'I would be more than happy to speak to them,' he says on law enforcement. | POLITICO Screen grab 
 
 Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald said in an interview Sunday that he has not heard from law enforcement authorities about his reporting into the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics. 
 
 “Any time they would like to speak to me, I would be more than happy to speak to them,” Greenwald said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution and the very First Amendment of which guarantees a free press.” 
 
 Greenwald reported last week that under a government order, Verizon has turned over millions of phone records to the NSA as part of a vast data-mining program. A follow-up article from Greenwald reported that the government collected 97 billion pieces of data in March. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reporters say there's a chill in the air) 
 
 He also shed some insight into the motivations of his sources. 
 
 “They risked their careers and their lives and their liberty because what they were seeing being done in secret inside the United States government is so alarming and so pernicious that they simply want one thing,” Greenwald said. “That is, for the American people at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, and what the capabilities are, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.” 
 
 Greenwald pushed back against comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who called the disclosures of the surveillance programs “reckless.” 
 
 “The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus about any accountability who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing,” Greenwald said. “There is no national security harm from letting people know that they are collecting all phone records, that they are tapping into the Internet, that they are planning massive cyberattacks -- both foreign and even domestic.” 
 
 Read more about: Constitution, National Security Agency, James Clapper, Glenn Greenwald ||||| On Wednesday evening, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald published a top-secret court order telling Verizon to turn over metadata on millions of business customers — length of calls, phone numbers of both parties, phone-specific identification information, and probably proximate call location, but not the content of calls — to the National Security Agency for three months, from April 25 until July 19, on a daily basis. 
 
 This is a big deal, Greenwald says, because it "shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." It appears, Greenwald adds, to be a continuation of the type of data-mining operation secretly authorized by George W. Bush in October 2001, exposed in 2006, to great furor, then made legal by Congress in 2008. 
 
 We don't know much about how the NSA and other spy agencies work, since their rules are classified. But here's what we know — and think we know — about this potential bombshell of a leak: 
 
 The NSA can do this — legally? 
 
 The short answer is: Yes, probably. Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act gives the federal government broad authority to demand a number of "tangible things," including phone records, from telecommunications firms, as long as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) agrees they are "relevant" to a national security investigation. 
 
 Civil liberties and privacy groups have been arguing that the federal government is misinterpreting the law. "This confirms what we had long suspected" since at least 2006, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells The Washington Post. "Section 215 is written as if they're going after individual people based on individual investigations.... There's no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation." 
 
 There are a few important caveats here, says Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy. First, the law "says that the 'things' that are collected must be relevant to a national security investigation or threat assessment, but it says nothing about the scope of the things obtained." It would be "surprising — and troubling" — if the Obama administration is counting whole phone-log databases as a "thing," but that's the larger problem: Figuring out what this court order means. "While this is potentially a huge story," Kerr says, "we don't yet have substantial certainty that the facts are what they have been reported to be." 
 
 The Guardian has the FISC order but was unable to get anyone to say anything about its context. I don't think we yet know if this 3-page order is what it appears to be, or if there is some other document that may reveal limitations not clear from the 3-page order. Note that the order is titled "Secondary Order," which presumably means that there is a primary one that it follows; we don't know what that order said. [Volokh Conspiracy] 
 
 The other big question mark, says Marc Ambinder at The Week, is why the FBI sought the information. 
 
 The language [in the law] doesn't rule out such bulk disclosures, but it suggests that the FBI or NSA has to provide the FISC with a good reason for doing so. The court finds that an undefined "application" from the FBI satisfies that Patriot Act provision... [but] we don't know what application the FISC order responds to. [The Week] 
 
 Let's be clear, says Joshua Foust at his blog. "The NSA, despite the broad nature of its warrant request, did nothing illegal, and the supposed illegality of the FISC procedure has not been demonstrated." 
 
 Who's affected by the data culling? 
 
 The court order is aimed at all customers of Verizon Business Network Services. That is "one of the nation's largest telecommunications and internet providers for corporations," say Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt in The New York Times. "It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cell phone services, or to other telecommunications carriers." 
 
 Previous reporting, says Greenwald in The Guardian, "has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks." Martin Longman at Booman Tribune speculates that the same is true here: "Since this is a leaked court order, I think we can safely assume that all the other phone carriers received a court order, too." 
 
 Who authorized the phone-log haul? 
 
 Roger Vinson, a senior federal judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Before this order was made public, Vinson was perhaps most famous for ruling that the ObamaCare individual mandate to buy insurance is unconstitutional — a decision not upheld by the Supreme Court. 
 
 Funny how things work out: The Tea Party hero who struck down Obamacare also authorized the NSA Verizon warrant. twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/st… — southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 6, 2013 
 
 Under the Patriot Act, such NSA requests can be approved by either a FISA court judge or "a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court." 
 
 Was this a one-off thing? 
 
 We don't know. But an unidentified "expert in this aspect of the law" tells The Washington Post that this order appears to be, as the Post puts it, "a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006." 
 
 The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency. The expert referred to such orders as "rubber stamps" sought by the telephone companies to protect themselves after the disclosure in 2005 that widespread warrantless wiretaps could leave them liable for damages. [Washington Post] 
 
 "My own understanding," says Ambinder at The Week, "is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records." 
 
 It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. 
 
 In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. [The Week] 
 
 Why is everyone making such a big deal of this? 
 
 The idea that the government is spying on its own citizens is kind of creepy. It's important to note that this isn't wiretapping, and "this sort of fishing expedition can sometimes be useful to counter-terrorism," says Juan Cole at Informed Comment, "but fishing expeditions into private papers and records are a violation of the U.S. constitution," and a recipe for all sorts of potential political abuses. 
 
 The government should only be allowed to see private information if there is reasonable cause to think something illegal is going on. Going looking into private records to see if patterns emerge that suggest illegality is the action of a totalitarian government, not a democratic one. The USA Patriot Act was a Sovietization of American law and practice and 2001 was year one of the fall of the Republic, when the Fourth Amendment and aspects of the First Amendment were abrogated. [Informed Comment] 
 
 In fairness, "the government can't keep this information forever, nor can they share information on a willy-nilly basis," says Booman Tribune's Longman. "And it's too much information for them to look at without running it through sophisticated computers." 
 
 Those computers aren't looking to see if you're cheating your business partner or fooling around on your husband. But this is concerning nonetheless, because they're using a provision of a law that is supposed to allow the government to snoop on business records in certain defined circumstances to sweep up every electronic communication in the country. [Booman Tribune] 
 
 Who's to blame? 
 
 The Obama administration, for one. On Thursday, a senior administration official confirmed that the government is vacuuming up massive amounts of phone logs, arguing that such data collection is "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States." 
 
 If you're upset about the government possibly knowing who you call and when, you could also blame the FISC judges who sign off on the data sweeps. But if you really want to nail someone, look to your senator or congressman, says Joshua Foust. "All of the opprobrium you should feel at the government's ridiculously broad surveillance powers needs to be directed at CONGRESS, which keeps approving them while voting they stay secret." 
 
 Congress voted to legalize expansive surveillance powers in 2001 (The USA Patriot Act), 2008 (retroactive immunity for warrantless NSA wiretaps in the FISA Amendments Act), and in 2012 (renewing the FISA Amendments Act). Congress declined to force administration transparency/honesty on secret interpretations of the law in 2001 (USA Patriot Act), 2008 (NSA immunity), 2011 (the [Sen. Ron] Wyden amendment to the NDAA, which would have required interpretations not be secret) & 2012 (the similar [Sen. Jeff] Merkley amendment to the NDAA). Those last two actually got voted down, which means Congress voted to enable secret government legal interpretation. [Joshua Foust] 
 
 What's the fix? 
 
 Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) — both on the Senate intelligence committee — have been publicly urging the Obama administration to lay out its interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act for at least a year. "As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows," they wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. "This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says." 
 
 Other people, like Juan Cole, want the Patriot Act — or as he calls it, "the most un-American and anti-patriotic piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act" — repealed, or at least greatly scaled back. This data reaping is "astonishing and appalling on many levels," says Andrew Kirell at Mediaite, but it is not surprising in post-9/11 America. 
 
 This latest example of Obama overreach is sure to rankle the feathers of conservatives.... While many of these same conservatives were rah-rah'ing the expansion of the NSA and United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the Bush years, it is a pleasant change to see them finally care about FISA. Welcome aboard. Now it's up to the liberals who rightly lauded Obama's anti-FISA stance in 2008 to swallow their pride as well and take a stand against this administration's overreach, despite what they might see as partisan opportunism coming from the right. 
 
 As the last 13 years have proven, regardless of who is in the White House the security state will continue to expand. And it will take some hypocrisy on both sides to finally end it. [Mediaite] 
 
 This data-mining could be "Orwellian," or it could be narrower than we think, says Ambinder. "Unfortunately, we don't know precisely what the NSA can do because its rules are highly classified." At the very least, "this disclosure will hopefully force the government to clarify the rules it uses to actually analyze the data it collects." ||||| House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Sunday that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the story of the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods, ‘doesn't have a clue’ on how the program works. 
 
 Rogers, a Michigan Republican, warned of security risks that could come with the disclosures of the programs and argued that Greenwald’s source should be prosecuted if identified. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) agreed Greenwald’s source should face prosecution. 
 
 “He doesn't have a clue how this thing works,” Rogers said on ABC’s “This Week” of Greenwald. “Neither did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reporters say there's a chill in the air) 
 
 Rogers said the disclosures were harmful because Greenwald’s source did not have all of the information to depict an accurate portrayal of the NSA’s data-mining program. If the sources were legitimately concerned, Rogers said they should have come to authorities on Capitol Hill instead of the media. 
 
 “Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us,” Rogers said. “It's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took.” 
 
 Read more about: Dianne Feinstein, Surveillance, National Security Agency, Glenn Greenwald, Mike Rogers ||||| (AN UPDATE TO THIS PIECE, POSTED JUNE 15, 2013: http://naomiwolf.org/?p=1840) 
 
 I hate to do this but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be. This is in no way to detract from the great courage of Glenn Greenwald in reporting the story, and the gutsiness of the Guardian in showcasing this kind of reporting, which is a service to America that US media is not performing at all. It is just to raise some cautions as the story unfolds, and to raise some questions about how it is unfolding, based on my experience with high-level political messaging. 
 
 Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them. 
 
 a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps — which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101″ — are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates. 
 
 b) In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points — again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points. 
 
 c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it. 
 
 d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’ 
 
 e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded… 
 
 f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from… 
 
 g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it. 
 
 h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press — when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary. 
 
 Seeing these diligent attentive free-speech attorneys for another whisleblower reinforced my growing anxiety: WHERE IS SNOWDEN’S LAWYER as the world’s media meet with him? A whistleblower talking to media has his/her counsel advising him/her at all times, if not actually being present at the interview, because anything he/she says can affect the legal danger the whistleblower may be in . It is very, very odd to me that a lawyer has not appeared, to my knowledge, to stand at Snowden’s side and keep him from further jeopardy in interviews. 
 
 Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive — even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times — rather than the machine itself — that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests — why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times — unless we know about it? 
 
 Naomi ||||| President Barack Obama is looking forward to national debate over surveillance policies triggered by the disclosure Wednesday of a highly classified National Security Agency program to obtain records of telephone calls made by million of Americans, the White House said Thursday. 
 
 White House Spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with Obama on Air Force One that the discussion about balancing national security and individual privacy is a valuable one. 
 
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 reset Why Obama’s picking a fight Holder tiptoes around NSA 
 
 “The president welcomes the discussion of the trade-off between security and civil liberties,” Earnest said. “The close examination of some of these complicated issues could cause people to arrive at differing opinions…. The president welcomes that debate. He has his own ideas, he’s presented them.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Obama names Susan Rice head of NSA) 
 
 Earnest declined to comment on classified matters, but noted that the order to telecom giant Verizon that was obtained Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper does not authorize listening to anyone’s calls. The White House spokesman also said the program has been effective at countering terrorist threats. 
 
 House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) was more specific, saying the call tracking had “thwarted” a specific terrorist incident in the United States. 
 
 “Within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States,” Rogers told reporters Thursday. “We know that. It’s important. It fills in a little seam that we have, and it’s used to make sure that there’s not an international nexus to any terrorism event that they may believe is ongoing in the United States.” 
 
 (PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report) 
 
 Attorney General Eric Holder emphasized that the administration had kept federal lawmakers fully informed about the program. 
 
 “Members of Congress have been fully briefed as these issues, these matters have been underway,” Holder said at a Senate hearing. He said he was “not really comfortable in saying an awful lot more than that” in an unclassified setting. 
 
 Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she had doubts about claims lawmakers had been kept in the loop. “This ‘fully briefed’ (claim) is something that drives us up the wall…. ‘Fully briefed’ doesn’t mean we know what’s going on,” she said, urging a classified hearing or briefing that all senators could attend. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Report says Panetta revealed SEAL unit info) 
 
 And Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said he was concerned that data on calls by members of Congress and Supreme Court justices could have been swept up in the program, though Holder said there was “no intention to do anything of that nature.” 
 
 Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, the top two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that the widespread monitoring of Verizon phone calls made in the United States has been going on for years, and that Congress is regularly briefed on it. 
 
 Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) also defended the National Security Agency’s request to the company for all the metadata about phone calls made within and from the United States. 
 
 “As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years,” Feinstein said. “This renewal is carried out by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.” 
 
 Chambliss said the report in the Guardian Wednesday was “nothing new.” 
 
 “This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “…every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years.” 
 
 The Obama administration is defending the program, arguing that the policy is a vital tool in monitoring terrorists and has the approval of “all three branches of government,” according to a senior administration official. 
 
 “On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.”
– Glenn Greenwald is resolutely standing by his story, telling ABC today that if the NSA comes calling, “I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution, and the very First Amendment of which guarantees a free press.” Of his sources, the Guardian reporter dismissed claims of recklessness, saying they "risked their careers because what (is) being done inside the United States government is so alarming and so pernicious that they simply want ... for the American people at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.” Further, he says, as per Politico, “The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power." Elsewhere in NSA news on your Sunday dial: Rand Paul wants to sue: I'm going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level. I'm going to be asking the Internet providers and all of the phone companies; ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying, 'We don't want our phone records looked at' then maybe someone will wake up and things will change in Washington." Mike Rogers thinks Greenwald 'doesn't have a clue:' “Neither did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous. Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us. It's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took.” Dianne Feinstein wants hearings: "I'm open to doing a hearing every month if that's necessary." But there's a but: "We can't actually go in there and - other than the two that have been released—give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing." John McCain thinks it's OK: “I believe that the FISA court system is an appropriate way of reviewing these policies. To somehow think that because we are having phone calls recorded as far as their length and who they were talking to, I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong if they want to go further and have to go to this court." Speaking of McCain, the New York Times ... has this piece on the faces you keep seeing on the Sunday shows over and over and over again.