Home » Posts tagged 'upstream'
Tag Archives: upstream
Trump Administration Lobbying Hard for Sweeping Surveillance Law
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is pushing hard for the reauthorization of a key 2008 surveillance law — section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — three months before it sunsets in December.
To persuade senators to reauthorize the law in full, the Trump administration is holding classified, members-only briefings for the entire House and Senate next Wednesday, with heavy hitters in attendance: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director Christopher Wray will give the briefings, according to an internal announcement of the meetings provided to The Intercept and confirmed by multiple sources on Capitol Hill.
Section 702 serves as the legal basis for two of the NSA’s largest mass surveillance programs, both revealed by Edward Snowden. One program, PRISM, allows the government to collect messaging data sent to and from foreign targets, from major internet companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. The other, UPSTREAM, scans internet backbone sites in the U.S. and copies communications to and from foreign targets.
Both programs ostensibly only “target” foreigners, but likely collect massive amounts of Americans’ communications as well. And despite persistent questioning from members of Congress, the Obama and Trump administrations have repeatedly refused to provide an estimate of how many domestic communications the programs collect. Civil liberties advocates have long warned liberal defenders of the program under President Obama that one day the surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of a president with little regard for rule of law or constitutional protections.
Privacy activists have also raised concerns about how the data is shared with law enforcement, and routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security. The FBI frequently conducts “backdoor searches” on the data during ordinary criminal investigations, which allows them access to Americans’ communications without having to get a warrant.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off — in Secret
But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an angry letter to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.
The debate over whether to reauthorize it is expected to be the most substantive public examination of the NSA’s surveillance regime since Congress’s decision to end NSA’s collection of bulk metadata of U.S. phone calls.
Kicking off that debate with a closed hearing sets the wrong tone, groups including openthegovernment.org and the ACLU wrote in their letter. “It continues the excessive secrecy that has contributed to the surveillance abuses we have seen in recent years and to their adverse effects upon both our civil liberties and economic growth.”
The authors of the letter reminded the committee that discussions over the original passage of the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 “happened largely in open session,” and that matters of national security are often discussed in open hearings, with classified briefings reserved for specific questions.
Specifically, they wrote, “In the case of Section 702 implementation oversight, a completely closed hearing is unnecessary to provide members with an adequate understanding of how the law is currently implemented by the executive branch and whether that exceeds Congress’s original intent.”
The two programs that run under Section 702 vacuum up hundreds of millions of online messages and voice communications, including emails, Skype calls, and Facebook messages, that involve “targeted” suspects overseas and the people they talk to.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Big oil that’s making a killing: Don Pittis
Don’t weep for the “downstream” part of the oil business, it’s booming
In business lore there is no better advice than “buy low, sell high.”
As markets keep hitting new lows, that’s pretty hard for the average investor these days, but in parts of the oil business, it’s exactly what they’re doing.
The news has been filled with headlines about Canada’s suffering oil industry, which might leave you thinking everyone in the sector is on the verge of going broke.
- TSX and Dow tumble on growth worries
- Oil prices dip to new six year lows
- Irving Oil announces $200M refinery maintenance project
But don’t weep for all of them. In certain sectors, business has never been so good.
Upstream vs. downstream
In oil lingo, although the principle applies to other sectors as well, the industry is divided, for practical purposes, into “upstream” and “downstream” portions.
In parts of southern Saskatchewan oil pumpjacks are thick along the roadside and crude is at six-year lows. That’s the upstream part of the business and it’s hurting.
The upstream part of the business is finding and gathering the resource — in this case, crude oil. Upstream includes the geologists using computer mapping and educated guesses about where oil might be. It includes seismic work where crews look deep underground for likely oil-producing rock formations.
It also includes oil drillers, bitumen miners and the smaller companies that support them with engineers, trucks, heavy equipment for making roads and berms, drilling mud, well testing, storage tanks and pumps. The upstream sector is huge and fragmented.
With oil now at a six-year low, it is this sector that has been devastated, because the dividing line between upstream and downstream is, give or take, crude oil.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
