Wyden Town Hall Shut Down

I saw an article in Golocalpdx.com about a Ron Wyden Town Hall meeting in Portland being disrupted by protesters with Don't Shoot PDX, chanting "Hands up don't shoot," "I can't breathe," and "No justice no peace.".  

Given that Wyden has little to nothing to do with the running of any police force anywhere and his progressive orientation, it seemed to me to be an opportunist grab by the group of a public forum that they used to publicize their protest.  Too bad for those who attended, the town hall was cancelled after the protesters refused to call it quits.  I can support protests against injustice and police violence, but if I were them I'd pick better targets than Wyden.

Ron Wyden Battles On For Civil Rights

I don;t think I can come up with any commentary other than to quote excerpts from Wyden's speech to the TechFestNW event in Portland on Friday, August 15, 2014.  He is a wise thinker on government power to do good or evil in the digital age.  Read the full speech.

For centuries, individual privacy was protected to a large extent by the limited resources of governments. It simply wasn’t possible for governments to secretly collect huge amounts of personal information about every single citizen without building massive networks of spies and informants. ...  

Our luck has run out. Here in the 21st century, this dynamic has already shifted in a profound and fundamental way. Advances in technology have made it possible for governments around the world to vacuum up and rifle through the personal information of huge numbers of law-abiding citizens. If you would defend a society built on the principle of individual liberty you need to recognize that you can no longer rely on the fact that mass surveillance is hard – in the 21st century, it’s easy. The only protections that we can count on now are those that are written into law, upheld by a responsible judiciary, and enforced by a public willing to stand up for their own freedoms.  Fortunately, our Founding Fathers left us with some pretty darn good legal principles that can guide us when it comes to privacy. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the fundamental right of the people to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Justice Louis Brandeis called this the right to be left alone. 

 

Oregon Resists Gilead Predatory Pricing on Solvaldi

Oregon is considering restricting Medicaid reimbursement for hepatitis C drug Sovaldi treatments because of the predatory pricing established by Gilead Pharmaceuticals which puts the price of a single pill at $1,000 or about $84,000 for a patient on a standard, 12-week treatment schedule.

The state can't afford to treat every patient given the way Gilead has priced its treatment.  The thought in Oregon is to only treat the sickest with the drug and wait for other competitors to offer alternatives and drive the price down through competition.

Ron Wyden is investigating the pricing of the drug as well as payments to research studies lauding the drugs' effectiveness, which OHSU found to be seriously biased and flawed.  That raises the question of whether or not Gilead gamed the research process to justify their high price.

NSA Reform Lite - The Empire Strikes Back

Ron Wyden blasted the House adoption of the USA Freedom Act which was so watered down and full of holes that some of it's original sponsors voted against it.  According to the Washington Post half of the original co-sponsors turned against the bill after it was gutted.

The new version from the House Rules Committee, privacy advocates say, significantly weakened the reform and included loopholes that could potentially allow bulk data collection on U.S. citizens to continue.

Privacy advocates weren't the only ones upset about the changes. Many co-sponsors of the original version were also concerned. In fact, a Washington Post analysis of the votes shows that 76 of the 152 co-sponsors of the earlier version voted against passage of the altered version on the House floor Thursday. So, half of the co-sponsors ended up voting against what was supposed to be their own NSA reform bill.

That includes Rep. Jared Polis, (D-Colo.), who released a press statement about his change of heart after the vote. “Unfortunately, the USA Freedom Act, which I cosponsored as introduced, has been watered down and co-opted to the point that it creates the possibility that NSA could misuse the bill- contrary to the legislative intent- to conduct broad searches of communication records," Polis said.

Ron Wyden had this to say.

Given the Executive Branch’s record of consistently making inaccurate public statements about these laws in order to conceal ongoing dragnet surveillance of Americans, it would be naive to trust the Executive Branch to apply new surveillance laws with restraint. 

It is unfortunately clear that some of the same officials who were responsible for conducting this dragnet surveillance and misleading the public about it are now working to make sure that any attempt at reform legislation is as limited as possible. 

Congress Trashes the Constitution, Blames Snowden

The NSA and Corporate Media are waging a bizarre sideshow over whether Edward Snowden tried to raise his concerns inside the NSA about their disregard of Constitutional protections of US citizens.  Wait a minute, these folks are arguing that he should have raised his voice privately to the folks running the unconstitutional operation?  You gotta be kidding, he'd have been squashed and locked up in some hole in a distant country and he knew it.  Even Ron Wyden didn't reveal it to the public because it would have been the end of his career.  The Intelligence game is rigged against whistleblowers and everybody knows it.

The current sideshow from Dianne Feinstein alleges essentially that Snowden didn't try to single handedly stop the criminal actions of Congress, the President and the NSA.  As The Guardian reported, first everybody claimed there were No emails on the subject, then claimed they found one email.  You can bet your ass there's lots more they're hiding, but even if there's only one the fact remains that whistleblowers were on a suicide journey if they told their bosses that they were criminals.

Senate intelligence committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long argued the administration may have been in breach of surveillance statutes in its activities. They were prevented from raising many of their concerns in public due to confidentiality requirements. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal adviser, said of the email: “This whole issue is a red herring. The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed – and deemed legal – without the knowledge or consent of the public. Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange after previously claiming that no evidence existed.”

The real issue that the media should be focusing on is the conduct of Congress, specifically the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees who are supposed to be protecting our rights and the Constitution, and whether or not they should be judged as criminals for their part in the unconstitutional acts, along with President Obama.  All of then knew what was happening and let it go on without even telling most other members of congress.

Don't Like Torture? CIA Says You're Too Emotional

Senator Ron Wyden blasted former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden when he suggested Dianme Feinstein was "too emotional" about torture undertaken by the CIA during the Bush administration.

General Hayden’s suggestion that Chairman Feinstein was motivated by ‘emotion’ rather than a focus on the facts is simply outrageous.  General Hayden unfortunately has a long history of misleading the American public – he did it on domestic surveillance when he was the head of the NSA, and he did it on torture when he was the CIA Director.
The best way to correct this culture of misinformation is to give the American people a chance to review the facts for themselves, and I’ll be working with my colleagues and the administration to ensure that happens quickly.

NSA - Ain't Nobody Safe

The NSA has confirmed in an article from The Guardian that a loophole in the restrictions against domestic spying was employed to search US citizens communications without any warrant.  This should probably come as no surprise given that NSA will use any opening to do whatever they like to anybody.  Senator Ron Wyden initiated the question, finally responded to by James Clapper in typical elaborate double-talk.

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.
“These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

 Ron Wyden and Mark Udall responded.

On Tuesday, Wyden and Udall said the NSA’s warrantless searches of Americans’ emails and phone calls “should be concerning to all.”
“This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. If a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in terrorism or espionage, the fourth amendment requires that the government secure a warrant or emergency authorisation before monitoring his or her communications. This fact should be beyond dispute,” the two senators said in a joint statement.
They continued: “Today’s admission by the Director of National Intelligence is further proof that meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the back-door searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans."

CIA Vrs the Senate

While Dianne Feinstein has long protected the US Intelligence agencies in the Senate, she finally had enough when the CIA accused her staff of hacking while investigating waterboarding Post 9/11 by the CIA.  She took to the floor of the Senate for 90 minutes denouncing the CIA and their tactics, accusing them of violating the US Constitution.  Ron Wyden agreed in a statement released Tuesday, 3/11/2014.  His language regarding the CIA was very blunt.

In my judgment, the Intelligence Community leadership’s misleading statements on interrogation and many other issues has undermined their credibility. I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure that the facts about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program are made public, so that the American people can make up their own minds about what happened and prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated.

 Even Lindsey Graham rose in wrath according to CNN.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the allegations "dangerous to a democracy," if it's substantiated that the CIA interfered with a congressional investigation.

"Heads should roll, people should go to jail, if it's true. ... I'm going to get briefed on it. If it is, the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA, if it's true," Graham said.

Climate Change Senate Marathon

The US Senate Democrats (28 of 55) are holding an overnight talkathon on the reality of climate change and urging legislation to deal with it, which sadly won't happen any time soon given the poisonous divisions in congress and the massive money behind the fossil fuel industry.  Both Oregon Senators Wyden and Merkley are in attendance. 

The full list of Senators attending are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; Patty Murray, D-Wash.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Bill Nelson, D-Fla.; Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.; Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md.; Bernard Sanders, I-Vt.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Mark Udall, D-Colo.; Tom Udall, D-N.M.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Al Franken, D-Minn.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Angus King, I-Maine; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Here are some interesting stats on the GOP point of view on Climate Change.

Republicans going to bed

Predictably, Republicans in Congress will not be joining in tonight’s events on the Senate floor. A majority of Republicans in Congress deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on climate change. The Center for American Progress has done a good job tracking congressional Republicans’ views on climate change.
By their count, 56% of Republicans in the house deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on climate change, and 65% of the Republican caucus in the Senate.
The numbers are even higher in the Republican leadership:

• 90 percent of the Republican leadership in both House and Senate deny climate change
• 17 out of 22 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, or 77 percent, are climate deniers
• 22 out of 30 Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, or 73 percent deny the reality of climate change
• 100 percent of Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans have said climate change is not happening or that humans do not cause it

NSA Reform Misdirection

President Obama gave the big NSA reform pitch, but it didn't make many people happy, for a lot of different reasons.  My own reaction is pretty unhappy, he danced around big issues while trying to dress the NSA in pretty clothes.  Some of the issues I have involve the government arbitrarily and secretly assuming the right to spy on innocent citizens, and to punish anyone who reveals it as a traitor, their persecution of Edward Snowden is classical police state stuff.  Over at The Guardian Glenn Greenwald has branded it mostly PR fluff.  The ACLU says:

“The president’s speech outlined several developments which we welcome. However, the president’s decision not to end bulk collection and retention of all Americans’ data remains highly troubling. The president outlined a process to study the issue further and appears open to alternatives. But the president should end – not mend – the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the Constitution. The president’s own review panel recommended that bulk data collection be ended, and the president should accept that recommendation in its entirety.”  See this link for an analysis of what got fixed and what didn't.

I completely agree with the ACLU when they say the government "is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the Constitution.", but the defenders of the status quo ignore that fact.  Ron Wyden had this to say about it.

“After the long push to rein in overbroad surveillance powers, we are very pleased that the President announced his intent to end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.  Ending this dragnet collection will go a long way toward restoring Americans’ constitutional rights and rebuilding the public’s trust. Make no mistake, this is a major milestone in our longstanding efforts to reform the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program.

We also believe that additional surveillance reforms are necessary, and we will continue to push for these reforms in the coming weeks and months.  In particular, we will work to close the “back-door searches” loophole and ensure that the government does not read Americans’ emails or other communications without a warrant.  We will work to ensure that intelligence activities do not recklessly undermine confidence in American IT products and American IT employers. We will also continue to press for meaningful reforms of the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court process. This should include the establishment of a strong, independent advocate to ensure that the Court hears both sides of the argument.

Blueberry Extortion Ruled Illegal

The US Department of Labor investigates minimum wage violations, and rightly so, but they have a tool called the "Hot Goods Order" which they used in 2012 against three Oregon Blueberry farm operations.  The tool was employed in the 1930's to shut down garment sweat shops, but it is a deadly weapon when used on perishable crops, and a federal judge agreed it was overreach in those circumstances in a suit brought by Pan-American Berry Growers and B&G Ditchen.

Attorney Tim Bernaseck represents both companies. He says his clients were faced with a choice: admit guilt, waive their right to an appeal and pay more than $200,000 in fines and back wages or let millions of dollars worth of berries rot.
Bernaseck said, “I mean it’s really unbelievable that they did this and thought that it was ok to do that. It’s just not the way that our government works, or should work. And we’re just thankful that the judge called them on it.”
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Thomas Coffin wrote the orders unfairly stacked the deck against the farms. The department did not respond to a request for comment. The government has 14 days to appeal.

Oregons' congressmen and State officials also blasted the DOL choice of enforcement.

A retired federal Wage and Hour Division investigator who reviewed two of the cases for an attorney representing the farmers said the agency's action was hasty and alarmingly incomplete.

"They put a noose around the neck of these farmers right off. That is not what Wage and Hour is about," said Manuel Lopez of Eugene, who was a labor investigator for 27 years.

Oregon officials are furious. The state's labor commissioner, agriculture director and most of the state's congressional delegation asked the labor department to explain its action.

Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian was the most direct. In an Aug. 15 letter to the federal agency, he said seizing perishable crops probably violates the constitutional search and seizure and due process rights of farmers "who have yet to be found guilty of anything."  In an Aug. 17 letter, the congressional delegation said the federal Department of Labor "may have abandoned normal due process mechanisms." Use of a "hot goods" order is reserved for cases in which farm labor violations are "willful, egregious and/or repeated," the letter said.

Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley signed the letter, as did representatives Kurt Schrader, Peter DeFazio, Greg Walden and Suzanne Bonamici.

NSA Phone Metadata Dragnet Ruled "Legal and Necessary"

A federal court judge ruled that the NSA was perfectly within its rights to collect the phone records of every US citizen in an absurd ruling against the ACLU.  The ACLU will appeal the dismissal of their lawsuit.  As MSNBC reports,

When Judge William H. Pauley ruled that the National Security Agency’s metadata program was lawful on Friday, he argued that there was no significant dispute about “the effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection.”
Pauley–who issued his ruling from a courthouse less than two miles from where the twin towers once stood–then offered a series of examples cited by the NSA to bolster their claims that the program is effective, all of which have been “seriously disputed.”
Only four plots among the fifty-four the NSA claims to have helped foil have been made public. Pauley cited three of those four plots in arguing that the metadata program was effective, but journalists and legislators have picked already picked those examples apart. ProPublica published a piece in October by Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer noting that in each of the three cases Pauley mentions, there were serious doubts as to whether or not the NSA was exaggerating either the plot itself or the impact of the program.

 Two Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, said in July that the NSA has “significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness,” and warned that “assertions from intelligence agencies about the value and effectiveness of particular programs should not simply be accepted at face value.”
Aside from Leon and federal legislators, there’s one more entity that has disputed the usefulness of the NSA metadata program: The review board appointed by the White House itself. In their report, the board concluded that bulk collection of metadata “was not essential to preventing attacks.” After the report was released, one of the review board members, Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, told NBC News there was no evidence the program had thwarted any attacks.

Sensenbrenner Wants Clapper Indicted for Lying to Congress

The Hill.com published excerpts of an interview with Rep. James Sensenbrenner in which he called for James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to be indicted for lying to congress.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress.
"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill.

He said the Justice Department should prosecute Clapper for giving false testimony during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

During that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper insisted that the NSA does not — or at least does "not wittingly" — collect information on Americans in bulk. 

After documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA collects records on virtually all U.S. phone calls, Clapper apologized for the misleading comment.

If You Have a Cell Phone, The NSA Knows Where You Are

The Washington Post has broken a new story based on internal NSA documents courtesy of Edward Snowden, it turns out the NSA is intercepting data worldwide from major cell telecoms and storing billions of records daily of cell phones proximity to cell towers.  This gives them a global surveillance capability, able to track anybody with a cell phone down to a city block location. They have software filtering the mass ocean of data looking for interesting people and who they might pass by.  You can only hope you're not one of them.

(Reuters) - The National Security Agency gathers nearly 5 billion records a day on the location of mobile telephones worldwide, including those of some Americans, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing sources including documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The records feed a database that stores information about the locations of "at least hundreds of millions of devices," the newspaper said, according to the top-secret documents and interviews with intelligence officials.
The report said the NSA does not target Americans' location data intentionally, but acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellular telephones "incidentally."
One manager told the newspaper the NSA obtained "vast volumes" of location data by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. 

Previously, in late September, Senator Ron Wyden asked NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander during a Senate hearing if the agency had ever made plans to collect Americans’ cell site location data. But, Alexander, after Wyden repeated his question, said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court needed notice if the NSA wanted to collect cell site location records. He then said he did not want to put anything out that would be classified.

Ron Wyden, "The Culture of Misinformation"

Ron Wyden comments on the bill passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee over his objections in an interview with The Oregonian yesterday.

After a dozen years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden doesn't get surprised easily.  But Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, recently managed it, by assuring the committee that the NSA planned to put bulk data it had collected on American citizens into a secure lockbox. 
Repeatedly, the Oregon senator recalls, Alexander had told the committee the NSA didn't hold data on American citizens.  "Now," says Wyden, "he said he's going to put into a lockbox the data that he's said he doesn't have."
"The culture of misinformation," he says, "has caused a lot of people to say, they're telling us stuff that just isn't true." Even the supersecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, Wyden points out, has ruled that NSA has sometimes exceeded its legal and constitutional authority.
Wyden is introducing his own bill, very different from the committee's, that would prevent bulk data collection on American citizens, create an independent counsel to respond to NSA surveillance requests to the FISA court and eliminate "backdoor" breaking into social media systems. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has introduced similar legislation, and last week Leahy and Wyden formed an alliance, becoming co-sponsors of each others' bills.

Wyden also commented to The Guardian recently.

Ron Wyden said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform".

Ron Wyden and the NSA Steamroller

“We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”
Ron Wyden has his hands full in trying to rein in the NSA steamroller, which has powerful allies in Congress, such as Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Saxby Chambliss a Georgia Republican on the same committee.  Wyden has labeled their ilk the "Business as Usual Brigade", and true to form they steamrolled a NSA "reform" bill that just continues business as usual with a few weak tweaks to existing practice.

The bill is a direct challenge to one introduced Tuesday by senator Patrick Leahy that would end domestic phone-records collection. It was also opposed by leading intelligence committee member Mark Udall, who said it did not go far enough.
"The NSA's invasive surveillance of Americans' private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform, not incidental changes. Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee does not go far enough to address the NSA's overreaching domestic surveillance programs," Udall said.
Another Democratic member of the committee, Ron Wyden, said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform". 
Wyden suggested that recent concern about NSA spying on foreign leaders had distracted from the real focus on mass domestic surveillance in the US. “The statements that American intelligence officials have made this week about collecting on the intentions of foreign leadership, that’s consistent with the understanding I’ve had for years, as a member of the intelligence committee,” he said.
“That has implications for foreign policy. My top priority is ending the mass surveillance, digital surveillance, on millions and millions of law-abiding Americans.”
Feinstein unexpectedly announced on Monday that she was “totally opposed” to the foreign leader spying of the sort the NSA conducts of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Feinstein has been a staunch supporter of the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
“Americans are making it clear, that they never – repeat never – agreed to give up their constitutional liberties for the appearance of security,” Wyden said. “We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”

NSA Circus, Nobody Can Keep Their Story Straight

The story of NSA spying on Angela Merkel and other friendly heads of state is a prototypical one of Washington circus, which has prompted a new round of "Reviews" ordered by President Obama and Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  According to the Guardian and CNN  there is a major fight brewing in the Administration over who is throwing whom under the bus.  He either knew and is denying it or he didn't know, which most people find not credible.  He either found about it last summer and ordered it stopped, or he let it go on.  Incredible stuff, but in my view we won't find out from any of the current circus performers, they all have no credibility.  I wouldn't trust anybody's word unless it came from Ron Wyden or Mark Udall, and so far they aren't saying.

First CNN.

It's plausible that Obama wouldn't know about specific surveillance targets, said CNN National Security Analyst Fran Townsend, a member of the CIA external advisory board.

She said overall intelligence collection priorities are well-known by the White House. "Specific targets, however, (like) Angela Merkel's cell phone, are not the sort of thing discussed with the President of the United States."

No one should expect the President to know everything the NSA is doing, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

"But when you're talking about the surveillance of world leaders, and an issue that's been controversial for a while now, you would expect that there's some knowledge either by the President or people surrounding him. ... I do think there's surprise that this was off the radar in the inner circles of the White House."

And from the Guardian,

Did President Obama know about US spying on its friends, apparently going back more than a decade in the case of Angela Merkel? The answer is either "Of course he did, idiot" or "It's plausible he didn't, actually" – depending on whom you ask.
The White House message is clear: the president was in the dark.
The Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous administration official on Sunday saying that the president didn't find out until this summer about spying on allies and he immediately ordered it stopped. The Washington Post published a corroborating report Monday.
Obama himself told ABC News on Monday that the White House merely gives the intelligence community "policy direction":

I'm the final user of all the intelligence that they gather. But they're involved in a whole wide range of issues.
We give them policy direction. But what we've seen over the last several years is their capacities continue to develop and expand, and that's why I'm initiating now a review to make sure that what they're able to do doesn't necessarily mean what they should be doing.

To members of the intelligence community, the president distancing himself in this way from data collection that fed his daily briefings is a betrayal. The intelligence officials involved aren't taking it sitting down, either. "Current and former US intelligence officials" are talking to Ken Dilanian of the Los Angeles Times, among others. The White House "signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders," he reports:

Obama may not have been specifically briefed on NSA operations targeting a foreign leader's cellphone or email communications, one of the officials said. 'But certainly the National Security Council and senior people across the intelligence community knew exactly what was going on, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.'

Wyden, NSA, and the Business-as-Usual Brigade

If the government budget crisis ever ends, Senator Ron Wyden, Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner all have a common goal, end the NSA bulk phone collection.  Wyden says,

They will “try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting”, Wyden said. “Their endgame is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin deep.”

"Privacy protections that don’t actually protect privacy are not worth the paper they're printed on,” he said. “And just because intelligence officials say that a particular program helps catch terrorists doesn’t make it true.”
He was also sceptical about the Obama administration’s professed commitment to greater transparency. “When it comes to greater transparency and openness, the executive branch has shown little interest in lasting reforms that would actually make the intelligence community more open and transparent, and executive branch officials will probably resist any attempts to mandate greater transparency,” he said.
Wyden was scathing about the government’s “trust us” argument on surveillance, which he said was undermined by the NSA’s own track record. “The rules have been broken, and the rules have been broken a lot,” he said.

Sensenbrenner has also introduced legislation.

Sensenbrenner has called his bill the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring Act – or USA Freedom Act, and a draft seen by the Guardian has four broad aims.
It seeks to limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects; to end "secret laws" by making courts disclose surveillance policies; to create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests; and to allow companies to disclose how many requests for users' information they receive from the USA. The bill also tightens up language governing overseas surveillance to remove a loophole which it has been abused to target internet and email activities of Americans.

Wyden Proposes Surveillance Limits

Ron Wyden issued a press release Tuesday on new legislation proposed to limit the most objectionable powers the government has assumed that led to mass spying on all American citizens.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), will hold a press conference on Wednesday, Sept. 25 at 4 pm EDT to unveil principles for comprehensive surveillance reform. Their approach will end the bulk collection of phone records of law-abiding Americans, close the “back-door searches” loophole that allows the government to search for Americans’ communications without a warrant, and create an independent constitutional advocate to argue significant cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Wyden also had a lot to say about the operation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) as well, in an article published in Ars Technica.

Further, the Oregon senator said that the FISC needs to be far more open than it has been previously. Until this year, nearly all FISC opinions and orders had been secret. That has changed recently, as lawsuits brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and resulting pressure from the Edward Snowden leaks forced a limited number of new documents to be exposed.
“[FISC's] rulings and opinions need to be made public in order for public confidence to exist,” he said. “Secret courts were one of the reasons that we rebelled against the English. Star chambers became a symbol of our reason for revolution, and secrecy should be really an anathema to our judicial process.”
Wyden and his colleagues also pushed the idea of a “constitutional advocate,” or ombudsman, who would act as the government’s judicial adversary in a FISC hearing. He also addressed a likely rebuttal from the intelligence community, that valuable information may be lost if the judicial process is bogged down by appeals.
“There should be no delay from a constitutional advocate because the review can happen while the warrants are ongoing,” he said. “That appeal can be to SCOTUS or to [other] courts of appeals, to [the FISC of Review]. The appeal right now is nonexistent because only the government is represented. The constitutional advocate would have as its clients the rights of American citizens.”

He's got my vote.

NSA Credibility Problem

On Tuesday 9/10/2013 the government finally declassified FISA and NSA court documents that reveal the agency lied to the court and Congress about their activities for years, and perpetuated those lies until Edward Snowden blew the whistle on them.

After years of government stalling and stonewalling, they finally released data to both the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation who had filed FOIA requests on the court rulings.  Both the EFF and ACLU have had only a few hours to examine the documents, but here are their initial comments.

ACLU

“These documents show that the NSA repeatedly violated court-imposed limits on its surveillance powers, and they confirm that the agency simply cannot be trusted with such sweeping authority,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The abuses revealed in these documents are alarming but also predictable. These violations are the inevitable result of allowing the NSA to assemble a vast database of sensitive information about every American. The documents provide further evidence that secret and one-sided judicial review is not an adequate check on the NSA’s surveillance practices.

EFF

Clapper's Continued Trouble with the Truth
On June 6, just days after the Guardian newspaper published the first of many articles on NSA spying, Director of National Intelligence Clapper attempted to reassure the public that the NSA telephone record program was limited and restrained. "The information acquired does not include ... the identity of any subscriber."
Documents released today show this to be false.  In an August 3, 2009 declaration to the FISA court, NSA Director Keith Alexander wrote that "the collected metadata thus holds contact information that can be immediately access as a new terrorist-associated telephone identified are identified."  While it is not surprising that the NSA can correlate a phone number to a person (phone book technology has been available for some time), here we have it in black and white that Dir. Clapper attempted to mislead the public.

The NSA's Word Games Confuse Even the NSA
As we've noted time and time again, the NSA plays with language, using words in non-standard ways.  After not reporting violations to the FISC for years, the NSA had this explanation: "there was never a complete understanding among the key personnel who reviewed the report ... regarding what each individual meant by the terminology used in the report."  The NSA presents this as an excuse why it misled the court.
Want to Know Why the NSA gave Raw Access to the CIA, FBI and NCTC in violation of a Court Order?
So did the Court, who ordered the NSA to explain the violation of its prior order. So did we. However, you're not going to find out today. Four pages of NSA Director Alexander's response to this question are redacted.

The Guardian published some analysis of the documents.

A judge on the secret surveillance court was so disturbed by the National Security Agency's repeated violations of privacy restrictions that he questioned the viability of its bulk collection of Americans' phone records, according to newly declassified surveillance documents.

Darrell Issa, the California Republican who chairs the powerful House committee on oversight and government reform, said that he backed legislation to "permanently cease" the bulk phone records collection.
"Government actions that violate the constitution cannot be tolerated and Congress must act to ensure the NSA and the intelligence community permanently cease such acts and hold the appropriate individuals accountable," Issa wrote to House majority leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday.