U.S. black budget

[June 24 2009]

national security collection functions
The Intelligence Community gives current heavy reliance on contractors. It is estimated that some intelligence entities within the IC devote up to 70 percent of their resources to contractors.
Allowing the private sector to be so heavily involved in the intelligence business is counterproductive for several reasons. First, it fosters an atmosphere of cronyism and patronage that is unhealthy in a functioning bureaucracy.
Unbalanced reliance on contractors erodes institutional knowledge and quality. Also, there is the ideological question of how much of our national security collection functions we believe it is prudent to outsource? To whom are the contractors ultimately loyal—their government or their corporation? Our national security depends upon it.
here

Data is increasingly flowing around the United States












Interception of foreign Internet communications is shifting Canadian and European traffic away from the United States. Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States is monitored by American intelligence agencies.
Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S. There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches. A climate of deteriorating respect for privacy and data protection has been created by US security measures to fight terrorism. This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two US-owned sites will flow through other nations.
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China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China. They won’t have to route through the U.S.”

“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”here here

The legal siege against the Bush administration’s counterterrorism programs goes far beyond the C.I.A., including lawsuits brought on behalf of hundreds of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more than 40 challenges in court to the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.

SWIFT Orwellian example of government overreaching
Two American banking customers have sued Swift on invasion-of-privacy grounds. Legal and financial analysts had expected that the suit would have been thrown out because American banking privacy laws are considered much laxer than those in much of Europe.

But the chief judge in Federal District Court in Chicago,[Northern District] James F. Holderman, ruled in June that he would allow the suit to proceed, partly on grounds of claims of a Fourth Amendment violation and his finding that Swift’s arguments on that point were “unpersuasive.” here

Attorney General resigns
The departure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could unlock the Bush administration's legal closet, bringing new details tumbling into the open about issues including the treatment of terrorism suspects, warrantless surveillance of Americans, and the administration's definition of official secrets.

here

TIDE
President Bush ordered the intelligence community in 2003 to centralize data on terrorism suspects, and U.S. agencies at home and abroad now send everything they collect to TIDE.
Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States.
The list marks the first time foreigners and U.S. citizens are combined in an intelligence database. The bar for inclusion is low, and once someone is on the list, it is virtually impossible to get off it. here

“It’s not academic when the president violates the law,” Mr. Romero said.


"An exorbitant and extreme theory of executive power that ended up weakening the presidency,” Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a critic of the administration’s legal theories, said the president’s strategy to wiretap without court approval, now reversed, might have provoked so strong a judicial and Congressional rebuff that it would ultimately accomplish the opposite of his goal. “I think historians will see it as an exorbitant and extreme theory of executive power that ended up weakening the presidency,” Mr. Koh said. here

A Justice Department official said the department would file a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, arguing that the court’s review of the issue in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union “is now moot” in light of this week’s developments.

The officials said the new approach was based on evolving legal interpretations of the foreign surveillance law by the Justice Department, changes in the foreign surveillance statute in recent years and precedents set by the FISA court in approving specific requests to conduct electronic monitoring.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the appellate court should still examine the legality of the program and whether the it had violated intelligence law for the last five years.

The Justice Department said it had worked out an “innovative” arrangement with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that provided the “necessary speed and agility” to provide court approval to monitor international communications of people inside the United States without jeopardizing national security.

The decision capped 13 months of bruising national debate over the reach of the president’s wartime authorities and his claims of executive power, and it came as the administration faced legal and political hurdles in its effort to continue the surveillance program. here

In August, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit ruled that the program was unconstitutional and should be halted. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the program to continue temporarily. here

Rumsfeld directed military to get financial records
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a senior Defense Department official said. But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying. Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said. Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first authorized them to issue national security letters. The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better coordinate the military’s efforts to combat foreign intelligence services, has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.

The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. here