The NSA watches you poop.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has signed an order deisgned to further wall off the public's access to the work being done at the nation's various intelligence services by banning all "unauthorized" contact betweens agency officials and journalists and making violations of the new orders punishable by termination or even prosecution.

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This is not about keeping America safe by protecting sensitive information. Management at the top does not want the public hearing from lower-level employees because it might create "misperceptions." It is best to chill the news gathering process and leave the public less informed so Clapper and future James Clappers are not inconvenienced or accidentally held accountable.

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The debate, hosted by Munk Debates, also featured Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

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Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. recited two claims made by the government: The Justice Department must notify criminal defendants who faced evidence derived from such surveillance, and the N.S.A., to intercept the Americans' communications without a warrant, must target their foreign contacts for surveillance. But both claims have come under scrutiny in the recent focus on N.S.A. activities.

It emerged that the Justice Department was not notifying defendants in situations when warrantless surveillance had led in turn to a wiretap order on an individual that produced evidence used in court. Mr. Verrilli fought an internal battle last summer to change the practice, and prosecutors have been belatedly notifying defendants, who have clear standing to challenge the constitutionality of the spying.

And in August, it surfaced that the N.S.A. was also systematically scanning Americans' cross-border emails without warrants and saving copies of any messages that contained discussion of a surveillance target. That meant the plaintiffs did not necessarily have to be in contact with an intelligence target for their communications to be intercepted without a warrant.

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If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care - least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act - one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance - was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" - in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true - but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it.

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The report states that the NSA also "disguises itself as a fake Facebook server" to perform "man-in-the-middle" and "man-on-the-side" attacks and spread malware [below].


As we wrote at the time, the "NSA's Facebook targeting is reportedly a response to the declining success of other malware injection techniques. Previous techniques included the use of "spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link."

Following the report, released in March, Zuckerberg said, "When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government."

Zuckerberg claimed he disapproved of the NSA's actions and said that he's spoken to president Barack Obama by phone to "express [his] frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future."

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