risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

Till then, it's just mindless bitching and complaining about "getting dragged out into the streets and shot".

Trauma of spy's girlfriend: 'like being raped by the state'

Woman says she now knows that the weekend she went into labour, the undercover policeman was with his wife and children

Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Sorcha Pollak
The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013 16.04 EDT

Bob Lambert undercover policeman spy
Bob Lambert cradles his son in the maternity ward. The child’s mother said he was initially doting but later vanished from her life. Photograph: Guardian

A woman who had a child with an undercover police officer who was spying on her says she feels she was "raped by the state" and has been deeply traumatised after discovering his real identity.

She met the undercover officer – Bob Lambert – in 1984. At the time, Lambert was posing as "Bob Robinson", an animal rights activist, on behalf of the then secret police unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

The woman, whose first name is Jacqui, said Lambert was supportive when she became pregnant with their son in 1985, and wanted to have the child. But he later vanished from her life, claiming to be on the run. She only discovered his true identity last year – after spotting his photograph in a newspaper.

"I feel like I've got no foundations in my life," she said. "It was all built on sand – your first serious relationship, your first child, the first time you give birth – they're all significant, but for me they're gone, ruined, spoiled ...

"I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn't know who Bob Lambert was. I had a spy living with me, sleeping with me, making a family with me, and I didn't do anything to deserve that."

Jacqui gave the Guardian and Channel 4 an exclusive interview, parts of which were broadcast in a Dispatches documentary on Monday.

Her story is also recounted in the book at the centre of the latest revelations, Undercover: The Truth About Britain's Secret Police.

"I was 22 when I first met Bob Robinson. He was quite a bit older than me," she said. "He was very charming and charismatic and after only a couple of meetings I was smitten.

"Bob could be whatever you wanted him to be – and I wanted a man to love me. That's what Bob gave me. I always thought that he was besotted with me ... Most of the time we went to animal rights meetings in east London because that's who he wanted to be introduced to."

Lambert was spending several days a week with Jacqui while occasionally returning to his real wife and two children. Jacqui believes she was deliberately targeted because of her connections in the animal rights movement. "I think I was trusted and liked so no one ever questioned him because he was with me."

As the couple grew closer, Jacqui said she told him she wanted to have a child. "Since all this has come out I've been asked, didn't Bob try to get you to terminate the pregnancy? I have to make them understand that it was a planned pregnancy so why would he try to persuade me not to have the baby?"

A photograph of Lambert in the maternity ward shows him holding his son. "I now know that the Sunday I went into labour, he was spending that weekend with his wife and two young children. And all the time he knew that he was going to watch his girlfriend give birth to their child."

When their son was born, Jacqui said Lambert was initially a doting father. However, she believes she ceased to be useful to Lambert, who started to drift away. "Once I became a mum I cut back on doing all the animal stuff and I was no longer any use to him," she said.

During his five-year deployment, Lambert also infiltrated the environmental campaign group London Greenpeace. On Friday the Guardian revealed how he co-wrote the "McLibel leaflet", which defamed McDonald's and became the subject of the longest libel trial in English legal history.

After his deployment ended in 1988, Lambert went on to become a detective inspector in the SDS, where he supervised other undercover police spies. Former SDS officer and whistleblower Peter Francis said that Lambert advised him to wear a condom when sleeping with activists.

Lambert, who now works as a university academic, declined to comment on specific testimony from Jacqui or Francis. However in a general statement, he said allegations against him were a "combination of truth, distortions, exaggerations and outright lies".

He added: "The work of an undercover officer is complex, dangerous and sensitive and it would take some considerable time, and the co-operation of my former police employers, to provide the full background, context and detail necessary to address the matters which have been raised."

Jacqui tracked down Lambert and spoke with him last summer, after discovering – after 24 years – that the father of her son was a police infiltrator. All the time Lambert was actually working a few miles away from her, at Scotland Yard. "When I spoke to him I was saying, 'Why me?'" she said. "I gave out a few leaflets, went on a few demos, but I wasn't a bad person."

The former officer is since understood to have developed a relationship with his son, who has declined to be interviewed and asked for journalists to respect his privacy.

Jacqui is one of about a dozen women bringing a legal action against the Met for the trauma caused by long-term relationships with undercover police. She said: "We [the women bringing cases] are psychologically damaged; it is like being raped by the state. We feel that we were sexually abused because none of us gave consent."

She added: "I've had apologies from Bob himself but I want an apology from the organisation that paid him and gave him the orders."

What A Drone Can See From 17,500 feet.

"In response to your question about access to the guardian.co.uk website, the army is filtering some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," said Gordon Van Vleet, a Netcom public affairs officer.

Jun 28, 2013 - 10:53pm PT
http://www.youtube.com/v/AHrZgS-Gvi4

What A Drone Can See From 17,500 feet.

The Criminal N.S.A.
By JENNIFER STISA GRANICK and CHRISTOPHER JON SPRIGMAN
Published: June 27, 2013

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”
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It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Let’s examine them in turn.

Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contract employee and whistle-blower, has provided evidence that the government has phone record metadata on all Verizon customers, and probably on every American, going back seven years. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious affiliations and political activities are, and so on.

The law under which the government collected this data, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows the F.B.I. to obtain court orders demanding that a person or company produce “tangible things,” upon showing reasonable grounds that the things sought are “relevant” to an authorized foreign intelligence investigation. The F.B.I. does not need to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed, or any connection to terrorism.

Even in the fearful time when the Patriot Act was enacted, in October 2001, lawmakers never contemplated that Section 215 would be used for phone metadata, or for mass surveillance of any sort. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that “Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations.” The N.S.A.’s demand for information about every American’s phone calls isn’t “targeted” at all — it’s a dragnet. “How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?” Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: It’s not.

The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date, even if there is no particular reason to believe that any but a tiny fraction of the data collected might possibly be suspicious. That is a shockingly flimsy argument — any data might be “relevant” to an investigation eventually, if by “eventually” you mean “sometime before the end of time.” If all data is “relevant,” it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.

Let’s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.’s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of e-mails and other messages — including communications to, from and between Americans.

The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non­American individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans’ international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, e-mails, video and voice chats, photos, voice­over IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.

How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.

If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.

The administration hides the extent of its “incidental” surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not “target” American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans’ e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government ­fed misunderstanding.

A “target” under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on — not the people the government is trying to listen to. It’s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans’ messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.

Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Christopher Jon Sprigman is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Sounds like you've got nothing to worry about though, unless your friends are terrorists