Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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Duitse hacker kraakt site NSA

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De Duitse hacker Matthias Ungethüm heeft de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA behoorlijk te kijk gezet. Hij hackte de website van de dienst, die flink onder vuur ligt vanwege het afluisteren van bevriende buitenlandse politici, zoals bondskanselier Angela Merkel.


Tegen DPA zei Ungethüm dat hij niet had verwacht gaten in de beveiliging van de site te kunnen vinden. 'Ik was er een nacht mee bezig', zegt de 24-jarige Duitser. Eenmaal binnen veranderde hij de slogan op de site. Van 'Codebreakers and Codemakers' maakte hij 'Durchleuchten Sie Ihre Homepage'. Dat betekent zoiets als lichten jullie eens je website door.

Nadat de Duitse zender MDR over de hack had bericht, heeft de NSA het gat gedicht, maar daarmee is de kous nog niet af. Ungethüm ontdekte ook dat het een koud kunstje was om bij een databank van de geheime dienst te komen. 'Ik kon informatie krijgen die helemaal niet voor de buitenwereld is bestemd', zegt hij. Ungethüm zegt dat hij niets uit de databanken heeft gehaald. 'Maar zulke sites zijn natuurlijk heel aantrekkelijk voor kwaadwillenden.'

De Duitser heeft de NSA via een mailtje van zijn bevindingen op de hoogte gesteld. Hij heeft er nog geen antwoord op gekregen. Bang dat de NSA hem op de korrel meent, is hij niet. 'Daar maak ik me echt geen zorgen over.'

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Edward Snowden: NSA Spies Most on Americans

"We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans Wednesday that the U.S. government's surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.

"Do you think it's right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?" Snowden said. "Because that''s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

"U.S. government policy directed by the NSA ... is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications," Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.

The former NSA contractor was awarded the Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling along with Laura Poitras, one of his chief confidants. The 30-year-old fugitive remains in Russia, where he fled and earned temporary asylum following his disclosures of classified information about the NSA's bulk data-collection practices.

Poitras also beamed into the ceremony from Berlin. The documentary filmmaker is believed to be one of only two people—along with journalist Glenn Greenwald—to possess the entire cache of Snowden files.

The two collectively lambasted both the Senate and House Intelligence committees for what they said was a failure of sufficient oversight of the intelligence community. Snowden also said he believed the Judiciary committees were more likely to enact substantive surveillance reform, and noted his support of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would end much of the government's bulk collection of phone "metadata."

Snowden, who has also been nominated this year for the Nobel Peace Prize, was a natural choice for the Ridenhour award, which has honored in recent years journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas and Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who also exposed secrets kept by the spy agency. The left-leaning group is named named after Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who helped expose the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai in 1968.

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Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden

People's privacy is violated without any suspicion of wrongdoing, former National Security Agency contractor claims

The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance.

“It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” he said. “It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”

Snowden made his comments in a short video that was played before a debate on the proposition that surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance, in Toronto, Canada. The former US National Security Agency contractor is living in Russia, having been granted temporary asylum there in June 2013.

The video was shown as two of the debaters – the former US National Security Administration director, General Michael Hayden, and the well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz – argued in favour of the debate statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.”

Opposing the motion were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work based on Snowden’s leaks won a Pulitzer Prize for the Guardian last month, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit.

The Snowden documents, first leaked to the Guardian last June, revealed that the US government has programs in place to spy on hundreds of millions of people’s emails, social networking posts, online chat histories, browsing histories, telephone records, telephone calls and texts – “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, in the words of one leaked document.

Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA’s own slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: “Collect it all.”

“What is state surveillance?” Greenwald asked. “If it were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there would be no debate.

“The actual system of state surveillance has almost nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by the NSA's actual words, that phrase they use over and over again: 'Collect it all.’ ”

Dershowitz and Hayden spent the rest of the 90 minutes of the debate denying that the pervasive surveillance systems described by Snowden and Greenwald even exist and that surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorism.

“Collect it all doesn't mean collect it all!” Hayden said, drawing laughter.

Greenwald sparred with Dershowitz and Hayden about whether or not the present method of metadata collection would have prevented the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2011.

While Hayden argued that intelligence analysts would have noticed the number of telephone calls from San Diego to the Middle East and caught the terrorists who were living illegally in the US, Greenwald argued that one of the primary reasons the US authorities failed to prevent the attacks was because they were taking in too much information to accurately sort through it all.

Before the debates began, 33% of the audience voted in favour of the debate statement and 46% voted against. It closed with 59% of the audience siding with Greenwald and Ohanian.

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Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”

“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.

Alexander, Schmidt and other industry executives met earlier in the month, according to the email. But Alexander wanted another meeting with Schmidt and “a small group of CEOs” later that summer because the government needed Silicon Valley’s help.

“About six months ago, we began focusing on the security of mobility devices,” Alexander wrote. “A group (primarily Google, Apple and Microsoft) recently came to agreement on a set of core security principles. When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEOs of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead … Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.”

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said she believes information sharing between industry and the government is “absolutely essential” but “at the same time, there is some risk to user privacy and to user security from the way the vulnerability disclosure is done.”

The challenge facing government and industry was to enhance security without compromising privacy, Granick said. The emails between Alexander and Google executives, she said, show “how informal information sharing has been happening within this vacuum where there hasn’t been a known, transparent, concrete, established methodology for getting security information into the right hands.”

The classified briefing cited by Alexander was part of a secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), and his email provides some rare information about what the ESF entails, the identities of some participant tech firms and the threats they discussed.

Alexander explained that the deputy secretaries of the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and “18 US CEOs” launched the ESF in 2009 to “coordinate government/industry actions on important (generally classified) security issues that couldn’t be solved by individual actors alone.”

“For example, over the last 18 months, we (primarily Intel, AMD [Advanced Micro Devices], HP [Hewlett-Packard], Dell and Microsoft on the industry side) completed an effort to secure the BIOS of enterprise platforms to address a threat in that area.”

“BIOS” is an acronym for “basic input/output system,” the system software that initializes the hardware in a personal computer before the operating system starts up. NSA cyberdefense chief Debora Plunkett in December disclosed that the agency had thwarted a “BIOS plot” by a “nation-state,” identified as China, to brick U.S. computers. That plot, she said, could have destroyed the U.S. economy. “60 Minutes,” which broke the story, reported that the NSA worked with unnamed “computer manufacturers” to address the BIOS software vulnerability.

But some cybersecurity experts questioned the scenario outlined by Plunkett.

“There is probably some real event behind this, but it’s hard to tell, because we don’t have any details,” wrote Robert Graham, CEO of the penetration-testing firm Errata Security in Atlanta, on his blog in December. “It”s completely false in the message it is trying to convey. What comes out is gibberish, as any technical person can confirm.”

And by enlisting the NSA to shore up their defenses, those companies may have made themselves more vulnerable to the agency’s efforts to breach them for surveillance purposes.

“I think the public should be concerned about whether the NSA was really making its best efforts, as the emails claim, to help secure enterprise BIOS and mobile devices and not holding the best vulnerabilities close to their chest,” said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team.

He doesn’t doubt that the NSA was trying to secure enterprise BIOS, but he suggested that the agency, for its own purposes, was “looking for weaknesses in the exact same products they’re trying to secure.”

The NSA “has no business helping Google secure its facilities from the Chinese and at the same time hacking in through the back doors and tapping the fiber connections between Google base centers,” Cardozo said. “The fact that it’s the same agency doing both of those things is in obvious contradiction and ridiculous.” He recommended dividing offensive and defensive functions between two agencies.

Two weeks after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents obtained by Snowden, reported that the NSA inserted back doors into BIOS, doing exactly what Plunkett accused a nation-state of doing during her interview.

Google’s Schmidt was unable to attend to the mobility security meeting in San Jose in August 2012.

“General Keith.. so great to see you.. !” Schmidt wrote. “I’m unlikely to be in California that week so I’m sorry I can’t attend (will be on the east coast). Would love to see you another time. Thank you !” Since the Snowden disclosures, Schmidt has been critical of the NSA and said its surveillance programs may be illegal.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did attend that briefing. Foreign Policy reported a month later that Dempsey and other government officials — no mention of Alexander — were in Silicon Valley “picking the brains of leaders throughout the valley and discussing the need to quickly share information on cyber threats.” Foreign Policy noted that the Silicon Valley executives in attendance belonged to the ESF. The story did not say mobility threats and security was the top agenda item along with a classified threat briefing.

A week after the gathering, Dempsey said during a Pentagon press briefing, “I was in Silicon Valley recently, for about a week, to discuss vulnerabilities and opportunities in cyber with industry leaders … They agreed — we all agreed on the need to share threat information at network speed.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin attended previous meetings of the ESF group but because of a scheduling conflict, according to Alexander’s email, he also could not attend the Aug. 8 briefing in San Jose, and it’s unknown if someone else from Google was sent.

A few months earlier, Alexander had emailed Brin to thank him for Google’s participation in the ESF.

“I see ESF’s work as critical to the nation’s progress against the threat in cyberspace and really appreciate Vint Cerf [Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist], Eric Grosse [vice president of security engineering] and Adrian Ludwig’s [lead engineer for Android security] contributions to these efforts during the past year,” Alexander wrote in a Jan. 13, 2012, email.

“You recently received an invitation to the ESF Executive Steering Group meeting, which will be held on January 19, 2012. The meeting is an opportunity to recognize our 2012 accomplishments and set direction for the year to come. We will be discussing ESF’s goals and specific targets for 2012. We will also discuss some of the threats we see and what we are doing to mitigate those threats … Your insights, as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base, are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”

A Google representative declined to answer specific questions about Brin’s and Schmidt’s relationship with Alexander or about Google’s work with the government.

“We work really hard to protect our users from cyberattacks, and we always talk to experts — including in the U.S. government — so we stay ahead of the game,” the representative said in a statement to Al Jazeera. “It’s why Sergey attended this NSA conference.”

Brin responded to Alexander the following day even though the head of the NSA didn’t use the appropriate email address when contacting the co-chairman.

“Hi Keith, looking forward to seeing you next week. FYI, my best email address to use is [redacted],” Brin wrote. “The one your email went to — sergey.brin@google.com — I don’t really check.”

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MPs: Snowden files are 'embarrassing indictment' of British spying oversight

All-party committee demands reforms to make security and intelligence services accountable in wake of disclosures

Edward Snowden's disclosures of the scale of mass surveillance are "an embarrassing indictment" of the weak nature of the oversight and legal accountability of Britain's security and intelligence agencies, MPs have concluded.

A highly critical report by the Commons home affairs select committee published on Friday calls for a radical reform of the current system of oversight of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, arguing that the current system is so ineffective it is undermining the credibility of the intelligence agencies and parliament itself.

The MPs say the current system was designed in a pre-internet age when a person's word was accepted without question. "It is designed to scrutinise the work of George Smiley, not the 21st-century reality of the security and intelligence services," said committee chairman, Keith Vaz. "The agencies are at the cutting edge of sophistication and are owed an equally refined system of democratic scrutiny. It is an embarrassing indictment of our system that some in the media felt compelled to publish leaked information to ensure that matters were heard in parliament."

The cross-party report is the first British parliamentary acknowledgement that Snowden's disclosures of the mass harvesting of personal phone and internet data need to lead to serious improvements in the oversight and accountability of the security services.

The MPs call for radical reform of the system of oversight including the election of the membership of the intelligence and security committee, including its chairman, and an end to their exclusive oversight role. Its chairman should also be a member of the largest opposition party, the MPs say, in direct criticism of its current head, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is a former Conservative foreign secretary.

Rifkind, however, said he had read the report, and had concluded: "The recommendations regarding the ISC are old hat. For several years, Mr Vaz has been trying to expand the powers of his committee so that they can take evidence from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. This is what this bit of his report is all about."

Rifkind attempted to head off some of the MPs' conclusions by announcing that the ISC would conduct its own inquiry into personal privacy and state surveillance. He also attacked Snowden and his supporters for their "insidious use of language such as mass surveillance and Orwellian" – which, he argued, "blurs, unforgivably, the distinction between a system that uses the state to protect the people, and one that uses the state to protect itself against the people".

However, a complete overhaul of the "part-time" and under-resourced system of oversight commissioners is recommended by the MPs, as is an end to some of the secrecy surrounding the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the only body that is able to investigate individual complaints against the security agencies.

A parliamentary inquiry into the principal legal framework that legitimises state communications surveillance, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, should be launched, they say, to bring it up to date with modern technology and improve its oversight safeguards.

The committee also voices strong concerns that a data protection ruling by the European court of justice last month has left the legality of the bulk collection of communications data by the phone and internet companies in serious doubt. "It is essential that the legal position be resolved clearly and promptly," say the MPs, who reveal that the home secretary, Theresa May, has ordered urgent work into the ruling's full implications for the police and security services.

The MPs say they decided to look at the oversight of the intelligence agencies following the theft of a number of National Security Agency documents by Snowden in order to publicise the mass surveillance programmes run by a number of national intelligence agencies.

Their report says Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, responded to criticism of newspapers that decided to publish Snowden's disclosures, including the head of MI6's claim that it was "a gift to terrorists", by saying that the alternative would be that the next Snowden would just "dump the stuff on the internet".

The MPs say: "One of the reasons that Edward Snowden has cited for releasing the documents is that he believes the oversight of security and intelligence agencies is not effective. It is important to note that when we asked British civil servants – the national security adviser and the head of MI5 – to give evidence to us they refused. In contrast, Mr Rusbridger came before us and provided open and transparent evidence."

The report makes clear the intelligence chiefs should drop their boycott of wider parliamentary scrutiny. "Engagement with elected representatives is not, in itself, a danger to national security and to continue to insist so is hyperbole," it says.

But a move by Labour and Lib Dem MPs to congratulate the Guardian and other media outlets for "responsibly reporting" the disclosures – saying they had opened a "wide and international public debate" – was voted down by four Tory MPs.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the report showed there was a cross-party consensus behind Labour's proposals, including reform of the commissioners system and an opposition chair of the ISC. "The government should now set out plans for oversight reforms," she said.

Nick Clegg has also outlined proposals for reforming the oversight system.

Cooper added that the select committee had added their voice to the growing number of MPs, who were calling for reform. She said that the police and security services needed to keep up with the challenges of the digital age but stronger safeguards and limits to protect personal privacy and sustain confidence in their vital were also needed: "The oversight and legal frameworks are now out of date," said the shadow home secretary.Emma Carr, of Big Brother Watch, the privacy campaign group, said: "When a senior committee of parliament says that the current oversight of our intelligence agencies is not fit for purpose, ineffective and undermines the credibility of parliament, the government cannot and must not continue to bury its head in the sand."

Last night, a statement by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) Board – consisting of assistant commissioner Cressida Dick, chief constable Sara Thornton, chief constable Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable Chris Sims, chief constable Mark Gilmore and chief constable Matt Baggott – said they were "concerned" the committee had recommended that responsibility for counter-terrorism policing should be moved to the National Crime Agency.

The statement described it as "a decision that does not appear to supported by the evidence and is based on an apparent misunderstanding of the role played by the Metropolitan Police Service."Counter-terrorism policing is not directed through a single lead force but rather has responsibility vested in nine chief constables across the UK in areas where the threat is considered to be the greatest. These chief constables act collaboratively and effectively on behalf of all forces, while at the same time maintaining close and critical links into local policing."

The statement added: "The Home Secretary has previously confirmed that she will conduct a review of counter-terrorism structures. We welcome any such review and look forward to participating fully and constructively in it. "

The Home Office said: "Our security agencies and law enforcement agencies operate within a strict legal and policy framework and under the tightest of controls and oversight mechanisms. This represents one of the strongest systems of checks and balances and democratic accountability for secret intelligence anywhere in the world."

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NSA Still Has No Idea How Many Documents Snowden Took... But Insists We Can Trust Them Because They Audit Everything

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In the ongoing saga over the NSA's snooping on just about everyone, the one message the NSA and its defenders keep going back to is this idea that we need to "trust" them. And they insist that the trust is fine because everything they do is carefully monitored and audited. In John Oliver's recent interview with former NSA boss, General Keith Alexander, Alexander insisted that this kind of tracking and auditing was fool-proof, claiming that it had caught the twelve people who had abused their authority to spy on specific individuals. Except that Alexander was flat out lying there. First of all, internal investigations have shown thousands of abuses, not just twelve. As for the twelve that Alexander is talking about, when we looked through the details, it became clear that only three of the twelve were caught because of audits. And many were only caught because the guilty party later confessed -- sometimes many years later.

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Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – "Orwellian" is the word that people generally reach for.

But "Kafkaesque" seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality", but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. "What's Kafkaesque," he once told the New York Times, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world."

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.

Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.

First – and most obviously – she determined that there would be absolutely no mention of her new state on social media. She phoned or wrote individually to friends and family members to give them the good news, and asked them not to mention it on Facebook. But an uncle in Australia sent her a congratulatory message via Facebook. "I then did," she said, "what any rational person would do. I deleted the thread of all our conversations and unfriended him." He replied plaintively: "But I didn't put it on your wall", apparently unaware that chats and other messages aren't private in the sense that he assumed.

In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.

The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.

At this point, some sobering thoughts begin to surface. The first is Melvin Kranzberg's observation that "technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral". Our technologies have values built into them, which is why Vertesi in her talk cites someone's observation that "the iPod is a tool to make us moral" (because it encourages people to buy music rather than download it illicitly) and philosophers argue about whether surveillance encourages moral – ie socially approved – behaviour (think speed cameras).

Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.

But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.

This is why the industry response to protests about tracking is so inadequate. The market will fix the problem, the companies say, because if people don't like being tracked then they can opt not to be. But the Vertesi experiment shows that if you take measures to avoid being tracked, then you increase the probability that you will be. Which is truly Kafkaesque.

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Why Are You So Fearful, O Ye of Little Faith?

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Greenwald’s pugilistic skills are on full display in his new book, No Place to Hide. My copy came with CONFIDENTIAL stamped on every page and a nondisclosure agreement that expires today. The prepublication insistence on secrecy seemed a little self-conscious given the topic. And in the end, it wasn’t newsy revelations that kept me reading.

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Many writers would stop there, short of naming names. After all, if you want to be welcome in the home of the establishment (and most journalists wouldn’t mind being invited for the weekend at least), it’s better to attack a faceless Washington columnist than a cadre of real ones. But Greenwald skewers the media outlets and individual journalists who he believes proved his point about how “subservient to the government’s interests” the press can be. He thinks the New York Times has become a “mouthpiece for those in power.” And he singles out Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, and Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker for wrong-footedly denouncing Snowden, Greenwald, or both as narcissists, plotters, or traitors. Some (genius) members of the press justified the idea of prosecuting Greenwald along with Snowden by insisting that he wasn’t a journalist at all. Beginning with the Times, in a profile that appeared soon after the first Snowden-driven stories, reporters and columnists labeled Greenwald a “blogger,” a “polemicist,” or an “activist” to more easily dismiss him. Never mind that Greenwald was publishing article after investigative article in the Guardian based on the biggest scoop in half a century. (He’s now working on a Pierre Omidyar-funded investigative journalism startup, and he promises in GQ this month that the biggest Snowden shoe is yet to drop.)

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No Such Agency

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Amidst the year's surreal procession of revelations about government spying, it can be easy to lose sight of the significance of these leaks. But the NSA is an entity so obsessed with secrecy that in Washington, its initials at one time were said to stand for “No Such Agency,” and so formidable that prior to 2013, prominent elected critics spoke publicly of its excess only in cryptic warnings. The amount of transparency and criticism in the wake of the Snowden Files was previously unthinkable; it poses an existential threat to the status quo.

So when government officials label Snowden or Greenwald a terrorist or criminal, it's not idle bullshit—it's representatives of one of the planet’s most powerful forces identifying an enemy. After Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was released after almost nine hours of detention in Heathrow Airport under a terrorism statute, he said, “There's really nothing scarier than being told by these two governments that you're a terrorist. … You realize they can do anything to you. … They kidnap people, imprison them without charges or a lawyer, disappear them, put them in Guantanamo, they kill them.” Greenwald surmises offhandedly at one point that the security state is more powerful than the president, and there is no real reason to believe he's wrong.

No Place to Hide is a deeply satisfying punctuation mark on what has surely been a singularly uncomfortable year for the defense establishment. It is a damning picture of a government that operates outside of accountability, and of the war waged in the press against the people associated with the Snowden Files, against journalism, and against dissent. But ultimately, No Place to Hide will be shocking in proportion to the depth of your illusions as to the goodness of the mainstream media and the powerful interests it defends. It leaves little room for argument: What's normal in Washington is very dangerous indeed.

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New Snowden Document Implies NSA May Be Putting Israel’s Security Ahead of America’s

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That is a stunning statement. It implies that the signals intelligence exchange between the American and Israeli governments has been driven almost entirely by the NSA giving information to the Israelis, instead of Israel giving information to the U.S. … even though we were the ones attacked on 9/11.

Remember, the raw data in American citizens collected by the NSA is shared with Israel. As the Guardian reported in September:

. The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

***

. According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

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. A much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government“. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

This not only raises major privacy concerns for American citizens, but it might mean that Israel is spying on the American Congress and other high-level politicians.

We have nothing against Israel, but – as American citizens – we want our intelligence agencies to put the American people and American security first.

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Swedish Foreign Ministry prevents Snowden’s invitation

The next European meeting of internet activists will be held in Sweden at the end of May. The “Stockholm Internet Forum” focusses on global development as well as surveillance. However, the world’s most important digital rights activist is not welcome: Edward Snowden

Sarah Harrison showed her anger at the USA. She explained how the US secret service surveyed the world, how it collected and analyzed data. The journalist that accompanied Snowden during his journey from Hong Kong to Moscow was a speaker at Berlin’s internet conference re:publica in the beginning of May. The hall was crowded, it was Europe’s largest gathering on these topics. But Harrison did not want to dismiss her audience without a warning: “You have two months to sort your government out, folks!” Snowden’s asylum in Russia ends in August. Up to that point a new shelter for the world’s most important whistleblower has to be found.

The Federal government has repeatedly resisted accepting Snowden. The opposition in the NSA parliamentary committee demand just that: The ex NSA employee should testify in Germany, and give him an opportunity here. The governing coalition prefers leaving Snowden in Moscow – and instead questioning him via video.

Harrison, aware of this political controversy, demanded EU neighboring states to jump in: “Other countries have to support and put pressure on Germany.”

But they seem to show little interest in the fate of Edward Snowden. For example Sweden: According to information by Cicero Online, the Swedish Foreign Ministry has disinvited Snowden and some of his closest confidants to an internet conference in its own country.

When third “Stockholm Internet Forum” opens on May 26, the activists will not descend on an old postal industrial area as they did for Berlin’s re:publica in 2014. Sweden’s largest digital convention will take place in the town hall, under the red brick tower with three golden crowns. It’s there in the ballroom where the Nobel prizes are awarded each year.

The event will not be hosted by a group of bloggers, but rather by the Swedish government. The minister of development will hold the opening address, adding meaning to the conference’s motto “Internet Freedom for Global Development”.

Sweden, which is regularly awarded top rankings for freedom, human rights and social welfare, wants to prove its democratic virtue again during this event. In an online podcast, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has already sketched out the scope of topics: The Forum will not only discuss the opportunities in the digital world, but also the question as to how state control and censorship can be countered. The first point on the agenda the following morning is “the debate regarding surveillance and the right to privacy in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden”.

There’s a flipside: Neither the former NSA employee Edward Snowden nor any of his confidantes will be at the conference in Stockholm. The Swedish government has taken care of that.

In addition to the ministries of foreign affairs and development, a third partner has helped organize and finance the forum: the internet organization .SE. They administer Sweden’s top level domains and were responsible for selecting suitable experts worldwide for the Stockholm Internet Forum. The SIF only accepts hand-picked speakers and guests. This year about 500 participants are expected.

So how did this come about?

.SE – the only non-governmental organization among the hosts – made a list of possible candidates. The most important name on it: Edward Snowden. Further names included journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists that informed the world about the NSA’s activities, Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger as well as hacker Jacob Appelbaum, who found the mobile phone number of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Snowden’s database. The list of candidates was sent to the Swedish Foreign Ministry for approval.

According to information from Cicero Online, that’s where Snowden’s name was marked in red. In official use, this apparently means: “do not invite”. The ministry had no comment on this when asked. Instead, it stated that the focus of the conference was to “represent a wide array of backgrounds, cultures and opinions”. The main ambition was to invite equal numbers of women and men and that at least half of the participants came from developing countries. “We would also like to point out that those who haven’t been invited are able to follow the entire conference online and give opinions and raise questions during the discussions”, the ministry added.

Indeed, Edward Snowden would not have been able to escape his Russian asylum in order to go to Stockholm. However, his invitation would have been a symbol. With a little imagination the hosts could have included him anyway. The German NSA parliamentary committee is currently discussing a video interrogation. Snowden has already answered questions posed by the European Council via a live broadcast; that was also the way he chose to spoke to participants of a tech festival in Texas.

Sweden could also have allowed Snowden’s confidantes to speak for him. That’s what other hosts of large computer and internet conferences have recently done. The Net Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil, chose a live broadcast with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, hacker Jacop Appelbaum was there personally. The Chaos Communication Congress had Glenn Greenwald speaking via video. Appelbaum and Harrison spoke there too, as well as at Berlin’s re:publica.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry only authorized one name among the Snowden confidantes: Laura Poitras. The documentary filmmaker has recently refrained from loud political demands. She eventually turned down the invitation. “Of course I would boycott any conference with a blacklist”, she said to Cicero Online.

The objection against Appelbaum was supposedly recorded as follows: “Has been discussed, and has to be discussed further.”

Appelbaum himself is outraged. “It is unacceptable that I am the target of retribution for attempting to discuss the issues of mass surveillance and the chilling effect it has on society.”

The Swedish Foreign Ministry replied to Cicero’s inquiries saying it had wanted to select participants that they believed would benefit from coming to the convention and who hadn’t been there before. “Only a fraction of the participants have been invited to all three SIFs [Stockholm Internet Forums, the editor]. Mr. Appelbaum was invited to both previous SIFs.”

Apparently the Swedish government’s selection of participants also upset the non-governmental host. The organization .SE, which had helped with the first two conferences, has reduced its involvement this year. The development ministry confirmed this. A .SE spokeswoman attested that “this year we are offering our support as a sponsor but we are not involved in the SIF program”.

Stockholm’s Internet Freedom convention will send out a contradictory message to the world: On the one hand, it wants to talk about surveillance and data protection issues. On the other hand, it locks out those people who could best speak about these topics. “Is this what they mean by internet freedom?” Jacob Appelbaum wonders. “Or by freedom in general?

Perhaps Sweden does not want to spoil its chances with the powerful American ally. After all, the EU state shares its destiny with the USA. Just as the fox lurks in front of the rabbit cave, both countries await the extradition of their whistleblower: Assange here, Snowden there. This could explain why Sweden refrains from inviting Snowden.

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"Collect It All": Glenn Greenwald on NSA Bugging Tech Hardware, Economic Espionage & Spying on U.N.

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Anonymous hacks security firm in revenge for identification claims

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The head of a security company who boasted that he could identify the leaders of hacktivist collective Anonymous has found his Twitter account, emails and company website hacked by members of the group.

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HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks' Donors

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Last week the loose hacker group Anonymous released a set of more than 40,000 emails from HBGary Federal, the security firm whose servers it hacked earlier this month. One of the files in those emails was a PowerPoint presentation that described “the WikiLeaks Threat,” created by a group of three security firms that suggested Nixonesque tactics for sabotaging the site on behalf of Bank of America, including spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against the site, and pressuring journalists.

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The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

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Glenn Greenwald On Dean Baquet: A 'Disturbing History' Of Journalism 'Subservient' To National Security State

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Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Friday to discuss Edward Snowden, the latest news on NSA spying and his recent book "No Place to Hide." The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist weighed in on the turmoil at the New York Times this week and had some choice words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet, who with the LA Times in 2006, was accused of killing a story about collaboration between AT&T and the NSA.

HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski asked Greenwald what kind of leader Baquet will be for the New York Times. "I think of all the executive editors of the New York Times," Greenwald began, "at least in recent history, or I'll say in the last 10 years since I’ve paying extremely close attention to how the New York Times functions, Jill Abramson was probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media. I don’t know if she’s always been that way but in her stewardship of the paper as editor in chief I think that was definitely the case."

Greenwald did not have kind words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet. He said, "By contrast, her successor Dean Baquet does have a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American National security state, and if his past record and his past actions and statements are anything to go by, I think it signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it's supposed to exercise oversight over."

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH GLENN GREENWALD BELOW:

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Snowden’s likely involvement with CryptoParty

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It appears likely that Edward Snowden was involved with CryptoParty. Cryptome has uncovered a public key for cincinnatus@lavabit.com, which is the same alias he used to contact Glenn Greenwald — and it’s associated with the organizing of an event in Honolulu, Hawaii in December 2012, where the now-famous NSA whistleblower was then living. Here’s the original page via Wayback Machine. Although I’m awaiting official confirmation from his lawyers, the odds are very high that it was him. CryptoParty is a global movement that was spawned nearly two years ago from an idea by Asher Wolf, an Australian activist.

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There’s also the video that Snowden created which I discovered in July last year, and has since been confirmed by Greenwald; a tutorial on GPG encryption for journalists, which was credited to “Anonymous 2013″ and posted by the Vimeo user anon108. Although setting up PGP proved too difficult for Greenwald, behind the voice-changing effect is someone who sounds extremely knowledgable about the mechanisms of digital security. Combined with the EFF and Tor Project stickers pictured on his laptop, the Anonymous and CryptoParty connections show a man attuned to the struggle for our rights on the internet; one with his eye on those communities.

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Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?

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.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as "about" surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance." In other words, the NSA doesn't just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone's international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

The Snowden leaks also pushed the Justice Department to admit – contrary to what it told the court – that the government hadn't been notifying any defendants they were being charged based on NSA surveillance, making it actually impossible for anyone to prove they had standing to challenge the Fisa Amendments Act as unconstitutional.

It's unclear how much Solicitor General Donald Verrilli knew when he told the government's lies – twice – to the justices of the supreme court. Reports suggest that he was livid when he found out that his national security staff at the Justice Department misled him about whether they were notifying defendants in criminal trials of surveillance. And we don't know if he knew about the "about" surveillance that might well have given the ACLU standing in the case. But we do know other Justice Department officials knew about both things, and they have let both lies stand without correcting the record.

Lawyers before the supreme court are under an ethical obligation to correct the record if they make false statements to the Court – even if they are unintentional – yet the Justice Department has so far refused. As ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer explained, the Justice Department has corrected the record in other cases where it was much less clear-cut whether it had misled the court.

The government's response, instead, has been to explain why it doesn't think these statements are lies. In a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall that only surfaced this week, the government made the incredible argument that the "about" surveillance was classified at the time of the case, so it was under no obligation to tell the supreme court about it. And the Justice Department completely sidestepped the question of whether it lied about notifying defendants, basically by saying that it started to do so after the case, and so this was somehow no longer an issue.

But there's another reason the government wanted any challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act dismissed without being forced to argue that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment: it has an extremely controversial view about your (lack of) privacy rights, and probably doesn't want anyone to know. As Jaffer wrote here at the Guardian earlier this week, the government has since been forced to defend the Fisa Amendments Act, and it's pretty shocking how they've done it. Here's what the government said in a recent legal brief:

. The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated, when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States.

This is an incredibly radical view of the right to privacy. We already know the government does not think you have any right to privacy when it comes who you talk to, or when, or for how long, or where you are while you're talking. Now the government has said, in court, that you don't have any right to the content of private conversations with anyone who is located outside the United States – or to any domestic communication remaining private if it is, at some point, transmitted overseas, which happens often. Jaffer explained the consequences of this view:

. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

Intelligence director James Clapper's infamous lie to Congress – in which he claimed just months before Snowden's leaks that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans – will certainly follow him for the rest of his career even if it never leads to his prosecution. But while Clapper almost certainly broke the law, the senate committee members in front of whom he spoke knew the truth regardless.

The Justice Department, on the other hand, convinced the supreme court to dismiss a case that could have dramatically curtailed the NSA's most egregious abuses of power based on false statements. And now all of us are forced to live with the consequences of that.

twitter:

ggreenwald twitterde op zondag 18-05-2014 om 14:29:36 I'll be in Amsterdam on Tuesday night, 8 pm, at the John Adams Institute discussing "No Place to Hide" - tickets: http://t.co/tgO2BYZHE9 reageer retweet

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Cisco chief urges Obama to curb NSA surveillance activity

(Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc's chief executive officer has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to curtail government surveillance after evidence circulated showing the National Security Agency had intercepted Cisco equipment, a company spokesman said on Sunday.

In a letter dated May 15, John Chambers, chief executive officer and chairman of the networking equipment giant, warned of an erosion of confidence in the U.S. technology industry and called for new "standards of conduct" in how the NSA conducts its surveillance.

"We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security," Chambers said in the letter.

The letter follows the circulation of pictures on the Internet showing NSA staff opening boxes of Cisco gear, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. "There have been allegations that the NSA has intercepted IT equipment in transit from manufacturers to customers to help monitor and gain information on surveillance targets," the paper wrote.

The allegations stem from early reporting from Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has written about a number of NSA documents that were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the letter, Chambers states that "if these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to deliver products globally."

In a separate blog post on Cisco's site dated May 13, the company's general counsel, Mark Chandler, wrote that "...we ought to be able to count on the government to ... not interfere with the lawful delivery of our products in the form in which we have manufactured them."

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Op maandag 19 mei 2014 05:05 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Goed dat je blijft doorposten papierversnipperaar!

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The Connection Between The Copyright Industry And The NSA

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As I described in a previous column, the copyright monopoly cannot be enforced without mass surveillance. There is no way to tell a private conversation in a digital environment from a monopolized audio file being transferred, not without actually looking at what’s being transferred. At that point, the secrecy of correspondence has been broken and mass surveillance introduced.

The copyright industry has been continuously and relentlessly pushing for more mass surveillance, including surveillance of citizens who aren’t under any suspicion (“mass surveillance”) for this reason. They defended the now-illegal Data Retention Directive, which logs everybody’s communications and location all the time (specifically including yours), as well as similar initiatives.

Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.

This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.

This has a direct connection to free speech as such.

In Germany, the effect of this logging and violation of people’s privacy has been studied extensively. According to a study conducted by polling institute Forsa before the data retention was in place, over half of German citizens would refrain from placing communications that could be used against them in the future – drug helplines, psychologists, even marriage counseling. A significant portion of Germans had already refrained from taking such contacts for that reason.