"Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!

I think he was just aware Brady didn't pass to him even though he was kind of open. He was half expecting the pass and that's why he realized about 1.5 seconds earlier than everyone else that it was an interception.

Iran's monkey is waiting up there to intercept and save earth.

Some of the best professional players across many versions of football are great because they can very efficiently avoid contact in a number of ways.

E.g. During my teens I wasn't bulked up or built to take a hit, but due to excellent acceleration, top speed and balance, when I broke their line there was little chance of catching/intercepting me, even by the back markers.

There is no reason a female couldn't achieve the same at teen or pro level. Speed and balance (and timing) is all it takes to be highly competitive.

Sam is on the right path!

as long as there is time left on the clock, the ball can be put into play, but the ball remains in play until the play has ended, not when the time runs out. The player that intercepted the hail mary dropped the ball when the clock ran out, but didn't "down" the ball (instead he fumbled it), leaving the ball in play and enabling the team on the offense to regain possession and run it back for a touchdown.

does that help?>> ^NaMeCaF:

I dont get it. What happened?

i grew up with a pretty gnarly scoliosis. Body language that wasn't strained or uncomfortable was nearly impossible.
Most of us have distortion in our spines that effects who we are, how we move, and how we present. Perhaps you do not, but ignoring the physical realities of the species to pretend that how we are perceived is mostly a conscious choice, is understating the matter.


>> ^draak13:

Dude...this is what happens when physicists think they're neurologists.
You should write up a proposal on that fiend of gravity idea and send it in to NIH. You could propose an experiment to replace the actual science, real observations, and real experimental work that she went through. You could describe how the solitons traveling down the neural pathway are intercepted by the higgs field, causing the altered hormone levels and improvements in interview scores that she observed. You could then go on to say how all of that was not an idea worth spreading, because surely nobody would benefit from performing better in interviews and presentations.
Come off it, man. This was the best TED I've ever heard, and everyone who listened to it, except for you, is a better person for it.
>> ^criticalthud:
Our neurology dictates our tendencies, which includes our structure and our posture.
Amy -a good try from a psych/freudian perspective but this is probably not an idea worth spreading.
a better idea worth spreading is that your neurological system is a pressure based, fluid system that is still trying hard to adapt to being upright, and in the process must deal with a myriad of pressure distortions within that occur as the body, over time and trauma, distorts in the field of gravity.

Dude...this is what happens when physicists think they're neurologists.

You should write up a proposal on that fiend of gravity idea and send it in to NIH. You could propose an experiment to replace the actual science, real observations, and real experimental work that she went through. You could describe how the solitons traveling down the neural pathway are intercepted by the higgs field, causing the altered hormone levels and improvements in interview scores that she observed. You could then go on to say how all of that was not an idea worth spreading, because surely nobody would benefit from performing better in interviews and presentations.

Come off it, man. This was the best TED I've ever heard, and everyone who listened to it, except for you, is a better person for it.

>> ^criticalthud:

Our neurology dictates our tendencies, which includes our structure and our posture.
Amy -a good try from a psych/freudian perspective but this is probably not an idea worth spreading.
a better idea worth spreading is that your neurological system is a pressure based, fluid system that is still trying hard to adapt to being upright, and in the process must deal with a myriad of pressure distortions within that occur as the body, over time and trauma, distorts in the field of gravity.

I had to look at that verrrrrry closely, and you're right. His right hand hits the side/top of the shoulder pad first.

Very nice 3-year-late rebuttal!

>> ^jonny:

actually not an illegal block - first contact is made on the side of the shoulder.
>> ^evil_disco_man:
Illegal block in the back at 0:20. Those are often missed, though, and it was still a good play.

actually not an illegal block - first contact is made on the side of the shoulder.

>> ^evil_disco_man:

Illegal block in the back at 0:20. Those are often missed, though, and it was still a good play.

Follow the DOTA 2 tag then watch the All Your History DOTA videos (there are 3)... then perhaps the Comical View (which is funnier if you got the basic understanding). DOTA 2 is free to play, but in closed beta at the moment. Getting a key though is mostly a matter of applying and waiting, and/or visiting Twitch streams of the game or Steam trade forums. At the point in this video iG wassort of winning, but Na'Vi turned it around with what SWBStX talked about...

>> ^doogle:

I'm curious to know more, but have immense difficulty with the limited info here.
What's "DOTA"?
Who the fuck is winning?
bla bla bla


That was a great analogy there... the interception and running for a touchdown in American football (I don't know football/soccer well enough to know on the other ).

>> ^SWBStX:

It would be kinda like intercepting a touchdown pass from your opponent to then run it back for your own score in American football. Perhaps something like one or two goals in stoppage time to comeback and win a football(soccer) game.


I've yet to actually play a game against real people... even Easy bots beat me. I think I am nearly at the stage I could have some coaching, but not sure yet... then again I worry I may be learning bad techniques and will have to unlearn what I have learned. Right now I am focusing on last hits and denies (for those that don't know DOTA/MOBA style games, each lane generates minions called creeps, and by getting the last hit on the enemy creeps you gain more experience and gold than you would otherwise, your creeps or towers are often getting last hits, since it is worth xp/gold to last hit a creep, you want to deny the enemy team that ability and so you last hit your own creep, they still get some XP/gold, but not as much, and XP/gold becomes more important as the game goes on). Then perhaps items/abilities and all the heroes... it really starts to get intimidating with the depth.

DOTA stands for Defense of the Ancients. It was originally a Warcraft 3 mod that has been remade by Valve into it's own stand alone game, now called DOTA2. It's technically still in Beta despite this being the second year they've had the International tournament with the $1 million prize to the top team.

The team who is winning is "Na Vi". This clip shows their opponent "iG" sweeping around to pull off what is called a "smoke gank" and which they seem to have set up perfectly. However one character on Na Vi's team is able to use one of his abilities to disable most of the other team giving his teammate time to steal a key ability from the other team and turn around a fight that should have been devastating.

It's a little hard to explain and even harder to tell what is going on if you don't know anything about the game. But what you should know is that it was an amazing turn around at a crucial moment on one of esports' biggest stages. It would be kinda like intercepting a touchdown pass from your opponent to then run it back for your own score in American football. Perhaps something like one or two goals in stoppage time to comeback and win a football(soccer) game.

This post has gone on far too long, check out Dota2 if you're interested in finding an excellent team oriented PC online game.

>> ^millertime1211:

Pennsylvania's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Pennsylvania makes it a crime to intercept or record a telephone call or conversation unless all parties to the conversation consent. See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter B, and then the specific provision).
This is similar to what happened here http://www.popehat.com/2010/04/14/embarrass-a-cop-in-maryland-thatll-be-five-years-in-jail/

However on September 27, 2010, some criminal charges against Graber were dropped. Harford County Circuit Court Judge Emory A Plitt Jr. dismissed four of the seven charges filed against Anthony Graber, leaving only traffic code violations. The judge ruled that Maryland's wire tap law allows recording of both voice and sound in areas where privacy cannot be expected and that a police officer on a traffic stop has no expectation of privacy.

This situation is no different.

>> ^millertime1211:

Pennsylvania's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Pennsylvania makes it a crime to intercept or record a telephone call or conversation unless all parties to the conversation consent. See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter B, and then the specific provision).
This doesn't apply to public spaces where there is no expectation of privacy.

Pennsylvania's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Pennsylvania makes it a crime to intercept or record a telephone call or conversation unless all parties to the conversation consent. See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter B, and then the specific provision).

>> ^curiousity:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^curiousity:
>> ^bcglorf:

They need to enforce all the rules evenly though. The defender fouled the guy while he was dunking, that should have been called first. The ref didn't seem to have a problem overlooking that rule and call. That involved actual physical contact too, but the ref called the foul based of someone giving another player the wrong look. That's pretty sketchy in my book.

The defender did not foul at all. The defender was going for the ball.

If there's contact on the players body though it's still a foul. Sure, in practice the refs will let a lot of things slide, especially by the basket. That's exactly my point though, after letting one infraction slide, they go ahead and call an even less significant one.

Body contact by itself does not necessitate a foul. If the ball is "free" (i.e. not actively possessed by a player), then players from both teams are allow to pursue the ball. In fact, the offensive player runs into the defensive player so it is the offensive player that causes the contact while the defensive player is just seeking to intercept the pass while having a superior position (and if he could have jumped higher and gained possession, it might have been a foul on the offense player if the offense player tried to take the ball away from him.) It was a good no-call by the ref.


You've never played ball before then, have you.

When the offensive player has the ball, any contact is a foul on the defensive player unless the defender has both feet planted on the ground before the offensive player left his own feet. Since both players are jumping and the offensive player is still holding the ball when there is contact there isn't any question what so ever on the call. It's just a call refs often leave alone if the contact is light and doesn't interfere with the shot. That's why on a dunk they'll allow some body contact with no call, but on a 3 point attempt they'll call even a feather touch on the shoe.