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FAQ: What You Need To Know About The NSA’s Surveillance Programs

By Jonathan Stray/Special to ProPublica

There have been a lot of news stories about NSA surveillance programs following the leaks of secret documents by Edward Snowden. But it seems the more we read, the less clear things are. We’ve put together a detailed snapshot of what’s known and what’s been reported where.

What information does the NSA collect and how?

We don’t know all of the different types of information the NSA collects, but several secret collection programs have been revealed:

A record of most calls made in the U.S., including the telephone number of the phones making and receiving the call, and how long the call lasted. This information is known as “metadata” and doesn’t include a recording of the actual call (but see below). This program was revealed through a leaked secret court order instructing Verizon to turn over all such information on a daily basis. Other phone companies, including several billion calls per day.

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Posted on June 28, 2013

NSA: Responding To This FOIA Would Help “Our Adversaries”

By Jeff Larson/ProPublica

Shortly after the Guardian and Washington Post published their Verizon and PRISM stories, I filed a Freedom of Information request with the NSA seeking any personal data the agency has about me.
I didn’t expect an answer, but on Monday I received a letter signed by Pamela Phillips, the chief FOIA officer at the agency (which really freaked out my wife when she picked up our mail).

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Posted on June 26, 2013

Obama’s War On Truth And Transparency

By Steve Rhodes

Hey, don’t take it from me, and don’t take it from Glenn Greenwald if you’re buying into the smear campaign against a person who has done some of the most impressive and vital journalism of the last decade – take it from Barton Gellman of the Washington Post:

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Posted on June 21, 2013

Fact-Check: The NSA And 9/11

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego.
Last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the same argument.
It is impossible to know for certain whether screening phone records would have stopped the attacks – the program didn’t exist at the time. It’s also not clear whether the program would have given the NSA abilities it didn’t already possess with respect to the case. Details of the current program and as well as NSA’s role in intelligence gathering around the 9/11 plots remain secret.
But one thing we do know: Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record.

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Posted on June 20, 2013

Remember When The Patriot Act Debate Was All About Library Records?

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

In the months following the October 200 passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.
“A chilling intrusion” declared one Op-Ed in the Baltimore Sun.
But the consternation didn’t focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records. Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.
Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, “He knows what you’ve been checking out.”
In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “FBI checking out Americans’ reading habits.”
The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of “any tangible things” from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.
Civil liberties groups and librarians’ associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records. The section even became known as the “library provision.”
Yet as the Guardian and others revealed this month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans – a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.
“A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination,” says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Posted on June 18, 2013

Bank Of America Lied To Homeowners And Rewarded Foreclosures, Former Employees Say

By Paul Kiel/ProPublica

Bank of America employees regularly lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications, denied their applications for made-up reasons, and were rewarded for sending homeowners to foreclosure, according to sworn statements by former bank employees.
The employee statements were filed in federal court in Boston as part of a multi-state class action suit brought on behalf of homeowners who sought to avoid foreclosure through the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) but say they had their cases botched by Bank of America.
In a statement, a Bank of America spokesman said that each of the former employees’ statements is “rife with factual inaccuracies” and that the bank will respond more fully in court next month. He said that Bank of America had modified more loans than any other bank and continues to “demonstrate our commitment to assisting customers who are at risk of foreclosure.”
Six of the former employees worked for the bank, while one worked for a contractor. They range from former managers to front-line employees, and all dealt with homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure through the government’s program.

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Posted on June 17, 2013

Defenders Of NSA Surveillance Citing Chicago Case Omit Most Of Mumbai Plotter’s Story

By Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica

Defending a vast program to sweep up phone and Internet data under antiterror laws, senior U.S. officials in recent days have cited the case of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said a data collection program by the National Security Agency helped stop an attack on a Danish newspaper for which Headley did surveillance. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Senate intelligence chairwoman, also called Headley’s capture a success.
But a closer examination of the case, drawn from extensive reporting by ProPublica, shows that the government surveillance only caught up with Headley after the U.S. had been tipped by British intelligence. And even that victory came after seven years in which U.S. intelligence failed to stop Headley as he roamed the globe on missions for Islamic terror networks and Pakistan’s spy agency.

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Posted on June 13, 2013

HUD Refuses To Prosecute Widespread Discrimination It Spends Millions To Find

By Nikole Hannah-Jones/ProPublica

The results of Tuesday’s U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development national study on the persistence of housing discrimination are unlikely to shock: Racial and ethnic minorities continue to find themselves locked out of many housing opportunities.
No, the more startling thing may be what HUD intends to do with its findings.
HUD spent $9 million to contract with the Urban Institute to conduct 8,000 undercover tests in 28 metropolitan areas in order to expose illegal housing discrimination. Yet the federal agency has no plans to use these tests to actually enforce the law and punish the offenders.

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Posted on June 12, 2013

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