The NSA watches you poop.

Some 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system and separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups during the course of CIA'sOperation CHAOS(1967-1973).

Click to expand...

Sanders asked Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, in a letter dated January 3 whether it "has spied, or is.currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials."

The senator defined "spying" as "gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business."

It would seem that if the NSA had never snooped on Capitol Hill, the agency would have simply assured Sanders that no such surveillance ever had, or is, taking place.

Instead, the agency responded with this: "NSA's authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process.Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.NSA is fully committed to transparency with Congress. Our interaction with Congress has been extensive both before and since the media disclosures began last June."

Given the numerous revelations last year that the NSA had collected metadata pertaining to millions of American's communications despite its "procedures that protect the privacy of US persons," the statement wasn't at all reassuring for members of Congress who "have the same privacy protections as all US persons."

The NSA also said that it was still "reviewing Senator Sanders's letter" and that officials "will continue to work to ensure that all members of Congress, including Senator Sanders, have information about NSA's mission, authorities, and programs to fully inform the discharge of their duties."

Click to expand...

In January 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum stating that officials could collect calling records of phone company customers without first obtaining a subpoena or any other authorization from a judge.

The memo came in response to a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose use of "exigent letters" to obtain telephone and financial records without following any legal procedures had stirred controversy.

Neither the FBI nor the OLC released a copy of the memo, whose existence only came to light after the Justice Department's inspector general issued a report in 2010 discussing its legal ramifications.

Inspector General Glenn Fine warned that the document established a "significant gap" in "accountability and oversight," He also called on Congress to address the matter by amending the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, the law upon which the memo was based.

For now, "the details of the legal theory, and the circumstances in which it [the memo] could be invoked, remain unclear," wrote Charlie Savage of The New York Times.

Wanting to find out how the OLC came to this legal conclusion, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the administration to force it to release the document.

But a district court judge and a federal appeals court have ruled that the administration can keep the memo under wraps and away from the public.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with Justice Department lawyers that the administration enjoys broad legal authority to keep secret its interpretation of what the law permits it to do.

Privacy advocates were alarmed by the ruling, saying it could be used by the government to lock away other classified memos.

The foundation's attorney, David Sobel, called the ruling "troubling," adding: "It's kind of hard to imagine how a different case in the D.C. Circuit is likely to have a different outcome in light of this opinion," according to the Times.

Click to expand...

What the NSA has done, according to leaked documents, is (1) undermine encryption by coercing companies to put backdoors into their software and (2) hack into tech company servers to steal encryption keys.

Click to expand...

The report details a secret deal between the NSA and respected encryption company RSA, in which the agency paid $10 million for RSA to incorporate the weaker algorithm into an encryption product called BSafe. Because of the earlier work, the algorithm had been approved by NIST, so RSA could claim their encryption used only nationally certified protocols. At the same time, BSafe's encryption was defaulting to a fundamentally flawed encryption algorithm, which the NSA could subvert whenever they needed to.

Click to expand...