Alarm as Trump Requests Permanent Reauthorization of NSA Mass Spying Program Exposed by Snowden

Common Dreams

Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates raised alarm Thursday after the Trump administration called on Congress to reauthorize an NSA mass surveillance program that was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The New York Times, which obtained the Trump administration's request to Congress, reported that "the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans' domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act."

"It's long past time that this surveillance program was shuttered once and for all."
—Patrick Toomey, ACLU

"The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent," according to the Times.

The administration claimed in its letter to Congress—which was signed by outgoing National Intelligence chief Dan Coats—that the NSA has suspended the spying program, but Free Press Action government relations director Sandra Fulton said in a statement that this "should give little comfort to those whose privacy rights are routinely violated by authorities."

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The New Living Language, Brainwaves & Babel

Truth Stream Media

Israel face-recognition start-up ‘secretly tracking Palestinians’

MEMO| Middle Eastern Monitor

A start-up known as “Israel’s most high-profile biometric recognition firm” is playing a key role in monitoring Palestinians at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, reported Haaretz.

According to the article, Anyvision Interactive Technologies “is taking part in two special projects in assisting the Israeli army in the West Bank”.

One project “involves a system that it has installed at army checkpoints that thousands of Palestinians pass through each day on their way to work from the West Bank.”

In a statement in February, the army said “27 biometric crossings” had been established in the West Bank, as part of a “wide-ranging” effort to “upgrade” the checkpoints in question.

The second project, however, “is much more confidential”, reported Haaretz, and “includes facial recognition technology elsewhere in the West Bank, not just at border crossings”, as “cameras deep inside the West Bank try to spot and monitor potential Palestinian assailants”.

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Demand for DHS to disclose surveillance program that tracks, monitors and mines social media influencers

The RutherFord Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pushing back against the expansion of secret government surveillance programs and the chilling impact they have on lawful First Amendment activities, The Rutherford Institute is demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclose the details of a government program proposed by DHS in April 2018 that aims to track, monitor, catalogue and mine content posted by social media “influencers.”

In filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Rutherford Institute attorneys are asking for all records relating to a “Media Monitoring Services” surveillance program that would create a “media influencer database” for content created and posted by journalists, editors, social media influencers, and bloggers.  The Institute is asking for records and information on the program because of the chilling effect it will have on the First Amendment activities of the citizens targeted by the program.

“Government surveillance stifles dissent. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance is reduced trust, increased conformity, diminished civic participation and a populace cowed by fear,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Department of Homeland Security’s secret surveillance of social media influencers is not only antithetical to the principles of a free society, but will also have a chilling and deleterious effect on the ability of all Americans to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech.” 

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The Pentagon’s New Laser-Based Tool Uses Your Heartbeat to Track You

Singularity Hub

The government’s hefty arsenal of surveillance tools just welcomed a powerful new member. Rather than monitoring an external device—a bug or a smartphone—or even the exterior features of your face, the new tech aims straight for your heart. Literally.

First reported by MIT Technology Review, the US Pentagon is developing an infrared laser that captures a person’s unique “cardiac signature” from as far as 200 meters—the length of just over two football fields—away, as long as you’re still. According to Steward Remaly of the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), even longer ranges may be possible with higher intensity lasers.

Although chilling, the tech builds on previous ideas.

Contact infrared sensors have long been used to monitor a person’s pulse, in a clinical setting or when traversing high altitudes. Here, the devices shoot infrared light into a finger and measure how much blood flow alters the refraction. Unlike this classic setup, the Pentagon’s new tech—dubbed Jetson—uses laser doppler vibrometry that detects minute movements on the skin caused by heartbeat.

Currently under development by Ideal Innovations, Inc., a veteran-owned biometrics, forensics, and scientific company based in Arlington, Virginia, the goal of Jetson is to positively identify an individual within five seconds using a “heartprint.”

“Existing long-range biometric methods that rely on facial recognition suffer from acquiring enough pixels at a distance to use the face matching algorithms and require high performance optics to acquire visual signatures at significant distances,” explained the CTTSO. “The Jetson effort…is a ruggedized biometric system that will capture cardiac signatures to aid in the positive identification of an individual” from a distance with little lag time.

Jetson is just the latest attempt at surveillance from a distance. Rather than old-school technologies such as fingerprinting or retinal scans, this new generation of surveillance technologies uses biometrics to monitor your every move—be it face, speech, heartbeat, or even brain activity—from a distance.

The tech may sound extreme, but Jetson is using the same playbook as biometrics for security. And to project where surveillance is going, it pays to look at biometrics research as the canary in the coal mine. Using your finger or face to unlock your phone is just the convenient side of things—what makes your biometric signature secure as a passcode is also what makes you identifiable as an individual. 

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“Amazon Could Equip Drones to Keep Watch Over Your Home”

The Times

Amazon’s delivery drones could one day be fitted with an arsenal of cameras and sensors to monitor customers’ homes in between drop-offs.

The retail giant has obtained a patent for a “surveillance as a service” function for the drones, which could be fitted with thermal-imaging cameras, surveying lasers and chemical sensors to detect burglars and fires, among other threats. Amazon intends to use the drones to deliver parcels to its customers and has tested the technology in Britain, with the co-operation of the Civil Aviation Authority.

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UK Rights Group’s Legal Challenge Shows MI5 Illegally Preserved Surveillance Data

Sputnik

The ongoing legal challenge of UK human rights group Liberty over data privacy breaches committed by MI5 has revealed new details about the violations, showing that the security service has been failing to remove collected bulk surveillance data on time and received surveillance warrants based on knowingly false information.

Under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), MI5 has the authority to collect, upon authorization, personal data of a large number of innocent people and store it for potential future investigations. Security services, however, cannot store such data indefinitely: they are obliged to delete it within certain time limits.

Documents released during a court hearing on Tuesday showed that the MI5 legal team said, as quoted by the Liberty, that there is “a high likelihood [of material] being discovered when it should have been deleted, in a disclosure exercise leading to substantial legal or oversight failure.”

Moreover, a senior official from the intelligence service said that people’s personal data was being kept in “ungoverned spaces,” the rights group said in a statement, published on its official website.
“These shocking revelations expose how MI5 has been illegally mishandling our data for years, storing it when they have no legal basis to do so. This could include our most deeply sensitive information – our calls and messages, our location data, our web browsing history,” Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding said, as quoted by the rights group.

Investigatory Powers Commissioner and Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, who is responsible for verifying that the security services respect data privacy provisions laid out in the IPA, described MI5’s actions as “undoubtedly unlawful.” 

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Orwellian Future: Facial Recognition & Mass Surveillance Is Coming To U.S. Schools

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

We are staring our Orwellian future right in the face.  Beginning in New York, facial recognition is coming to schools in the United States and it’ll be switched on for testing next week.

The dystopian future George Orwell warned about in his accidental historical predictions book, 1984, has arrived. According to an article by Engadget, the Lockport City School District in New York will start testing a facial and object recognitionsystem called “Aegis” on June 3rd. According to BuzzFeed News, that will make it the first in the U.S. to pilot a facial recognition mass surveillance system on its students and faculty.

The district installed cameras and the software suite back in September, using $1.4 million of the $4.2 million funding it received through the New York Smart Schools Bond Act. Funding provided through the Bond Act is supposed to go towards instructional tech devices, such as iPads and laptops, but the district clearly had other plans. –Engadget

BuzzFeed News got its hands on a copy of a letter distributed to the students’ parents, and it describes Aegis as “an early warning system” that can notify officials of threats.  But that’s the propagandized version of what the system is in reality: it’s a mass surveillance tool being sold to the public as “safety” as with any human rights infringement. The system, created by Canadian company SN Technologies, can apparently keep track of certain individuals in school grounds.

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Facial recognition: Britain faces a dystopian future

George Harrison
spiked.com

Automated facial recognition (AFR) is the state’s latest, and most invasive, surveillance technology.

Since 2015, three police forces – South Wales, Metropolitan and Leicestershire – have made use of AFR in controversial live trials. Now, South Wales Police have been taken to court by office worker Ed Bridges, who started a crowdfunding campaign when he felt his privacy had been violated by AFR.

Bridges’ legal challenge has been backed by civil-rights organisation Liberty, which argues that the indiscriminate deployment of AFR is equivalent to taking DNA samples or fingerprints without consent. According to Liberty, there are no legal grounds for scanning thousands of innocent people in this way. It also claims the technology discriminates against black people, whose faces are disproportionately flagged by mistake, meaning they are more likely to be stopped by police unfairly.

In London, AFR has been put on hold while the Metropolitan Police carries out a review. The Met is also facing a legal challenge of its own from Big Brother Watch, another civil-liberties group. Director Silkie Carlo, a vocal critic of AFR since its inception, told spiked: ‘People are right to be concerned when they can see us moving towards a police state. The result of this technology is that the normal relationship between innocence and suspicion has been inverted.’

One camera, placed in a busy, inner-city location, can scan the faces of up to 18,000 pedestrians per minute, automatically logging the features of anyone unlucky enough to walk past. A computer immediately checks these faces against a database of wanted mugs and lets nearby officers know if there’s a match.

I have previously warned on spiked against the illiberal use of this technology, and the flaws inherent in AFR policing have since become even clearer. Around 50 deployments have taken place so far in Wales alone, including during the Champions League final in Cardiff in June 2017. On that occasion, the cameras scanned 2,470 people – 92 per cent of whom were wrongly identified as criminals.

The trials do not exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of this technology. But even if AFR worked perfectly, its use would still violate our right to privacy and turn us all into suspects. In previous live AFR trials, it was unclear what would happen to members of the public who refuse to be scanned. Well, now we know: anyone who doesn’t consent to being turned into a walking ID-card will be treated like a criminal.

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“Research”: The U.S. Navy Wants To Archive 350 Billion Social Media Posts

Marc Slavo
SHTFplan

The United States Navy wants to archive 350 billion social media posts in order to conduct “research.” What exactly does the military want to study? “Modes of collective expression.”

The Department of the Navy has posted a solicitation asking contractors to bid on a project that would amass a staggering 350 billion social media posts dating from 2014 through 2016. The data will be taken from a single social media platform – but the solicitation does not specify which one. -RT

“We seek to acquire a large-scale global historical archive of social media data, providing the full text of all public social media posts, across all countries and languages covered by the social media platform,” the contract synopsis reads. The Navy said that the archive would be used in “ongoing research efforts” into “the evolution of linguistic communities” and “emerging modes of collective expression, over time and across countries.”

This is simply spying and the research will be used for propaganda purposes, which is blatantly obvious at this point. The intentions are far from benign.

The archive will draw from publicly available social media posts and “no private communications or private user data” will be included in the database. However, all records must include the time and date at which each message was sent and the public user handle associated with the message. Additionally, each record in the archive must include all publicly available meta-data, including country, language, hashtags, location, handle, timestamp, and URLs, that were associated with the original posting. -RT

So basically, most of your information is going to be stored by the U.S. military. The data must be collected from at least 200 million unique users in at least 100 countries, with no single country accounting for more than 30 percent of users, according to the contract.

The U.S. government has previously expressed interest in collecting social media data for more tracking and spying on Americans. Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a notice asking contractors to bid on a database that tracks 290,000 global news sources in over 100 languages. The contract also mentioned the ability to keep tabs on“influencers,” leading some reports to speculate that the proposed database could be used to monitor journalists.

There is no way anyone could say we live in the land of the free anymore. It’s delusional to think we have any power at all. Freedom of speech is almost gone, gun rights are on the chopping block, and journalists will soon be punished by the military for not toeing the line and reporting on the official narrative (some have already been.)  Censorship and manipulation are completely out of control.  We are rapidly heading toward the dystopian nightmare George Orwell warned about.

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Big brother Britain: Facial recognition cameras deployed in London, man fined for covering his face

Mark Duell
Daily Mail

Police fined a pedestrian £90 for disorderly behaviour after he tried to cover his face when he saw a controversial facial recognition camera on a street in London.

Officers set up the camera on a van in Romford, East London, which then cross-checked photos of faces of passers-by against a database of wanted criminals.

But one man was unimpressed about being filmed and covered his face with his hat and jacket, before being stopped by officers who took his picture anyway.  


After being pulled aside, the man told police: 'If I want to cover me face, I'll cover me face. Don't push me over when I'm walking down the street.'

It comes just weeks after it was claimed the new technology incorrectly identified members of the public in 96 per cent of matches made between 2016 and 2018.

The cameras have been rolled out in a trial in parts of Britain, with the Met making its first arrest last December when shoppers in London's West End were scanned.

But their use has sparked a privacy debate, with civil liberties group Big Brother Watch branding the move a 'breach of fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of assembly'. Police argue they are necessary to crack down on spiralling crime.

Officers previously insisted people could decline to be scanned, before later clarifying that anyone trying to avoid scanners may be stopped and searched.

It was first deployed by South Wales Police ahead of the Champions League final in Cardiff in 2007, but wrongly matched more than 2,000 people to possible criminals.

Police and security services worldwide are keen to use facial recognition technology to bolster their efforts to fight crime and identify suspects.

But they have been hampered by the unreliability of the software, with some trials failing to correctly identify a single person.

The technology made incorrect matches in every case during two deployments at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford last year, according to Big Brother Watch. It was also reportedly 96 per cent accurate in eight uses by the Met from 2016 to 2018. 

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At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism

Katie Fitzpatrick
The Nation

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. 

Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”

By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time. 

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. 

Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.

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THE END OF SCHOOL: AI ‘Google brain’ implants to REPLACE education and ‘supercharge IQ’

secureteam.com 

AI expert Nikolas Kairinos believes artificial intelligence will improve people’s lives on a mass scale and dramatically transform the way we learn

The CEO and Founder of Fountech.ai exclusively told Daily Star Online he is working on a revolutionary AI to “personalize education”.“The current area of focus is personalized education – trying to speed up learning so that anyone can learn almost anything using AI,” he told Daily Star Online.

“And it’s highly personalized, so the more the AI gets to know you the more it adapts its teaching style, its voice, the time of day it speaks to you – all to optimize learning.”

Nick said the new learning tool could end school as we know it – getting rid of “rogue memorization” where facts are learned and repeated and eventually forgotten.

“That’s not learning,” Nick said.

Nick said we will hear the answers to our questions inside our heads. “This AI will enable anyone in the world, no matter who or how old they are, to log on to their smart tv or their computer or their phone or their smart glasses or the AI in their car, and say ‘teach me about this’.

“You won’t need to memorize anything. Learning will not be about memorizing anything.”

Nick says the need to learn things in “parrot fashion” as we are taught in schools will disappear completely and will free up our brains to think in new, innovative ways – skyrocketing our IQs.

“At the moment it’s all about memorizing and learning facts but when they are accessible to you instantly, things are going to be taken up a level.

“We will be doing more thinking than just memorizing, perhaps getting more creative, learning how to connect dots, and learning how to apply that knowledge.

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Global Government and Mass Surveillance May Be Needed to Save Humanity, Expert Says

Dagny Taggart
Activist Post
 
A prominent Oxford philosopher who is known for making terrifying predictions about humanity has a new theory about our future, and it isn’t pretty.

Over 15 years ago, Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, made the case that we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation run by another civilization.

Here’s a summary of that theory, explained by Vox:

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones. (source)

Will humanity eventually be destroyed by one of its own creations?

 

If you find the idea of living in a computer simulation that is run by unknown beings troubling, wait until you hear Bostrom’s latest theory.

Last Wednesday, Bostrom took the stage at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to share some of the insights from his latest work, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”

While speaking to head of the conference, Chris Anderson, Bostrom argued that mass surveillance could be one of the only ways to save humanity – from a technology of our own creation.

His theory starts with a metaphor of humans standing in front of a giant urn filled with balls that represent ideas. There are white balls (beneficial ideas), grey balls (moderately harmful ideas), and black balls (ideas that destroy civilization). The creation of the atomic bomb, for instance, was akin to a grey ball — a dangerous idea that didn’t result in our demise.
Bostrom posits that there may be only one black ball in the urn, but, once it is selected, it cannot be put back. (Humanity would be annihilated, after all.)
According to Bostrom, the only reason that we haven’t selected a black ball yet is because we’ve been “lucky.” (source)

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Amazon’s Alexa Reviewers Can Access Customers’ Home Addresses

bloomberg.com

 

An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.

The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The program, whose existence Bloomberg revealed earlier this month, was set up to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands.

Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.

While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.

Location data is more sensitive than many other categories of user information, said Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Communications and Technology Clinic.

“Anytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don’t want to be found,” she said. Widespread access to location data associated with Alexa user recordings “would set up a big red flag for me.”

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US airports will scan 97% of outbound flyers’ faces within 4 years

futurism

 

If you board a flight out of the United States four years from now, chances are the government is going to scan your face — an ambitious timeline that has privacy experts reeling.

That’s according to a recent Department of Homeland Security report, which says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to dramatically expand its Biometric Exit program to cover 97 percent of outbound air passengers within four years.

Through this program, which was already in place in 15 U.S. airports at the end of 2018, passengers have their faces scanned by cameras before boarding flights out of the nation. If the AI-powered system determines that the photo doesn’t match one on file, CBP officials can look into it.

The goal of these airport face scans is purportedly to catch people who have overstayed their visas, but civil liberties expert Edward Hasbrouck sees them as potentially giving the government increased control over American citizens.

“This is opening the door to an extraordinarily more intrusive and granular level of government control, starting with where we can go and our ability to move freely about the country,” he told Buzzfeed News. “And then potentially, once the system is proved out in that way, it can literally extend to a vast number of controls in other parts of our lives.”

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Beyond Censorship: Destroying Free Thought Online

Truthstream Media

Air Travel Is About to Get Even MORE INVASIVE with Facial Recognition

Dany Tagggert
The Organic Prepper

 If you don’t feel like your privacy rights are already being violated enough, rest assured, things are going to get a lot worse in the near future.

We are being watched at every turn – the US has truly become a surveillance state, with cameras on every corner, Smart devices spying on us, and our own computers and phones tracking our movements.

Airports have been particularly invasive since the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2001. Since then, air travel has become quite unpleasant.

Invasive screenings, body scanners, and property searches are a major cause of irritation and inconvenience for those of us who are just trying to get from one place to another. And now, they’re adding another way to invade your privacy.

Facial recognition systems are coming to an airport near you.

 

Unfortunately, some airports are already using facial recognition systems, and more will be soon. While some say this will make getting through security screenings faster, others aren’t too thrilled about using their face as a boarding pass, and privacy concerns abound.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in an effort to stop the unwarranted searches of the biometric data of American citizens.

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San Diego Has Been Turned Into A Massive Chinese-Style Public Surveillance Network

Mass Private I

Can you imagine a city in the United States secretly creating a Chinese-style public surveillance network that can identify everyone? Can you imagine that same city secretly creating a Chinese-style public watchlisting network?

Well imagine no more because it has already happened.

When I wrote about "covert facial recognition streetlights coming to a city near you" last year, I never would have dreamt that my article would become a reality so quickly.

A recent article in the San Diego Reader reveals how a hacker discovered emails between the Port of San Diego and BriefCam. The emails revealed that law enforcement is secretly using a network of 400 facial recognition surveillance cameras to identify everyone.

Last year, BriefCam announced a "breakthrough" in real-time facial recognition surveillance.

"Robust multi-camera search capabilities identify men, women, children and vehicles with speed and precision, using 25 classes and attributes, face recognition, appearance similarity, color, size, speed, path, direction, and dwell time."

According to another article, the City of San Diego is using GE's CityIQ streetlights to listen to everyone.

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Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies on American Phones in Hidden Program

Comment: Obvious doesn't even come close...

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Nafeez Ahmed

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE

On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question — is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

Since then, further doubt was cast on the NYT report when NSA chief General Paul Nakasone refused to confirm or deny the story. But he did tell a major security conference on Wednesday that the agency was still “in a deliberative process” about whether to use a revamped version of the vast database of American phone records.

All of this, however, is an elaborate ruse. According to two former top NSA officials interviewed by INSURGE, there is no credible reason to believe that NSA phone surveillance has truly been shut down. 

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