Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 3

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Op donderdag 20 juni 2013 10:10 schreef -jos- het volgende:

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Ik heb het nog steeds over het datacentrum. Daarvoor is het budget $2miljard. En je moet het dus nog door 10 delen want volgens je quote gebruiken ze maar 10% van de capaciteit als opslag.

Trouwens, als je alleen uitgaat van de oppervlakte dan is het dus nog maar maximaal 15MB per aardbewoner, aangezien dat onafhankelijk is van de kosten.

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China completes internet monitoring scheme in Tibet

China has completed a monitoring scheme in Tibet that requires all telephone and internet users to register under their real names, state media said on Wednesday, as part of a campaign to crack down on what officials describe as rumours.

By the end of last year, all 2.76 million fixed line and mobile telephone users and 1.47 million internet users in the remote region had registered for services under their real identities, Xinhua news agency said.

The scheme "is conducive to protecting citizens' personal information and curbing the spread of detrimental information" the report quoted the government official Nyima Doje as saying.

The growing popularity of the internet and mobile phones has "brought about social problems, including the rampant circulation of online rumours, pornography and spam messages", another official, Dai Jianguo, said.

"The real-name registration will help resolve these problems while benefiting the long-term, sound development of the internet," Dai added, according to Xinhua.

The Chinese government last year passed a law mandating the use of real names to register for internet services and also began to force users of Sina Corp's wildly successful Weibo microblogging platform to register their real names.

Enforcement of similar rules for mobile phones, especially pay-as-you-go services, is often lax, though.

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'Vliegtuig gereed om Snowden naar IJsland te brengen'

In Hong Kong staat een vliegtuig klaar om klokkenluider Edward Snowden naar IJsland te vliegen. Volgens een IJslandse zakenman heeft hij een privétoestel voor Snowden in gereedheid gebracht.

'Alles staat klaar, nu hoeven we alleen nog op toestemming te wachten van de IJslandse minister van Binnenlandse Zaken', aldus Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, directeur van DataCell, een bedrijf dat is gelieerd aan klokkenluiderwebsite WikiLeaks.

Bij WikiLeaks en de IJslandse regering was niemand beschikbaar voor commentaar op het nieuws.

Snowden werd vorige week wereldnieuws na het lekken van belangrijke informatie over het PRISM-spionageprogramma van de Verenigde Staten. Aangezien hij niet verwacht dat hij in de VS op een eerlijk proces kan rekenen, vluchtte hij naar Hong Kong. Inmiddels heeft hij politiek asiel in IJsland gevraagd. Of hij dat krijgt, is nog onduidelijk.
Bron: Volkskrant

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Op vrijdag 21 juni 2013 06:28 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:
Een IJslandse zakenman, yeah, sure, die vliegt direct naar de States

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Op vrijdag 14 juni 2013 08:47 schreef RetepV het volgende:
Mijn mening:

Zonder monitoren is het inderdaad vrijwel onmogelijk om daden van terrorisme tegen te gaan.

Maar dat is het 'verdedigende' aspect van monitoring.

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Op vrijdag 21 juni 2013 09:52 schreef El_Matador het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

En dat zonder internet! Maar het was toch met behulp van de internetmonitoring dat de VS vuile spelletjes speelde? Of zijn die vuile spelletjes er toch wel, met of zonder internetmonitoring?

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Op vrijdag 21 juni 2013 09:15 schreef -Strawberry- het volgende:

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Misschien moeten mensen dan accepteren dat je niet alles kan voorkomen. Het weegt niet op tegen de schendingen van privacy en de macht die erbij komt kijken.

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Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant | World news | guardian.co.uk

Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's surveillance of Americans' communication

Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed.

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants.

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.

Since the Guardian first revealed the extent of the NSA's collection of US communications, there have been repeated calls for the legal basis of the programs to be released. On Thursday, two US congressmen introduced a bill compelling the Obama administration to declassify the secret legal justifications for NSA surveillance.

The disclosure bill, sponsored by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican, is a complement to one proposed in the Senate last week. It would "increase the transparency of the Fisa Court and the state of the law in this area," Schiff told the Guardian. "It would give the public a better understanding of the safeguards, as well as the scope of these programs."

Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which was renewed for five years last December, is the authority under which the NSA is allowed to collect large-scale data, including foreign communications and also communications between the US and other countries, provided the target is overseas.

FAA warrants are issued by the Fisa court for up to 12 months at a time, and authorise the collection of bulk information – some of which can include communications of US citizens, or people inside the US. To intentionally target either of those groups requires an individual warrant.

One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment.

Those procedures state that the "NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person".

It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination - including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases, which can include public information and data collected by other agencies.

Where the NSA has no specific information on a person's location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues.

"In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person," it states "a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person."

If it later appears that a target is in fact located in the US, analysts are permitted to look at the content of messages, or listen to phone calls, to establish if this is indeed the case.

Referring to steps taken to prevent intentional collection of telephone content of those inside the US, the document states: "NSA analysts may analyze content for indications that a foreign target has entered or intends to enter the United States. Such content analysis will be conducted according to analytic and intelligence requirements and priorities."

Details set out in the "minimization procedures", regularly referred to in House and Senate hearings, as well as public statements in recent weeks, also raise questions as to the extent of monitoring of US citizens and residents.

NSA minimization procedures signed by Holder in 2009 set out that once a target is confirmed to be within the US, interception must stop immediately. However, these circumstances do not apply to large-scale data where the NSA claims it is unable to filter US communications from non-US ones.

The NSA is empowered to retain data for up to five years and the policy states "communications which may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on the NSA's ability to filter communications".

Even if upon examination a communication is found to be domestic – entirely within the US – the NSA can appeal to its director to keep what it has found if it contains "significant foreign intelligence information", "evidence of a crime", "technical data base information" (such as encrypted communications), or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property".

Domestic communications containing none of the above must be destroyed. Communications in which one party was outside the US, but the other is a US-person, are permitted for retention under FAA rules.

The minimization procedure adds that these can be disseminated to other agencies or friendly governments if the US person is anonymised, or including the US person's identity under certain criteria.

A separate section of the same document notes that as soon as any intercepted communications are determined to have been between someone under US criminal indictment and their attorney, surveillance must stop. However, the material collected can be retained, if it is useful, though in a segregated database:

"The relevant portion of the communication containing that conversation will be segregated and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice will be notified so that appropriate procedures may be established to protect such communications from review or use in any criminal prosecution, while preserving foreign intelligence information contained therein," the document states.

In practice, much of the decision-making appears to lie with NSA analysts, rather than the Fisa court or senior officials.

A transcript of a 2008 briefing on FAA from the NSA's general counsel sets out how much discretion NSA analysts possess when it comes to the specifics of targeting, and making decisions on who they believe is a non-US person. Referring to a situation where there has been a suggestion a target is within the US.

"Once again, the standard here is a reasonable belief that your target is outside the United States. What does that mean when you get information that might lead you to believe the contrary? It means you can't ignore it. You can't turn a blind eye to somebody saying: 'Hey, I think so and so is in the United States.' You can't ignore that. Does it mean you have to completely turn off collection the minute you hear that? No, it means you have to do some sort of investigation: 'Is that guy right? Is my target here?" he says.

"But, if everything else you have says 'no' (he talked yesterday, I saw him on TV yesterday, even, depending on the target, he was in Baghdad) you can still continue targeting but you have to keep that in mind. You can't put it aside. You have to investigate it and, once again, with that new information in mind, what is your reasonable belief about your target's location?"

The broad nature of the court's oversight role, and the discretion given to NSA analysts, sheds light on responses from the administration and internet companies to the Guardian's disclosure of the PRISM program. They have stated that the content of online communications is turned over to the NSA only pursuant to a court order. But except when a US citizen is specifically targeted, the court orders used by the NSA to obtain that information as part of Prism are these general FAA orders, not individualized warrants specific to any individual.

Once armed with these general orders, the NSA is empowered to compel telephone and internet companies to turn over to it the communications of any individual identified by the NSA. The Fisa court plays no role in the selection of those individuals, nor does it monitor who is selected by the NSA.

The NSA's ability to collect and retain the communications of people in the US, even without a warrant, has fuelled congressional demands for an estimate of how many Americans have been caught up in surveillance.

Two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall – both members of the Senate intelligence committee – have been seeking this information since 2011, but senior White House and intelligence officials have repeatedly insisted that the agency is unable to gather such statistics.

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Op vrijdag 21 juni 2013 12:52 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.
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Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

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The FBI acknowledged this week that drones are carrying out surveillance within the United States.

FBI's Use of Drones for U.S. Surveillance Raises Fears over Privacy, Widening Corporate-Gov't Ties

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"Britten tappen glasvezelkabels af"

_{Toegevoegd: vrijdag 21 jun 2013, 20:07
Update: vrijdag 21 jun 2013, 20:55}

De Britse inlichtingendienst GCHQ tapt op grote schaal telefoongegevens en internetverkeer af uit transatlantische glasvezelkabels. Die informatie wordt opgeslagen en gedeeld met de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA.

Dat onthult de Britse krant The Guardian op basis van informatie die voormalig CIA-medewerker Edward Snowden beschikbaar heeft gesteld. Snowden werkte ook voor de NSA.

De operatie draagt de codenaam Tempora en draait al achttien maanden. Bij het verwerken van alle informatie waren in mei vorig jaar 300 analisten van GCHQ betrokken en ook nog 250 van de Amerikaanse NSA.

Veiligheidswaarborgen
Om deze operatie mogelijk te maken is aftap-apparatuur geplaatst op plaatsen waar de kabels aan land komen. De schaal waarop informatie uit de kabels wordt getapt en opgeslagen, zou nog steeds toenemen.

Volgens The Guardian is er geen enkele controle op wat de inlichtingendiensten met deze informatie doen. Daarbij zitten ook telefoongesprekken, e-mailverkeer, Facebook-notities en internetgegevens van mensen die niets hebben misdaan.

Een anonieme bron vertelde The Guardian dat GCHQ zich aan de wet houdt en aan een systeem van veiligheidswaarborgen moet onderwerpen.

Tempora zou volgens diezelfde bron al een aantal belangrijke doorbraken hebben opgeleverd bij het opsporen en voorkomen van ernstige misdrijven.

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Op vrijdag 21 juni 2013 20:58 schreef teckna het volgende:

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Je gaat nu alleen uit van het publiekelijke bekend gemaakte geld. Er is een complete schaduwboekhouding in de usa van 50+ miljard per jaar enkel en alleen al bij het Pentagon (zoek op black budget) Dus ga er maar vanuit dat het budget nog vele malen hoger is dan enkel je 2 miljard.

De eerdere NSA whistle blower William Binney heeft al aangegeven dat het Utah datacenter 5 Zettabytes kan opslaan aan data. Daarnaast is het zo dat het datacenter is ontworpen en uitgebreid kan worden om uiteindelijk Yottabytes op te slaan.

Hetzelfde principe als giganews nu heeft bijvoorbeeld voor haar usenet service, nooit meer wat deleten maar gewoon iedere keer wat harde schijven bijprikken als je tegen je limiet aan loopt zodat je eigenlijk tot in het oneindige data kan bijhouden.

Daarnaast gaat iedereen uit van commerciële tarieven op harde schijven. Het zou het mij niets verbazen als ze gewoon zelf ergens een fabriek neer hebben gezet die zelf alleen maar harde schrijven maakt aan de lopende band al dan niet met techniek ingekocht/samenwerking bij een v/d grote hardeschijf producenten. En anders krijg je vast wel korting als je harde schijven per ton stuks koopt.

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The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director turned whistleblower. Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified.

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US 'to charge NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with espionage'

US prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint charging National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The US also has asked Hong Kong to detain the former NSA contractor on a provisional arrest warrant, the Post reported. Snowden, 29, is reported to be in hiding in Hong Kong.

A US justice department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a criminal complaint had been filed against Snowden, who disclosed documents detailing US and UK telephone and internet surveillance efforts.

US prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment and can then take steps to secure Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong for a criminal trial in the US, the newspaper reported.

Snowden would be able to challenge the request for his extradition in court in Hong Kong.

The Post noted the US extradition treaty with Hong Kong has an exception for political offences, and that espionage has been viewed as a political offence.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic businessman linked to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, said on Thursday he had readied a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland if Iceland's government would grant asylum.

Iceland refused on Friday to say whether it would grant asylum to Snowden.

Glenn Greenwald Responds To Edward Snowden Being Charged With Espionage

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The Strange Case of Barrett Brown | The Nation

Amid the outrage over the NSA's spying program, the jailing of journalist Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling problem.

WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius, and with or without Julian Assange, it is not going away.

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

One connection was between Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks had claimed to possess a large cache of documents belonging to Bank of America. Concerned about this, Bank of America approached the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ directed it to the law and lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which does legal work for Wells Fargo and General Dynamics and also lobbies for Koch Industries, Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, Gas Processors Association, Entergy among many other firms. The DoJ recommended that Bank of America hire Hunton and Williams, explicitly suggesting Richard Wyatt as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis”—‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch, using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.” The leaked e-mails showed that similar disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

It was clear to Brown that these were actions of questionable legality, but beyond that, government contractors were attempting to undermine Americans’ free speech—with the apparent blessing of the DOJ. A group of Democratic congressmen asked for an investigation into this arrangement, to no avail.

By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. The FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went under the nom de guerre Sabu. The FBI arrested him on June 7, 2011, and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Just three days before his arrest, Sabu had been central to the formation of a new group called AntiSec, which comprised his former LulzSec crew members, as well as members as Anonymous. In early December AntiSec hacked the website of a private security company called Stratfor Global Intelligence. On Christmas Eve, it released a trove of some 5 million internal company e-mails. AntiSec member and Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond has pled guilty to the attack and is currently facing ten years in prison for it.

The contents of the Stratfor leak were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. They included discussion of opportunities for renditions and assassinations. For example, in one video, Statfor’s vice president of intelligence, Fred Burton, suggested taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to render Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been released from prison on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness. Burton said that the case “was personal.” When someone pointed out in an e-mail that such a move would almost certainly be illegal—“This man has already been tried, found guilty, sentenced…and served time”—another Stratfor employee responded that this was just an argument for a more efficient solution: “One more reason to just bugzap him with a hellfire. :-)”

(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in Jeremy Scahill’s writings about Blackwater in The Nation, copying and circulating entire articles, with comments suggesting a principle interest was in the question of whether Blackwater was setting up a competing intelligence operation. E-mails also showed grudging respect for Scahill: “Like or dislike Scahill’s position (or what comes of his work), he does an amazing job outing [Blackwater].”)

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a warrant for Brown’s laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous and, most ominously, “email, email contacts, ‘chat’, instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence.” In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

When the FBI went to serve Brown, he was at his mother’s house. Agents returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieving his laptop. To turn up the heat on Brown, the FBI initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice for concealing his laptop computer in her house. (Facing criminal charges, on March 22, 2013, his mother, Karen McCutchin, pled guilty to one count of obstructing the execution of a search warrant. She faces up to twelve months in jail. Brown maintains that she did not know the laptop was in her home.)

By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made Brown snap. In September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube video, in which he explained that he had been in treatment for an addiction to heroin, taking the medication Suboxone, but had gone off his meds and now was in withdrawal. He threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother, by name, warning:

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me.… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”

“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids…. How do you like them apples?”

The media narrative was immediately derailed. No longer would this be a story about the secretive information-military-industrial complex; now it was the sordid tale of a crazy drug addict threatening an FBI agent and his (grown) children. Actual death threats against agents are often punishable by a few years in jail. But Brown’s actions made it easier for the FBI to sell some other pretext to put him away for life.

The Stratfor data included a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. On this basis, the DOJ accused Brown of credit card fraud for having shared that link with the editorial board of ProjectPM. Specifically, the FBI charged him with traffic in stolen authentication features, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as an obstruction of justice charge (for being at his mother’s when the initial warrant was served) and charges stemming from his threats against the FBI agent. All told, Brown is looking at century of jail time: 105 years in federal prison if served sequentially. He has been denied bail.

Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of ten years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s journalism. As Glenn Greenwald remarked inThe Guardian: “It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”

Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in, encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships. In order to neutralize those who question or investigate the system, laws are being reinterpreted or extended or otherwise misappropriated in ways that are laughable—or would be if the consequences weren’t so dire.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that can be fixed by trying to tweak a few laws or by removing a few prosecutors. The problem is not with bad laws or bad prosecutors. What the case of Barrett Brown has exposed is that we confronting a different problem altogether. It is a systemic problem. It is the failure of the rule of law.

Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, died in a car crash yesterday. Read Greg Mitchells obituary here.


Bron: www.thenation.com

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Tot slot mag niet vergeten worden dat ook internetproviders flink getroffen worden door het PRISM-schandaal, zegt CEO Dragos Manac van cloudprovider Appnor. "Zij moeten kiezen tussen twee kwaden. Het niet helpen van autoriteiten betekent het overtreden van de wet, maar help je hen wel, dan werk je mee aan de schending van burgerrechten."

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 10:39 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:
bron: http://cio.nl/beveiliging(...)ar-mogelijk/pagina-2

Aan het eind:

[..]

Zit het probleem dan niet bij de autoriteiten: dat zij juist de burgerrechten zitten te schenden met zo'n dataverzoek?

quote:

Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 10:50 schreef teckna het volgende:

[..]

Vergeet ook even niet dat het plaatje een commercieel plaatje is van een bedrijf dat producten wil verkopen en al uit 2009 stamt In 4 jaar tijd is er sowieso al een hoop veranderd.

Het plaatje gaat uit van harde schijven van 1 TB per stuk, commercieel zijn er op dit moment tegen een betaalbare prijs harde schijven van 4 TB per stuk. Ik neem aan dat de next-gen schijven nog wel meer kunnen vasthouden, laten we uitgaan van 6-8TB per schijf. Dan zit je al op minstens 4 keer zoveel data per schijf als niet meer (6 tot 8TB per schijf)

het lijkt mij ook niet ondenkbaar dat 'oude' schijven met minder capaciteit continue vervangen worden door harde schijven met grotere capaciteit. Al dan niet om dataverlies te voorkomen die veel I/O met zich meebrengt.

Afaik is de 100 000 voet datacenter enkel het publiek bekend gemaakte ruimte. Je weet niet hoeveel verdiepingen ze nog de grond in gaan. Daar zijn de Amerikanen erg goed in namelijk. Nieuwe ruimtes maken waar je een zichtbaar en onzichtbare gedeelte hebt door ondertussen nog onder de grond te gaan. Dit is ook gebeurd bijvoorbeeld bij het witte huis tijdens verbouwingen/de aanbouw van een nieuwe vleugel en bijvoorbeeld met de bunker bij The Greenbrier hotel.

Anyway, 70 Petabyte lijkt mij aardig lage schatting als je nagaat dat microsoft alleen al bij de migratie van hotmail naar outlook het dubbele (150 Petabytes) heeft verplaatst*