Amerika bespioneert al haar burgers, deel II

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NSA surveillance challenged in court as criticism grows over US data program | World news | guardian.co.uk

Civil liberties group accuses US government of running a program 'akin to snatching every American's address book'

The first constitutional challenge to the widespread surveillance of US citizens disclosed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden was laid down on Tuesday, as international pressure on the Obama administration over the scale of the dragnet intensified.

In a lawsuit filed in New York, the American Civil Liberties Union accused the US government of a process that was "akin to snatching every American's address book".

On Capitol Hill, a group of US senators introduced a bill aimed at forcing the US federal government to disclose the opinions of a secretive surveillance court that determines the scope of the eavesdropping on Americans' phone records and internet communications.

Separately, a leading member of the Senate intelligence committee came close to saying that James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, misled him on the scope of government surveillance during a March hearing.

In Brussels, furious members of the European parliament threatened to unpick data-sharing agreements with the United States.

As the fallout from the revelations by Edward Snowden continued, the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, said he ordered a wide-ranging review of the Defense Department's reliance on private contractors. Snowden, 29, had top-security clearance for his work at Booz Allen Hamilton, an NSA contractor. Booz Allen issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Snowden had been fired for "violations of the firm's code of ethics".

Snowden checked out of the hotel where he was staying in Hong Kong on Monday and moved to an undisclosed location. The director of Human Rights Watch, Peter Bouckaert, said Snowden should not consider himself protected in the Chinese province. "I certainly would not consider Hong Kong a safe place for him at the moment," said Bouckaert, who after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi found faxes in Tripoli indicating that the Hong Kong authorities had co-operated with the CIA in rendering an anti-Gaddafi Islamist to Libya.

A spokesman for Vladimir Putin said that if Snowden applied for asylum in Russia, the request would be considered.

Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong three weeks ago, telling his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, that he was going away for a while but was deliberately vague about the reason for his disappearance. A blogpost, apparently written by Mills, a 28-year-old performance artist, said: "My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass … at the moment all I can feel is alone."

The authenticity of the blog, which was seen by the Guardian before it was taken down on Tuesday, could not be verified. However, Snowden had previously told the Guardian his girlfriend was called Lindsay.

The constitutional implications of Snowden's revelations were addressed in the ACLU's law suit, filed in the Southern District of New York. It claimed the National Security Agency's acquisition of phone records of millions of Verizon users, obtained in April through an order by the secret Fisa court and revealed by the Guardian, violates the first and fourth amendments, which guarantee citizens' right to association, speech and to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. As a Verizon subscriber, the ACLU claimed standing to sue.

The suit also claims that the surveillance goes beyond the authorisation provided by section 215 of the Patriot Act, a claim made for years by two leading Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado.

Wyden revealed on Tuesday that he had given Clapper, the director of national intelligence, a day's advance notice of a question about the extent of government surveillance at a congressional hearing earlier this year.

When asked directly by Wyden in March whether the NSA was collecting any kind of data on "millions" of Americans, Clapper replied "no" and "not wittingly" – a claim undermined by the Guardian's disclosures about NSA collection of millions of Americans' phone records. Wyden disclosed that he had given Clapper an opportunity in private to revise his answer, after the session. Clapper said earlier this week that he had answered the question in the "least untruthful" way possible.

In statement on Tuesday, Wyden said: "One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren't getting straight answers to direct questions."

The office of Senator Jeff Merkley said he planned to introduce a bill on Tuesday that would compel the first public airing of the so-called Fisa court's understandings of section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government has cited as the basis for collecting the phone records of millions of Americans; and section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act, which the government has cited as the basis for NSA internet monitoring program known as Prism.

"I think that Americans deserve to know how our government is interpreting the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act," Jamal Raad, a spokesman for Merkley, told the Guardian on Tuesday.

The Obama administration has said all its surveillance efforts are subject to rigorous Fisa court review and members of congress are sufficiently briefed on them, even though most legislators did not receive such briefings.

US authorities faced challenges on other fronts: Google's chief legal counsel wrote to the Justice Department to request its ability to detail its co-operation with the government on surveillance orders, largely in the hope of assuring customers that it does not turn over user data wholesale to the NSA.

"Google's numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made," wrote Google's David Drummond. "Google has nothing to hide."

Similarly, a new coalition of privacy groups, internet companies and activists, called Stop Watching Us, unveiled itself Tuesday to demand "the US Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs," which amount to "a stunning abuse of our basic rights." The coalition includes Mozilla, Reddit, John Cusack and the ACLU, among others.

The NSA affair continued to have international ramifications. German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters on Monday that the chancellor, Angela Merkel, would question Obama about the NSA program when he visits Berlin on 18 June. The issue could tarnish a visit that both sides had hoped would reaffirm strong German American ties.

In a heated debate in the European parliament on Tuesday, lawmakers complained that for a decade they had yielded to US demands for access to European financial and travel data and said it was now time to re-examine the deals and to limit data access.

"We need to step back here and say clearly: mass surveillance is not what we want," said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green lawmaker in charge of overhauling the European Union's outdated data protection laws.

Bron: www.guardian.co.uk

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Op dinsdag 11 juni 2013 22:48 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Real world fallout of PRISM: German girl turned away at US airport because her Facebook messages mentioned her intent to work as an au pair, violating her visa.

http://www.reddit.com/r/w(...)_german_girl_turned/

Duitse bron:

http://www.derwesten.de/w(...)rueck-id8041896.html

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 00:11 schreef Reya het volgende:

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Nou nou, schokkend.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 00:14 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

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Best wel, aangezien iedereen constant maar roept, ah joh je hoeft niets te vrezen als je geen terrorist bent

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Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector. Former NSA director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a quote "Digital Blackwater."

Digital Blackwater: How the NSA Gives Private Contractors Control of the Surveillance State

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Op dinsdag 11 juni 2013 02:13 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

Private partijen rond de NSA zijn goocheme geldwolven (leaches on the side of the NSA ).

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 00:42 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

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Digital Blackwater: How the NSA Gives Private Contractors Control of the Surveillance State

[..]

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Op dinsdag 11 juni 2013 12:44 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:
En met al die miljarden onderschepte telefoontjes zijn het aantal verijdelde aanslagen nihil.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 06:38 schreef Cynix ® het volgende:

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Tsja, waarschijnlijk niet, maar dát weten we dus niet.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 06:46 schreef sig000 het volgende:
Ik heb al mijn vage Skype kennissen een bericht gestuurd wat haast wel onderschept moet worden.

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Door de werkwijze van de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA aan de kaak te stellen, heeft klokkenluider Edward Snowden de erecodes geschonden van allen die hem ooit hebben geholpen, meent columnist David Brooks van The New York Times.

...

Verraden
Hij heeft zijn vrienden verraden. Iedereen die met hem heeft gewerkt, is nu verdacht. Jonge mensen op soortgelijke posities zullen geen verantwoordelijke taken meer krijgen, uit angst dat ze hetzelfde zullen doen als Snowden. Hij heeft zijn werkgevers verraden. Booz Allen en later de CIA hebben een gesjeesde student een baan gegeven met een vorstelijk salaris. Hij schendt de erecodes van allen die hem in staat hebben gesteld hogerop te komen.

Hij heeft de zaak van de open overheid verraden. Telkens als er iets wordt gelekt, zullen de machthebbers de kring van vertrouwen verder inkrimpen en het debat verder inperken. Hij heeft de privacy van ons allen verraden. Als de federale veiligheidsdiensten geen grote hoeveelheden data meer kunnen scannen, zullen ze terugvallen op oudere, meer inbreuk makende afluistermethoden. Hij heeft de Constitutie verraden. De VS zijn niet gesticht om een 29-jarige in zijn eentje te laten beslissen over wat openbaar moet worden gemaakt. Snowden heeft egocentrisch kortsluiting veroorzaakt in de democratische verantwoordingsstructuren en zijn eigen opvatting boven alles gesteld.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 09:31 schreef Joanne35 het volgende:
Dit soort artikelen zagen we ook helemaal niet aankomen he?

Klokkenluider Edward Snowden is een immorele einzelgänger

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 09:39 schreef Claudia_x het volgende:


Ik vind het wonderlijk dat de Volkskrant ervoor kiest een vertaling van de column te publiceren als nieuws, nu nog.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 09:40 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Ze lopen wel vaker een dag achter.

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The epic online battle against NSA spying has begun

Earlier today, 86 Internet companies and organizations sent a letter to Washington demanding the formation of a Congressional committee to investigate the NSA’s surveillance tactics and “reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying.”

The coalition—including Mozilla, Reddit, Greenpeace, BoingBoing, and the American Civil Liberties Union—has also launched a petition at StopWatching.Us. The group is calling for reforms to both the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that “make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law.”

On a press conference call Tuesday afternoon, Rainey Reitman, the activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the past week’s revelations about NSA surveillance an opportunity to strike back against government spying and ask, “What kind of domestic spying are we willing to tolerate?”

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said there has been a pattern of increased surveillance over the past decade in which the U.S. government claims broad tactics like wiretapping are necessary to combat terrorism. But, he said repeatedly, these assertions haven’t panned out. “We need the kind of inquiry that reveals the claims of the security need were overstated.”

The group focused on the idea that the government’s broad surveillance program functions as a dragnet, not a safety net. “General Surveillance is rarely limited to one suspect,” said Amalia Deloney, the associate director of the Center for Media Justice. Often it tracks friends and family members that are two or three steps removed.

The coalition is seeking global support. “It is human rights, not just American rights, that are affected,” said Anne Jellema, the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. She pointed to the contradictory nature of a government that claims to promote democracy worldwide while conducting massive, unwarranted surveillance operations.

The group, only a day old, did not yet offer a clear picture of what actions it will take moving forward, though it did cite phone campaigns as one potential option.

The coalition sees its main purpose as awareness. They hope that a grassroots campaign will compel not only reform in Washington, but in Silicon Valley as well. Josh Levy of Free Press called the PRISM revelations a “wake up call” that highlighted civil rights issues the founders of established tech companies like Facebook and Google hadn’t foreseen a decade ago.

Commenting on a recent Pew poll in which the majority of Americans claimed they are willing to give up their privacy rights for domestic security, Sanchez said that many people do not understand the extent to which they are losing their freedoms. “You can’t make that decision in the abstract,” he said.

Bron: www.dailydot.com

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 09:31 schreef Joanne35 het volgende:
Dit soort artikelen zagen we ook helemaal niet aankomen he?

Klokkenluider Edward Snowden is een immorele einzelgänger

[..]

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Op dinsdag 11 juni 2013 22:48 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Real world fallout of PRISM: German girl turned away at US airport because her Facebook messages mentioned her intent to work as an au pair, violating her visa.

http://www.reddit.com/r/w(...)_german_girl_turned/

Duitse bron:

http://www.derwesten.de/w(...)rueck-id8041896.html

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 11:17 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:

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Dus als je hier harde kritiek hebt op Prism kom je de vs ook niet meer in?

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 09:31 schreef Joanne35 het volgende:
Dit soort artikelen zagen we ook helemaal niet aankomen he?

Klokkenluider Edward Snowden is een immorele einzelgänger

[..]

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 11:19 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:

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Zag gisteren ook al langskomen dat zijn vriendin een lapdancer is

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 11:26 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

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Het spinnen is al weer begonnen. Charles Groenenhuis gisteren in Knevel en van den Brink ook al.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 12:27 schreef Claudia_x het volgende:

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Wat zei hij dan?

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 12:41 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

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1. Dat terrorisme bestrijding de huidige ontwikkeling in big data analyse rechtvaardigt.

Terwijl in een rechtsstaat de macht van de staat in balans moet blijven met de rechten van burgers. Maar deze kant van de medaille interesseert hem niet.

2. Dat Snowden uit de school is geklapt en dus moet worden bestraft. Punt.

Dat is het tegenwoordig een voortdurend gebruikt rechtspositivistische argument. Denk bijvoorbeeld ook aan de belastingontwijking: het is gewoon legaal is. Alsof je er dan niet meer over na hoeft te denken.

Groenhuizen is zo rechts geworden, sinds hij in de VS als correspondent is gaan werken. Ik vond hem een typisch voorbeeld van een debater met een agenda / een opiniemaker. Niet open voor een serieuze discussie. Waarom zitten dit soort mensen in het publieke debat.

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Op woensdag 12 juni 2013 12:42 schreef tribalwars het volgende:

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Dus voor terrorisme laten we alle vrijheid schieten.
Ik vind die man een held.