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Top intelligence officials from the Obama and Bush administrations, along with senior House lawmakers from both parties, succeeded Wednesday in heading off the first legislative challenge to the domestic snooping program exposed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

Arrayed against them was an equally odd cross-section of the political spectrum. Tea party libertarian Republicans and Democratic civil rights advocates — generally at odds — were united behind an amendment to a must-pass defense spending bill that would defund the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records.

The amendment was defeated in a 217-205 vote.

I sent a freedom of information request to the NSA to see what they had about me, and I received a denial letter specifying that they didn't have to disclose this information because an Executive action from Mr Obama.

The NSA appears to have carte blanche and are covered by executive privilege. At this point they seem to be beyond the law.

Beyond me being bothered that they are collecting all this information, the tax payers of the United States are paying for the hardware and software systems needed to collect and store this burgeoning dataset. It has to be an enormous amount if information, each and every day.

The Annoyed Man wrote:you guys DO realize what it is going to take to trim this leviathan's claws, don't you? Apparently, there aren't enough votes to do so, so elections won't do it. I am advocating nothing. I'm merely point out the facts.

The Annoyed Man wrote:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... in-in-nsa/
House narrowly kills move to rein in NSA; bill unites Obama, Bush officials

Top intelligence officials from the Obama and Bush administrations, along with senior House lawmakers from both parties, succeeded Wednesday in heading off the first legislative challenge to the domestic snooping program exposed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

Arrayed against them was an equally odd cross-section of the political spectrum. Tea party libertarian Republicans and Democratic civil rights advocates — generally at odds — were united behind an amendment to a must-pass defense spending bill that would defund the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records.

The amendment was defeated in a 217-205 vote.

One commenter at the bottom of the article wrote:

I sent a freedom of information request to the NSA to see what they had about me, and I received a denial letter specifying that they didn't have to disclose this information because an Executive action from Mr Obama.

The NSA appears to have carte blanche and are covered by executive privilege. At this point they seem to be beyond the law.

Beyond me being bothered that they are collecting all this information, the tax payers of the United States are paying for the hardware and software systems needed to collect and store this burgeoning dataset. It has to be an enormous amount if information, each and every day.

you guys DO realize what it is going to take to trim this leviathan's claws, don't you? Apparently, there aren't enough votes to do so, so elections won't do it. I am advocating nothing. I'm merely point out the facts.

mewalke wrote:I would argue that the vote was a HUGE improvement considering it was bi-partisan and was very close. I think before the NSA scandal broke a rogue congressman wouldn't have gotten a dozen votes for it.

And with the lawsuits challenging the NSA, I don't think it will disappear from the public eye too quickly.

Hopefully it stays in peoples' minds long enough to have a successful vote after the next election cycle.

VoiceofReason wrote: And meanwhile Edward Snowden is hanging out there with no country to go to paying the price the rest of his life.

xb12s wrote:I'll throw this on the fire:

Feds want passwords and password algorithms for user accounts from major internet companies:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595 ... passwords/

sjfcontrol wrote: If the internet company knows what it's doing, they will be unable to comply with this request, as they don't know the passwords. All that is stored is a "hash" of the password. When the user logs in, he enters the password, which is passed thru the hash algorithm, and compared with the stored hash value. If it matches, the user is logged on. So the only thing the company stores is the hash, and there is no way (well, outside of the NSA, anyway) to recreate the password from only the hash.

But modern computers, especially ones equipped with high-performance video cards, can test passwords scrambled with MD5 and other well-known hash algorithms at the rate of billions a second. One system using 25 Radeon-powered GPUs that was demonstrated at a conference last December tested 348 billion hashes per second, meaning it would crack a 14-character Windows XP password in six minutes.

The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt utility.

The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment, which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to refuse the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could bring a criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives."

In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled under the All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba Satellite laptop.

Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the password holder is the target of an investigation -- and don't address when a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an innocent third party.

"If you can figure out someone's password, you have the ability to reuse the account," which raises significant privacy concerns, said Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.