Kevin Drum

Last week, Darrell Issa released a few carefully chosen excerpts from interviews with IRS managers in Cincinnati which tried to imply that "Washington"—by which he meant the White House—was behind the targeting of tea party groups. Today, Democrats are fighting back with their own set of carefully chosen excerpts from the interviews. For example, this one from the manager of the IRS Screening Group in Cincinnati:

He states that he has worked at the IRS for 21 years as a civil servant and supervised a team of several Screening Agents in that office. When asked by Republican Committee staff about his political affiliation, he answered that he is a "conservative Republican."

....Q: In your opinion, was the decision to screen and centralize the review of Tea Party cases the targeting of the President's political enemies?

A: I do not believe that the screening of these cases had anything to do other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development.

This manager goes on to tell committee staff that the decision to elevate the first tea party case was his; that it wasn't motivated by political concerns in any way; and that the use of specific search terms ("tea party," "patriot," etc.) came from a line worker in his group.

Needless to say, this doesn't put an end to things. Cincinnati workers, after all, have a vested interest in denying political motivation, since they could lose their jobs over that. And it's still possible that the attorneys in Washington who reviewed all this stuff had political motivations. Still, it's looking less likely all the time. As happens so often, this is almost certainly a case of incompetence, not malice. More here from the Washington Post.

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Does NSA have "direct access" to corporate servers from Google, Microsoft, and other companies? That's what the initial reports said. Then the Washington Post reported that "the arrangement is described as allowing 'collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,' rather than directly to company servers." But what does that mean? Today, the New York Times digs a little more:

Instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key....The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.

....FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

Obviously this is still a little fuzzy, but the picture that's developing is substantially different from the initial reporting. If tech companies have agreed only to build more secure ways of passing along data in response to individual FISA warrants, that explains why they've never heard of PRISM and why they deny being part of any program that allowed the government direct access to their data.

Technically speaking, this also makes a lot more sense. The process described by the Times sounds quite plausible, in contrast to the "direct access" story. Further reporting might clear this up even more, for example by explaining just how automated this system is and when human intervention is necessary.

For now, I'm just passing this along as interesting information. I suspect we'll learn more over the next few days.

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This has been a dispiriting week on a bunch of levels. I'm not sure what else to say about it. So here's a soothing sort of catblogging photo to make up for it. The weather is nice, our garden is in full bloom, and this week Domino was outside enjoying it. Maybe we should all do the same this weekend.

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What, precisely, does the PRISM program do? The Guardian described it as providing "direct access" to corporate servers owned by the likes of Google and Microsoft, and I was puzzled about exactly what that meant. From a technical perspective, I didn't understand what this entailed. Some kind of remote superuser access? Taps on incoming and outgoing communications links? Software agents installed on company servers? Or what? It's especially peculiar because most of the companies involved have now issued seemingly unequivocal denials that they allow NSA any kind of access at all without a firm legal basis.

Well, the Washington Post updated its story this morning and added this paragraph:

It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.

Does this help? It doesn't help me much, but maybe it means something to someone with the right background. Anyone care to weigh in?

Also: Britain apparently has access to the PRISM program too, which allows their spy agency "to circumvent the formal legal process required in Britain to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside of the country."

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