Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 4

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Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if “Anything Happens” To Him - The Daily Beast

Snowden has shared encoded copies of all the documents he took so that they won’t disappear if he does, Glenn Greenwald tells Eli Lake.

As the U.S. government presses Moscow to extradite former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, America’s most wanted leaker has a plan B. The former NSA systems administrator has already given encoded files containing an archive of the secrets he lifted from his old employer to several people. If anything happens to Snowden, the files will be unlocked.


^{Glenn Greenwald, who first reported former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure of government surveillance programs, speaks to reporters in June at his hotel in Hong Kong. (Vincent Yu/AP)}

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who Snowden first contacted in February, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

The fact that Snowden has made digital copies of the documents he accessed while working at the NSA poses a new challenge to the U.S. intelligence community that has scrambled in recent days to recover them and assess the full damage of the breach. Even if U.S. authorities catch up with Snowden and the four classified laptops the Guardian reported he brought with him to Hong Kong the secrets Snowden hopes to expose will still likely be published.

A former U.S. counterintelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the Internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.”

The arrangement to entrust encrypted archives of his files with others also sheds light on a cryptic statement Snowden made on June 17 during a live chat with The Guardian. In the online session he said, “All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

Last week NSA Director Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Snowden was able to access files inside the NSA by fabricating digital keys that gave him access to areas he was not allowed to visit as a low-level contractor and systems administrator. One of those areas included a site he visited during his training that Alexander later told reporters contained one of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court orders published by The Guardian and The Washington Post earlier this month.


It’s unclear what else is in the Snowden archive. The Guardian and The Washington Post have already published slides from a classified presentation on a program known as Prism that gives the NSA access to data on non-U.S. persons from Internet companies like Google and Facebook. The newspapers have also published the “minimization procedures” approved by Attorney General Eric Holder to make sure this collection does not include U.S. persons without a warrant and a top-secret presidential directive approving offensive cyber operations.

Greenwald said that he himself has thousands of documents from Snowden that he is continuing to examine. That figure is considerably higher than the 200 documents that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee, said over the weekend that she was told Snowden possessed.

“I don’t know for sure whether [Snowden] has more documents than the ones he has given me,” Greenwald said. “I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published.”

In addition to providing documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post, Snowden has also given interviews to the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, which reported that Snowden has disclosed the Internet Protocol addresses for computers in China and Hong Kong that the NSA monitored. That paper also printed a story claiming the NSA collected the text-message data for Hong Kong residents based on a June 12 interview Snowden gave the paper.

“He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”

Greenwald said he would not have published some of the stories that ran in the South China Morning Post. “Whether I would have disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking, I don’t think I would have,” Greenwald said. “What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.”

However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public’s right to know. “Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,” Greenwald said. “I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”

Greenwald said Snowden for example did not wish to publicize information that gave the technical specifications or blueprints for how the NSA constructed its eavesdropping network. “He is worried that would enable other states to enhance their security systems and monitor their own citizens.” Greenwald also said Snowden did not wish to repeat the kinds of disclosures made famous a generation ago by former CIA spy, Philip Agee—who published information after defecting to Cuba that outed undercover CIA officers. “He was very insistent he does not want to publish documents to harm individuals or blow anyone’s undercover status,” Greenwald said. He added that Snowden told him, “Leaking CIA documents can actually harm people, whereas leaking NSA documents can harm systems.”

Greenwald also said his newspaper had no plans to publish the technical specifications of NSA systems. “I do not want to help other states get better at surveillance,” Greenwald said. He added, “We won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing.”

In this sense Greenwald is applying a more traditional journalistic approach to publishing classified information than WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that published hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables and intelligence reports from Afghanistan and Iraq—initially without removing the names of individuals who were placed at risk after their interactions with U.S. officials in dangerous places were made public. “I am supportive of WikiLeaks, but I am doing something different,” Greenwald said.

For now, the FBI has taken a keen interest in the leak of FISA court documents. Those documents are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. intelligence community. As of last week, the FBI was investigating whether Snowden may have obtained those documents from a leak inside the secret FISA court.

Thus far, The Guardian and The Washington Post have only published FISA documents that disclosed the wholesale collection of telephone metadata, but not the authorization to monitor the electronic communications of individuals. Greenwald declined to say whether or not he possessed FISA court warrants authorizing surveillance of a specific individual.

For now, Greenwald said he is taking extra precautions against the prospect that he is a target of U.S. surveillance. He said he began using encrypted email when he began communicating with Snowden in February after Snowden sent him a YouTube video walking him through the procedure to encrypt his email.

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

When asked if Greenwald believed his computer was being monitored by the U.S. government. “I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer. I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

Bron: www.thedailybeast.com

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Op woensdag 26 juni 2013 06:51 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:
Sorry, NSA, Terrorists Don't Use Verizon. Or Skype. Or Gmail.

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Op woensdag 26 juni 2013 15:50 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
<snip>
When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”
<snip>

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Op woensdag 26 juni 2013 05:53 schreef Disorder het volgende:

[..]

Dat is een ding wat zeker is.

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Snowden Coverage: If U.S. Mass Media Were State-Controlled, Would They Look Any Different?

The Edward Snowden leaks have revealed a U.S. corporate media system at war with independent journalism. Many of the same outlets -- especially TV news -- that missed the Wall Street meltdown and cheer-led the Iraq invasion have come to resemble state-controlled media outlets in their near-total identification with the government as it pursues the now 30-year-old whistleblower.

While an independent journalism system would be dissecting the impacts of NSA surveillance on privacy rights, and separating fact from fiction, U.S. news networks have obsessed on questions like: How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice?

Unfazed by polls showing that half of the American rabble -- I mean, public -- believe Snowden did a good thing by leaking documentation of NSA spying, TV news panels have usually excluded anyone who speaks for these millions of Americans. Although TV hosts and most panelists are not government officials, some have a penchant for speaking of the government with the pronoun "We."

After Snowden made it out of Hong Kong to Russia, New York Times journalist and CNBC talking head Andrew Ross Sorkin expressed his frustration: "We've screwed this up, to even let him get to Russia." By "we," he meant the U.S. government.

Last time I checked, Sorkin was working for the Times and CNBC, not the CIA or FBI.

When a huge swath of the country is on the side of the guy-on-the-run and not the government, it's much easier to see that there's nothing "objective" or "neutral" about journalists who so closely identify with the spy agencies or Justice Department or White House.

The standard exclusion of dissenting views -- panels often span from hawk ("he's a traitor who needs to be jailed") to dove ("he may have been well-intentioned but he needs to be jailed") -- offers yet another reason why young people, more libertarian in their views, have turned away from these outlets. Virtually no one speaks for them. While a TIME poll found 53 percent of respondents saying Snowden did "a good thing," that was the sentiment of 70 percent of those age 18 to 34.

I teach college journalism classes about independent media. New developments like WikiLeaks and independent bloggers like Glenn Greenwald may scare the wits out of establishment media, but they sure don't scare young people or journalism students.

As media employees at elite outlets have grown cozier with their government and corporate sources (Sorkin is famously close with Wall Street CEOs), they exhibit an almost instinctual antipathy toward those adversarial journalists who challenge powerful elites day after day.

Look at the reactions of some top mainstream journalists to Greenwald, who built up a big readership as a solo blogger before moving his blog to Salon and then the Guardian, where he broke the Snowden/NSA stories. I know several journalism professors who view Greenwald as one of the world's best journalists. He's known as accurate, thorough, well-documented and ethical.

It was Sorkin, the New York Times guy, who declared on CNBC that maybe Greenwald should be arrested: "I told you this in the green room - I would arrest him [Snowden] and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to be out there, almost, he wants to help him get to Ecuador."

If it's strange for a journalist to suggest another journalist's arrest, it was almost as strange when Sorkin wrote in a Times column that he went down to check out the Occupy Wall Street encampment "after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank." Sorkin concluded: "As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn't seem like a brutal group -- at least not yet."

Another mainstream media star is NBC's David Gregory (seen literally dancing with White House source Karl Rove in 2007). Since he interviewed Greenwald on Sunday's "Meet the Press," there's been scrutiny of Gregory's factually-misleading question: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you be charged with a crime?" And of Greenwald's response: "I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies."

But I'm just as bothered by Gregory's retort -- "Well, the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regards to what you're doing" -- and the ensuing discussion in mainstream outlets questioning Greenwald's bona fides as a journalist.

A Washington Post article ("On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter?") questioned the blogger's credentials as a journalist because he's also an advocate: "Greenwald has appeared frequently on TV to plead Snowden's case as a whistleblower -- an advocacy role many mainstream journalists would be uncomfortable with."

The Post article spoke of "the line between journalism -- traditionally, the dispassionate reporting of facts -- and outright involvement in the news seems blurrier than ever." Libertarian journalist Matt Welch critiqued the article as "historically illiterate."

The truth is that many of the greatest journalists in our country's history -- from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone -- were accurate reporters of fact, but hardly dispassionate. And mainstream outlets have always had hybrid reporter/columnists offering both fact and advocacy; one of the most famous, David Broder, graced the pages of the Washington Post for years, including its front page.

Broder was a reporter, columnist and TV talking head -- yet no one questioned whether Broder was a genuine journalist. That's because, unlike Greenwald, the reporting and opinions of a David Broder were militantly pro-establishment, pro-bipartisan consensus.

And Broder's not alone as a hybrid reporter/columnist in the mainstream. Let's not forget the delightful pundit who wanted to "almost arrest" Greenwald. His official Times bio states: "Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist, chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, and editor of Dealbook for The New York Times."

The reason Glenn Greenwald's credentials as a journalist are being questioned by some mainstreamers is not that he blurs the line between journalist and advocate. It's because of the anti-establishment content of his journalism and advocacy.

Can the Government Hack Into Your Car?

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According to a prominent security analyst, technology exists that could've allowed someone to hack his car. Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke told The Huffington Post that what is known about the single-vehicle crash is "consistent with a car cyber attack."

Clarke said, "There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers" -- including the United States -- know how to remotely seize control of a car.

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Op donderdag 27 juni 2013 07:45 schreef heiden6 het volgende:
Bron.

LAten we hopen dat dit vooralsnog onzin is.

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Op woensdag 26 juni 2013 15:56 schreef -jos- het volgende:
http://arstechnica.com/te(...)-then-he-became-one/

Fotoshoot van een jonge Snowden:

http://web.archive.org/li(...)ic.php?f=23&t=311697

Het hadden zo fragmenten uit mijn oude logs kunnen zijn.

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NSA Collected Bulk Email, Internet Data of Americans Under Obama | Threat Level | Wired.com

The National Security Agency collected bulk data on the email traffic of millions of Americans under the Obama administration, according to new documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The program involved email metadata — the “enveloped” information for email that reveals the sender address and recipient as well as IP addresses — as well as web sites visited until 2011 when it ended, according to the Guardian.

The collection, which did not included the content of email, was actually part of a decade-long surveillance program launched under the Bush administration in 2001 called Stellar Wind that was initially conducted without oversight from a court. The program was first exposed in 2004 by a former Justice Department official who leaked the information to the New York Times.

The collection involved “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” according to an NSA inspector general’s report the newspaper obtained.

The NSA subsequently was granted authority to “analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States.” The NSA didn’t just focus on targeted individuals, but also studied the data of people who communicated with people who communicated with targets.

The program ended in 2011 “for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted,” Shawn Turner, the Obama administration’s director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian.

The following year, however, the NSA launched a new program that allowed it to analyze communications with one party inside the US, leading to a doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters.

IP and email addresses can be datamined and analyzed to reveal the location of a correspondent over time, as well as relationships.

When the program began in late 2001, the NSA was not allowed to analyzed data pertaining to email between communicants who were solely inside the U.S. At least one of the communicant had to be outside the United States, or at least as far as the NSA could determine this.

The program was briefly halted in 2004 after a dramatic showdown in which top officials objected to the manner of the collections. Two months later, the Justice Department obtained permission from the FISA Court to collect bulk metadata, providing the program the legal cover to resume.

The NSA was restricted from analyzing data pertaining to accounts used by a U.S. person. But in 2007, that changed when the government successfully argued that studying Americans’ online habits would give the surveillance agency insight into the online habits of foreigners.

The existence of Stellar Wind was first exposed by Thomas Tamm, an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, who made a call to the New York Times one day in 2004 from a phone booth in a Washington, D.C., subway station.

Tamm discovered the secret program and agonized over what to do about it, according to a later story in Newsweek, before finally making the call to reporter Eric Lichtblau at the Times.

Tamm was motivated by a need to do what was “right,” and was stunned that someone higher up than him didn’t speak up about the program before him. Tamm thought Congress and the public should know about the spying to debate its lawfulness. He was also motivated by anger over the administration’s introduction of controversial “enhanced” interrogation methods of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

The code name for the NSA’s phone call and e-mail collection program was “Stellar Wind,” he told the Times, which included secret wiretap requests that began in October 2001 and received no court oversight.

Tamm tried to discuss the issue with a former colleague who worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee but was shut down by the colleague who didn’t want to discuss anything related to government secrets. The Times learned from other sources that the NSA, with the secret cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, had also begun collecting vast amounts of information about the phone and e-mail records of American citizens.

Because intelligence obtained without a court order couldn’t be used in criminal court, counterterrorism officials would examine the surveillance information already obtained without an order to find a reason for requesting a legitimate FISA warrant and cover their illegal tracks.

That changed in 2004, when the program was given legal protection under the FISA Court.

Bron: www.wired.com

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Op donderdag 27 juni 2013 18:58 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

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De Wet bewaarplicht telecommunicatiegegevens is een Nederlandse wet. Het wijzigt de Telecommunicatiewet en de Wet op de economische delicten. De wet is op 7 juli 2009 goedgekeurd door de Eerste Kamer nadat de minister een voorstel voor een 'reparatiewet' had toegezegd. Naar het Koninklijk Besluit op 25 augustus 2009 is de wet op 1 september 2009 in werking getreden.

[..]

De aanbieders van openbare telecommunicatienetwerken en telecommunicatiediensten zijn verplicht tot het bewaren van alle verkeers- en locatiegegevens van de gebruikers van deze diensten.

Van een telefoongesprek moeten gedurende twaalf maanden o.a. worden bewaard de begin- en eindtijd, de telefoonnummers, de namen en adressen van de betrokken abonnees of geregistreerde gebruikers (niet van toepassing bij anonieme prepaid-gebruikers), en de locaties waar betrokken mobiele telefoons zich bevinden, maar niet de inhoud van het gesprek. Bij SMS en MMS analoog.

Van e-mails moeten soortgelijke gegevens twaalf maanden (na de reparatiewet: zes maanden) bewaard worden, zoals datum en tijdstip en e-mailadressen, maar niet de inhoud.

Van een internetsessie moet onder meer twaalf maanden (na de reparatiewet: zes maanden) bewaard worden datum en tijdstip van de log-in en log-off en het IP-adres van de gebruiker, maar niet de bezochte webpagina's.

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Is Congress Beginning to Rein in NSA Spying?

This isn’t much positive to say about the virtues of Congressional oversight in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks of the NSA’s vast domestic surveillance apparatus. Congress has been little more than an active participant in the systematic violation of Americans’ rights and privacy.

But as I wrote in a recent piece at The Huffington Post, there is a growing opposition to broad NSA surveillance from people on both sides of America’s terribly narrow political spectrum. The press reports on this issue, most notably from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, have sparked a public reaction that is being reflected in Congress, in however limited a way.

Over at the ACLU’s blog, Michelle Richardson claims “a civil-libertarian energy is stirring” in Congress and provides a list of “six bipartisan pieces of legislation to rollback NSA spying that have been introduced” in the last three weeks.

• The LIBERT-E Act (H.R. 2399)—from Reps. Conyers (D-Mich.), Amash (R-Mich.), and 31 other bipartisan cosponsors—would limit Section 215 of the Patriot Act and force disclosure of the secret court orders and/or legal reasoning behind all of these surveillance programs.

• The Ending Secret Law Act (S. 1130 and H.R. 2475)—sponsored by Sens. Merkley (D-Ore.), Lee (R-Utah) and 10 others in the Senate and Reps Schiff (D-Calif.), Rokita (R-Idaho) and five others in the House—forces the administration to release the secret court orders that have interpreted this statute and our constitutional rights. If disclosure would harm national security, the attorney general would have to write and release an unclassified summary of the secret court orders or explain why they can’t. This language got 37 “yes” votes on the Senate floor during the FISA debate this past December.

• S. 1182—from Sens. Udall (D-Colo.), Merkley, and five other bipartisan Senators—would tighten the requirements for getting a Patriot Section 215 order.

• The Restore Our Privacy Act (S. 1168) from Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) would require the government to state with specific and articulable facts why each thing sought is relevant to an investigation.

• The Fourth Amendment Restoration Act (S. 1037), introduced by Sen. Paul (R-Ky.), would direct the government to interpret the Fourth Amendment as prohibiting searches of phone records without a warrant based on probable cause in both intelligence and criminal investigations.

• And yesterday Senate Judiciary Chairman Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act based on his past Patriot Act reform bills to rein in the Patriot Act and increase transparency.

This is really a testament to the effectiveness of Snowden’s leaks and Greenwald’s reporting. Many of these proposals are half-measures that would do little to penetrate the executive branch’s unconstitutional intelligence apparatus as a whole. But they are something, and are worth following for anyone inclined to call their representatives to urge support of these attempts to rein in domestic spying.

bron

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Ecuador Cancels US Trade Pact Over Repeated Threats

Faced with several days of overt threats from the Obama Administration and top senators threatening to revoke a key US-Ecuador trade pact if they dare to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the Ecuadoran government has told the US what they can do with their frozen broccoli and fresh cut flowers, and has cancelled the pact themselves.

bron

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Senators' letter to US director of national intelligence James Clapper

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Senators accuse government of using 'secret law' to collect Americans' data | World news | guardian.co.uk

Bipartisan group seeks answers from intelligence chief James Clapper over scale of and justification for NSA surveillance

A bipartisan group of 26 US senators has written to intelligence chiefs to complain that the administration is relying on a "secret body of law" to collect massive amounts of data on US citizens.

The senators accuse officials of making misleading statements and demand that the director of national intelligence James Clapper answer a series of specific questions on the scale of domestic surveillance as well as the legal justification for it.

In their strongly-worded letter to Clapper, the senators said they believed the government may be misinterpreting existing legislation to justify the sweeping collection of telephone and internet data revealed by the Guardian.

"We are concerned that by depending on secret interpretations of the Patriot Act that differed from an intuitive reading of the statute, this program essentially relied for years on a secret body of law," they say.

"This and misleading statements by intelligence officials have prevented our constituents from evaluating the decisions that their government was making, and will unfortunately undermine trust in government more broadly."

This is the strongest attack yet from Congress since the disclosures began, and comes after Clapper admitted he had given "the least untruthful answer possible" when pushed on these issues by Senators at a hearing before the latest revelations by the Guardian and the Washington Post.

In a press statement, the group of senators added: "The recent public disclosures of secret government surveillance programs have exposed how secret interpretations of the USA Patriot Act have allowed for the bulk collection of massive amounts of data on the communications of ordinary Americans with no connection to wrongdoing."

"Reliance on secret law to conduct domestic surveillance activities raises serious civil liberty concerns and all but removes the public from an informed national security and civil liberty debate," they added.

The letter was organised by Oregan Democrat Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, but includes four Republican senators: Mark Kirk, Mike Lee, Lisa Murkowski and Dean Heller.

They ask Clapper to publicly provide information about the duration and scope of the program and provide examples of its effectiveness in providing unique intelligence, if such examples exist.

The senators also expressed their concern that the program itself has a significant impact on the privacy of law-abiding Americans and that the Patriot Act could be used for the bulk collection of records beyond phone metadata.

"The Patriot Act's 'business records' authority can be used to give the government access to private financial, medical, consumer and firearm sales records, among others," said a press statement.

In addition to raising concerns about the law's scope, the senators noted that keeping the official interpretation of the law secret and the instances of misleading public statements from executive branch officials prevented the American people from having an informed public debate about national security and domestic surveillance.

The senators said they were seeking public answers to the following questions in order to give the American people the information they need to conduct an informed public debate:

• How long has the NSA used Patriot Act authorities to engage in bulk collection of Americans' records? Was this collection underway when the law was reauthorized in 2006?

• Has the NSA used USA Patriot Act authorities to conduct bulk collection of any other types of records pertaining to Americans, beyond phone records?

• Has the NSA collected or made any plans to collect Americans' cell-site location data in bulk?

• Have there been any violations of the court orders permitting this bulk collection, or of the rules governing access to these records? If so, please describe these violations.

Please identify any specific examples of instances in which intelligence gained by reviewing phone records obtained through Section 215 bulk collection proved useful in thwarting a particular terrorist plot.

Please provide specific examples of instances in which useful intelligence was gained by reviewing phone records that could not have been obtained without the bulk collection authority, if such examples exist.

Please describe the employment status of all persons with conceivable access to this data, including IT professionals, and detail whether they are federal employees, civilian or military, or contractors.

The Senators signing the letter are: Ron Wyden (D-Or), Mark Udall (D-Co), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), Mark Kirk (R-Il), Dick Durbin (D-Il), Tom Udall (D-NM), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Jon Tester (D-Mt), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Dean Heller (R- Nev),Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), Patty Murray (D-Wash), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Al Franken (D-Minn), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chris Coons (D-Del), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), Max Baucus (D-Mont), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc) and Mike Lee (R-Utah).

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

Bron: www.guardian.co.uk

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Op vrijdag 28 juni 2013 21:47 schreef gembird het volgende:
Zoveel drama, rellen en slotjes op de wereld omdat een groep grot wonende baarddragers de wereld wil overnemen met hun afgedankte wapens. Deze aapjes hebben niet eens papieren om te reizen.

News of Mass Internet Spying Explains NSA Whistleblower Resignation, Ashcroft Hospital Room Showdown

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How the NSA is still harvesting your online data

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011.

Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted."

But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

While there is no reference to any specific program currently collecting purely domestic internet metadata in bulk, it is clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets.

On December 26 2012, SSO announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.

The NSA called it the "One-End Foreign (1EF) solution". It intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for "broadening the scope" of what it is able to collect. It relied, legally, on "FAA Authority", a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions.

This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. "The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter," the SSO December document reads. "This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories."

It continued: "After the EvilOlive deployment, traffic has literally doubled."

The scale of the NSA's metadata collection is highlighted by references in the documents to another NSA program, codenamed ShellTrumpet.

On December 31, 2012, an SSO official wrote that ShellTrumpet had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record".

It is not clear how much of this collection concerns foreigners' online records and how much concerns those of Americans. Also unclear is the claimed legal authority for this collection.

Explaining that the five-year old program "began as a near-real-time metadata analyzer for a classic collection system", the SSO official noted: "In its five year history, numerous other systems from across the Agency have come to use ShellTrumpet's processing capabilities for performance monitoring" and other tasks, such as "direct email tip alerting."

Almost half of those trillion pieces of internet metadata were processed in 2012, the document detailed: "though it took five years to get to the one trillion mark, almost half of this volume was processed in this calendar year".

Another SSO entry, dated February 6, 2013, described ongoing plans to expand metadata collection. A joint surveillance collection operation with an unnamed partner agency yielded a new program "to query metadata" that was "turned on in the Fall 2012". Two others, called MoonLightPath and Spinneret, "are planned to be added by September 2013."

A substantial portion of the internet metadata still collected and analyzed by the NSA comes from allied governments, including its British counterpart, GCHQ.

An SSO entry dated September 21, 2012, announced that "Transient Thurible, a new Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) managed XKeyScore (XKS) Deep Dive was declared operational." The entry states that GCHQ "modified" an existing program so the NSA could "benefit" from what GCHQ harvested.

"Transient Thurible metadata [has been] flowing into NSA repositories since 13 August 2012," the entry states.

bron

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'Amerikanen bespioneren EU-diplomaten'

De Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA begluurt niet alleen burgers in de Europese Unie, maar ook EU-diplomaten in Washington. Dat blijkt uit geheime documenten die Der Spiegel heeft ingezien.

Het Duitse weekblad schrijft zaterdag dat de NSA de diplomatieke vestiging van de EU in Washington bespioneert. De Amerikaanse geheime dienst heeft niet alleen apparatuur in het gebouw geïnstalleerd, maar ook het interne computernetwerk geïnfiltreerd.

De geheime documenten die Der Spiegel heeft ingezien, zijn afkomstig van de voortvluchtige klokkenluider Edward Snowden. De Amerikaan onthulde onlangs dat de NSA op grote schaal telefoon- en internetcommunicatie in de gaten houdt.
Bron: Volkskrant

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Op zaterdag 29 juni 2013 18:07 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op zaterdag 29 juni 2013 19:07 schreef Breekfast het volgende:

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Europese burgers bespioneren konden ze nog goedpraten uit veiligheidsoverwegingen.

Dit is een stuk gênanter. Je vraagt je toch af hoe ver dat gaat. Dat ze ook afluisterapparatuur in het torentje hebben geplaatst van onze minister-president bijvoorbeeld

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Op zaterdag 29 juni 2013 19:18 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

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Inderdaad. Hoe kunnen ze dit nog rechtpraten eigenlijk. Hier worden vast diverse wetten met voeten getreden - het kan toch niet meer onder de noemer terrorismebestrijding geveegd worden?

Glashard ontkennen is voor hun nog het beste? Dat Snowden het verkeerd begrepen heeft ofzo...

The Secret Government - The Constitution In Crisis (PBS 1987)

The Trials Of Henry Kissinger.

Authors@Google: Daniel Ellsberg