NSA + DEA + IRS = ??
Could the Internal Revenue Service be investigating Americans using NSA surveillance data laundered through a secretive US Drug Enforcement Agency program? That question is on a number of minds in the wake of yesterday’s story from Reuters, which says that “Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.” Reuters notes that, “The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden,” but that hasn’t stopped Republicans like Senator Rand Paul and Rep Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, from starting to ask questions. ACLU privacy researcher Chris Soghoian responded in a tweet: “We just need evidence showing the NSA helped the IRS to spy on tea party activists to get a 2013 Church Committee.”
Meanwhile, the Times frontpages a report detailing how the NSA justifies searching the contents of Americans’ email and text messages if they communicate with foreigners of interest to the agency.
Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA, doesn’t have a high opinion of hackers or transparency activists, speculating before a Washington audience Tuesday that they will conduct cyber-terror attacks on the US “…if and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial.” He referred to them as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”
Rep. John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement, told the Guardian he sees Edward Snowden as acting in the spirit of Thoreau and Gandhi. “If you believe something that is not right, something is unjust, and you are willing to defy customs, traditions, bad laws, then you have a conscience. You have a right to defy those laws and be willing to pay the price.”
Actor Matt Damon, who has campaigned for Barack Obama, thinks he may know why the President has defended the NSA’s surveillance programs. “”I think it’s tough for guys who weren’t in the military,” he told The Guardian. “One, their manhood is kind of challenged on some level, I imagine, and they allow themselves to get bullied. And two, they’re just politically afraid of either looking soft or looking incompetent, so they overcompensate.”
Other domestic news from around the web
Yesterday, I mistakenly referred to TV executive Jeff Zucker of CNN (not NBC, anymore), whose son was on the advisory board of Waywire, Cory Booker’s video aggregation start-up profiled by the New York Times. And it’s “was”–Andrew Zucker resigned from Waywire yesterday afternoon. And The New York Times editorial board, having already endorsed Booker in next week’s primary, calls today for better disclosure of his “financial arrangements.”
Organizing for America says it is sticking to a pledge it made to avoid partisan races,