to continue its tech snooping as in the pre-Snowden days just took another hit. Verizon promises to start publishing reports on all the data requests it gets from the government and law-enforcement agencies, reports Reuters . The first online report will be out early next year. Given that…
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Verizon to Publish Reports on NSA Data Requests

Selective Shutdown: NSA Spying Funded, FOIA Requests Denied

The government might be shut down, but both parties have agreed that the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance programs will not be impacted by the stoppage.

However, fulfilling the requests of citizens or journalists trying to obtain information about the government’s activities has been deemed not “an essential service.”

As journalist Glenn Greewald tweeted Wednesday morning:

The link is to a NSA/CSS press statement which reads:

Due to the government shutdown, FOIA/PA requests or inquiries submitted to the FOIA/PA Office will not be addressed until the office reopens.

The contradiction has been hit on by other commenters who say the selectivity of the shut down reveals much about the government’s priorities.

Writing at Common Dreams on Tuesday, author and activist Norman Solomon argued not only should the NSA not be funded throughout the so-called “shutdown,” but that it should be permanently shuttered:

At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of “core NSA operations” is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to make it achievable.

NSA documents, revealed by intrepid whistleblower Edward Snowden, make clear what’s at stake. In a word: democracy.

Wielded under the authority of the president, the NSA is the main surveillance tool of the U.S. government. For a dozen years, it has functioned to wreck our civil liberties. It’s a tool that should not exist.

And Rabbi Michael Lerner, writing at Common Dreams on Wednesday, pointed the finger at Democrats, arguing they’ve made it all too easy for the shutdown to hurt everyday workers, but have preserved funding for the sacred cows of war and military spending. Lerner writes:

If [Democrats] had a backbone, they would have insisted that if the government is going to be shut down, then all of the government will be shut. Instead, they’ve taken the standpoint of the Republicans in dividing “essential services” from “non-essential,” and saying only non-essential services are to be shut down. So when it comes to taking care of the poor and the powerless, those services get shut.

What they should have been saying, and could still say, is this: the government finances and the ability to pay the national debt impact everything, and if the Republicans want to shut down the government, then everything will be shut. So, no pay for anyone who receives government pay, including the Congress (which right now continues to get paid), the entire military (after all, we are not in a war, and if we are still fighting in Afghanistan, we shouldn’t be), the entire homeland security, NSA, FBI, etc. including the people searching us when we get on airplanes (and if the airports have to shut down, that’s another consequence of the Republican’s move), the border guards and the entire Immigration and Naturalization service.

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Copyright: Common Dreams

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Selective Shutdown: NSA Spying Funded, FOIA Requests Denied

Montana AG: Public Records Requests Create "Chilling Effect"

In March, Associated Press reporters sent the Montana Department of Justice a public records request for a copy of the state’s database of concealed firearm permit holders. That’s not especially unusual; the AP has requested such information from the state regularly over the years. But there was a hitch: In 2013, Montana’s legislature passed a new law officially classifying concealed carry data as confidential. Tim Fox, the Republican attorney general, rejected the AP’s request in mid-July—and then proceeded to notify every sheriff and county attorney in the state of what he had done. The AP never wrote about the rejected request, but the word somehow got out anyway:

News of the AP request and Fox’s denial first broke July 24 on the website for Aaron Flint, a conservative Billings commentator and broadcaster with Northern Broadcasting System, who has a daily statewide radio show. Flint said he had received a copy of Fox’s memo from a source outside of the Attorney General’s Office and posted it on his website. A day later, Media Trackers, a conservative Montana website that covers Montana politics and the media, picked up the story.

The reporters who had requested the data found their personal information (including photos of their homes) posted on the Internet, along with thinly-veiled threats, prompting the wire service to file a complaint with the Helena Police Department. The fact that the AP never has and never planned to indiscriminately publish personal information about concealed carry holders in the first place was lost in the angry backlash.

So what is Fox’s response to the threats? Blame the media—for following up on the story.

“All of the media attention on this issue has come from the media,” he told Montana Public Radio’s Dan Boyce on Tuesday. ” I think that’s important to know. Because some reporters have blogged that I have initiated these things and my office has initiated it. But its been the media that’s run with this. That’s what the media does. The media asks for information. They did so on who it was that requested the concealed weapons permit information and then they wrote their stories.”

Although Fox was quick to call the online intimidation “darn-right wrong,” he ultimately warned journalists that reporters should keep such threats in mind when they request public information in the first place: “Whether or not there is a chilling effect I guess the media, the journalistic profession needs to contemplate when they ask for information whether or not they are creating a chilling effect in their own profession.”

Montana isn’t alone in relocating its concealed carry data to an undisclosed location; seven states passed laws to reclassify concealed carry databases as confidential information in the first half of 2013. And Montana’s isn’t even the most strict. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) signed into a law bill last spring that would criminalize the publication of private gun records by journalists.

Political Mojo | Mother Jones

Montana AG: Public Records Requests Create "Chilling Effect"