Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

quote:

Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs

Editor tells parliamentary committee that stories revealing mass surveillance by UK and US have prompted global debate

quote:

MPs' questions to Alan Rusbridger: do you love this country?

twitter:

ggreenwald twitterde op dinsdag 03-12-2013 om 19:29:25 Watching @arusbridger hauled before Parliament & interrogated on whether he loves Britain was one of the creepier events in quite some time reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 december 2013 22:19 schreef VeX- het volgende:
Schijnbaar is het percentage aan uitgebracht materiaal van wat Snowden heeft gelekt nog maar 1 procent.

Dat belooft nog eens wat.

quote:

Microsoft: US government is an 'advanced persistent threat'

Brad Smith, Microsoft's EVP of Legal and Corporate Affairs, labeled the American government as an "advanced persistent threat" in a December 4 post on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Smith wrote in Protecting customer data from government snooping:

(...) Like many others, we are especially alarmed by recent allegations in the press of a broader and concerted effort by some governments to circumvent online security measures – and in our view, legal processes and protections – in order to surreptitiously collect private customer data.

In particular, recent press stories have reported allegations of governmental interception and collection – without search warrants or legal subpoenas – of customer data as it travels between customers and servers or between company data centers in our industry.

If true, these efforts threaten to seriously undermine confidence in the security and privacy of online communications. Indeed, government snooping potentially now constitutes an “advanced persistent threat,” alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.

quote:

NSA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, former U.S. officials say

Morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency’s surveillance activities, according to former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.

A White House spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, noted that top White House officials have been to the agency to “express the president’s support and appreciation for all that NSA does to keep us safe.”

It is not clear whether or when Obama might travel the 23 miles up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to visit Fort Meade, the NSA’s headquarters in Maryland, but agency employees are privately voicing frustration at what they perceive as White House ambivalence amid the pounding the agency has taken from critics.

An NSA spokeswoman had no comment.

Obama in June defended the NSA’s surveillance as lawful and said he welcomed the public debate prompted by revelations from former contractor Edward Snowden beginning that month.

Though Obama has asserted, for instance, that the NSA’s collection of virtually all Americans’ phone records is lawful and has saved lives, the administration has not endorsed legislation that would codify it. And his recent statements suggest he thinks some of the NSA’s activities should be constrained.

A senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record said that the White House would normally not endorse legislation so early in the process but that “it’s been clear . . . that we prefer legislation” that preserves the phone records program “while making some changes . . . to potentially strengthen oversight and transparency.”

Said Hayden: “The president has the highest respect for and pride in the men and women of the intelligence community who work tirelessly to protect our nation. He’s expressed that directly to NSA’s leadership and has praised their work in public. As he said: ‘The men and women of our intelligence community work every single day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots.’ ”

She noted that in recent weeks, Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, and Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, visited Fort Meade “to express the president’s support and appreciation for all that NSA does to keep us safe.”’

Supporters of the NSA say staffers are not feeling the love.

“The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it’s been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,” said Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006. “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.”

A former U.S. official — who like several other former officials interviewed for this story requested anonymity because he still has dealings with the agency — said: “The president has multiple constituencies — I get it. But he must agree that the signals intelligence NSA is providing is one of the most important sources of intelligence today.

“So if that’s the case, why isn’t the president taking care of one of the most important elements of the national security apparatus?”

The White House, observers say, is caught between competing desires to preserve what it has said are valuable national security programs and to shield the president from criticism from allies abroad and civil-liberties advocates at home.

Some observers said it is not surprising that Obama would not travel to Fort Meade before internal and external reviews of surveillance activities have been completed. The reviews are expected to be done soon.

The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, who is retiring in the spring after 81 / 2 years, has been the most vocal defender of the agency’s 35,000 employees. In speeches he has noted that more than 6,000 of them went to Iraq and Afghanistan to support the military. He has spoken of how 22 cryptologists were killed. “They’re the heroes — not the media leaker,” he said in a September speech, in a reference to Snowden.

NSA counterterrorism analysts have worked “every weekend for eight years since I’ve been here. . . . Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they’re there to defend us,” he said then.

On Thursday, Obama said on MSNBC that he would be proposing “some self-restraint on the NSA” and “some reforms that can give people more confidence.”

In an interview with NBC last month, he said: “In some ways, the technology and the budgets and the capacity [at NSA] have outstripped the constraints. And we’ve got to rebuild those in the same way that we’re having to do on a whole series of capacities . . . [such as] drone operations.”

Civil-liberties advocates generally agree with that sentiment, but they would go further and say that the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone records is unlawful and ought to be ended.

Former officials note how President George W. Bush paid a visit to the NSA in January 2006, in the wake of revelations by the New York Times that the agency engaged in a counterterrorism program of warrantless surveillance on U.S. soil beginning after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Bush came out and spoke to the workforce, and the effect on morale was tremendous,” Brenner said. “There’s been nothing like that from this White House.”

A second former official said NSA workers are polishing up their résumés and asking that they be cleared — removing any material linked to classified programs — so they can be sent out to potential employers. He noted that one employee who processes the résumés said, “I’ve never seen so many résumés that people want to have cleared in my life.”

Morale is “bad overall,” a third former official said. “The news — the Snowden disclosures — it questions the integrity of the NSA workforce,” he said. “It’s become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, ‘Why are you spying on Grandma?’ And we aren’t. People are feeling bad, beaten down.”

quote:

Edward Snowden to give evidence to EU parliament, says MEP

British Conservatives oppose video appearance by NSA whistleblower, which Green MEP says could happen this year

The European parliament is lining up Edward Snowden to give evidence by video link later this month, in spite of resistance by British Conservatives, a Green MEP has announced.

German Green Jan Philipp Albrecht said MEPs wanted Snowden to appear before the assembly's committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs (LIBE).

Albrecht said it would represent a "great success" for the parliament's investigation into mass surveillance of EU citizens. "Half a year after the first publications from his collection of numerous NSA documents, the truth of which has not so far been refuted, there are still consequences as far as political responsibility is concerned," he said.

"The basic political will is there," he said on Sunday "Now we will need to see if we can get a formal majority for a hearing and hope that Snowden can keep his promise to answer question on the affair".

The LIBE committee would most likely want to seek questions on what role other European information services have played in gathering data for the NSA, as well as whether servers and data networks in the EU were used as part of the process.

Albrecht claims Snowden had expressed an initial interest via his lawyers in July, and that recent communications had firmed that up. In October, Green party MEP Christian Ströbele travelled to Moscow to meet Snowden in person.

Sources within the European parliament considered it likely that committee members would vote in favour of a Snowden hearing, with the only vocal opposition represented by British Conservative MEPs. Since the Tories are no longer part of the European People's party alliance of centre-right parties, however, one MEP described their reluctance as "not crucial".

Since a real-time video testimony could allow Snowden's location to be pinpointed, the committee would send questions to the US whistleblower and then play back pre-recorded answers in front of the parliament.

quote:

Acht grote techbedrijven protesteren in brief tegen afluisteren NSA

AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter en Yahoo hebben in een gezamenlijke brief protest aangetekend tegen het grootschalig afluisteren van internetdiensten en hun gebruikers.

quote:

Op maandag 9 december 2013 10:51 schreef Perrin het volgende:
Acht grote techbedrijven protesteren in brief tegen afluisteren NSA

quote:

Op maandag 9 december 2013 19:23 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Ja, nu ineens allemaal dit soort acties. Had Snowden niet gelekt was het allemaal gewoon doorgegaan. En ik kan me toch moeilijk voorstellen dat Google en Apple etc dit internetbackbone-aftappen niet doorhadden.

quote:

Op maandag 9 december 2013 19:23 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Ja, nu ineens allemaal dit soort acties. Had Snowden niet gelekt was het allemaal gewoon doorgegaan. En ik kan me toch moeilijk voorstellen dat Google en Apple etc dit internetbackbone-aftappen niet doorhadden.

quote:

Europarlement wil Edward Snowden horen

De Amerikaanse klokkenluider Edward Snowden zal gehoord worden door het Europees Parlement (EP). Over de manier waarop wordt nog onderhandeld, zo klonk het donderdag in Straatsburg.

quote:

Op maandag 9 december 2013 19:23 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Ja, nu ineens allemaal dit soort acties. Had Snowden niet gelekt was het allemaal gewoon doorgegaan. En ik kan me toch moeilijk voorstellen dat Google en Apple etc dit internetbackbone-aftappen niet doorhadden.

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 01:36 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

[..]

De vraag is, wisten de CEO's van Google en Apple het? Ik denk van niet. Die zijn namelijk constant aan het reizen voor meetings en praatjes en hebben vrij weinig inspraak over wat er op technisch vlak gebeurd. Bovendien kunnen ze het op die manier altijd oprecht ontkennen.

Zulke bedrijven zijn dermate groot dat binnenin makkelijk geheime deals kunnen sluipen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 08:19 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

Dan nog zouden ze actie moeten ondernemen zodra ze het te weten kwamen via de media.

Maar ik denk eerlijkgezegd juist dat dit op topniveau wordt geregeld en dat er relatief weinig onderknuppels vanaf weten.

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:02 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

M'n punt is, ik zie niet in waarom de CEO's van een bedrijf op de hoogte zouden moeten zijn.

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:05 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

Omdat me het 't waarschijnlijkst lijkt dat de overheid contact met hen heeft.

En idd een klein team technici zal er ook vanaf weten, maar het lijkt me plausibeler dat die intern worden aangestuurd en niet als infiltranten stiekem op de NSA-loonlijst staan.

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:06 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar in zo'n groot bedrijf heb je natuurlijk wel 10 lagen van bestuur. Dat kleine team kan prima aangestuurd worden door de CTO bijvoorbeeld die er dan vanaf weet, maar die zegt niets tegen de CEO's...

quote:

Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:07 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

En zodra de CEO via een omweg komt te weten wat er speelt in zijn bedrijf, wat denk je dat die met zo'n CTO gaat doen die achter zijn rug om vanalles bekokstooft?

quote:

Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks

WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.

Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America’s most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures set off a national debate about the expansion of the N.S.A.’s powers to spy both at home and abroad, and have left the Obama administration trying frantically to mend relations with allies after his revelations about American eavesdropping on foreign leaders.

A presidential advisory committee that has been examining the security agency’s operations submitted its report to Mr. Obama on Friday. The White House said the report would not be made public until next month, when Mr. Obama announces which of the recommendations he has embraced and which he has rejected.

Mr. Snowden gave his cache of documents to a small group of journalists, and some from that group have shared documents with several news organizations — leading to a flurry of exposures about spying on friendly governments. In an interview with The New York Times in October, Mr. Snowden said he had given all of the documents he downloaded to journalists and kept no additional copies.

In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed. The official, Rick Ledgett, who is heading the security agency’s task force examining Mr. Snowden’s leak, said he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those documents.

“So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Mr. Ledgett told CBS News. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

Mr. Snowden is living and working in Russia under a one-year asylum. The Russian government has refused to extradite Mr. Snowden, who was indicted by the Justice Department in June on charges of espionage and stealing government property, to the United States.

Mr. Snowden has said he would return to the United States if he was offered amnesty, but it is unclear whether Mr. Obama — who would most likely have to make such a decision — would make such an offer, given the damage the administration has claimed Mr. Snowden’s leaks have done to national security.

Because the N.S.A. is still uncertain about exactly what Mr. Snowden took, government officials sometimes first learn about specific documents from reporters preparing their articles for publication — leaving the State Department with little time to notify foreign leaders about coming disclosures.

With the security agency trying to revamp its computer network in the aftermath of what could turn out to be the largest breach of classified information in American history, the Justice Department has continued its investigation of Mr. Snowden.

According to senior government officials, F.B.I. agents from the bureau’s Washington field office, who are leading the investigation, believe that Mr. Snowden methodically downloaded the files over several months while working as a government contractor at the Hawaii facility. They also believe that he worked alone, the officials said.

But for all of Mr. Snowden’s technical expertise, some American officials also place blame on the security agency for being slow to install software that can detect unusual computer activity carried out by the agency’s work force — which, at approximately 35,000 employees, is the largest of any intelligence agency.

An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment.

After a similar episode in 2010 — when an Army private, Chelsea Manning, gave hundreds of thousands of military chat logs and diplomatic cables to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks — the Obama administration took steps intended to prevent another government employee from downloading and disseminating large volumes of classified material.

In October 2011, Mr. Obama signed an executive order establishing a task force charged with “deterring, detecting and mitigating insider threats, including the safeguarding of classified information from exploitation, compromise, or other unauthorized disclosure.” The task force, led by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, has the responsibility of developing policies and new technologies to protect classified information.

But one of the changes, updating computer systems to track the digital meanderings of the employees of intelligence agencies, occurred slowly.

“We weren’t able to flip a switch and have all of those changes made instantly,” said one American intelligence official.

Lonny Anderson, the N.S.A.’s chief technology officer, said in a recent interview that much of what Mr. Snowden took came from parts of the computer system open to anyone with a high-level clearance. And part of his job was to move large amounts of data between different parts of the system.

But, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Snowden’s activities were not closely monitored and did not set off warning signals.

“So the lesson learned for us is that you’ve got to remove anonymity” for those with access to classified systems, Mr. Anderson said during the interview with the Lawfare blog, part of a podcast series the website plans to run this week.

Officials said Mr. Snowden, who had an intimate understanding of the N.S.A.’s computer architecture, would have known that the Hawaii facility was behind other agency outposts in installing monitoring software.

According to a former government official who spoke recently with Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, the general said that at the time Mr. Snowden was downloading the documents, the spy agency was several months away from having systems in place to catch the activity.

As investigations by the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. grind on, the State Department and the White House have absorbed the impact of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures on America’s diplomatic relations with other countries.

“There are ongoing and continuing efforts by the State Department still to reach out to countries and to tell them things about what he took,” said one senior administration official. The official said the State Department often described the spying to foreign leaders as “business as usual” between nations.

quote:

NSA Can 'Easily' Break Cellphone Encryption, Report Says

quote:

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has the technical capacity to crack the most commonly-used cellphone encryption technology, and in doing so it can decode and access the content of calls and text messages, according to a Washington Post report published Friday.

Citing a top-secret document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the report states that the agency can easily break a technology called A5/1, the world's most common stream cipher used to encrypt cellular data as it transmits to cell towers.

SEE ALSO: Will Obama Rein in NSA Surveillance Powers?

Privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, co-author the Post's report, explains that encryption experts have long been aware of the weakness of A5/1. The technology makes use of decades-old 2G GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular network technology.

The so-called "summer of revelations" on NSA surveillance tactics, fueled by Snowden's leaked documents, has brought to light the agency's vast data-collecting capabilities. The NSA's considerable abilities to collect and decode cellular data would seem to allow it to track private conversations on a very wide scale.

Of course, it would be against the law for the NSA to use these capabilities to spy on Americans without a court order. But experts believe other nations have probably developed many of these same surveillance technologies.

quote:

Tech firms meet Obama to press their case for NSA surveillance reform

A delegation of 15 from Silicon Valley, including Tim Cook and Marissa Mayer, visit White House for face-to-face talks

quote:

Senior executives from some the world’s largest technology firms were meeting face to face with Barack Obama on Tuesday to press their case for a major rollback of National Security Agency surveillance.

The White House is hosting the 15-strong delegation from Silicon Valley, which includes the chief executives of Apple, Yahoo and Google, less than 24 hours after a federal judge ruled that the NSA program to collect telephone metadata is likely to be unconstitutional.

Many of the senior tech leaders meeting the president and the vice-president, Joe Biden, have already made public their demand for sweeping surveillance reforms in an open letter that specifically called for a ban on the kind of bulk data collection that the judge ruled on Monday was probably unlawful.

quote:

Tech firms push back against White House efforts to divert NSA meeting

quote:

The top leaders from the worlds biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agencys controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.

Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.

quote:

Merkel compared NSA to Stasi in heated encounter with Obama
German chancellor furious after revelations US intelligence agency listened in on her personal mobile phone

In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.

The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.

Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi."

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."

Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.

In Brussels, the chairman of the US House select committee on intelligence, Mike Rogers, a Republican, said his views on the invitation to Snowden were "not fit to print" and that it was "not a great idea".

Inviting someone "who is wanted in the US and has jeopardised the lives of US soldiers" was beneath the dignity of the European parliament, he said.

He declined to comment on Merkel's alleged remarks to Obama. In comments to the Guardian, he referred to the exchange as "a conversation that may or may not have occurred".

Senior Brussels officials say the EU is struggling to come up with a coherent and effective response to the revelations of mass US and British surveillance of electronic communication in Europe, but that the disclosure that Merkel's mobile had been monitored was a decisive moment.

A draft report by a European parliament inquiry into the affair, being presented on Wednesday and obtained by the Guardian, says there has to be a discussion about the legality of the NSA's operations and also of the activities of European intelligence agencies.

The report drafted by Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP heading the inquiry, says "we have received substantial evidence that the operations by intelligence services in the US, UK, France and Germany are in breach of international law and European law".

Rather than resorting to a European response, Berlin has been pursuing a bilateral pact with the Americans aimed at curbing NSA activities and insisting on a "no-spying pact" between allies.

The NYT reported that Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, had told Berlin that there would be not be a no-espionage agreement, although the Americans had pledged to desist from monitoring Merkel personally.

A high-ranking German official with knowledge of the talks with the White House told the Guardian there had been a "useful exchange of views", but confirmed a final agreement was far from being reached.

The Germans have received assurances that the chancellor's phone was not being monitored and that the US spy agency is not conducting industrial espionage.

However the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, said German and US officials were still in the process of negotiating how any final agreement – the details of which could remain secret between both governments – would be formalised.

Their discussions, which include talks about so-called confidence building measures, are also bound-up with wider discussions with the EU regarding special privacy assurances that might be afforded to its citizens under a future arrangement.

"We want to be assured that not everything that is technically possible will be done," the German official added.

In Germany, the main government minister dealing with the NSA fallout, Hans-Peter Friedrich, has fallen victim to a reshuffle in the new coalition unveiled in Berlin at the weekend. Friedrich, from Bavaria's Christian Social Union, is not seen as an ally of Merkel's and was widely viewed to have performed less than robustly in the exchanges with the Americans.

His replacement as interior minister, by contrast, is a close ally of Merkel's – her former chief of staff and former defence minister, Thomas de Maiziere. Additionally, Merkel has brought a former senior intelligence official into the new coalition.

Alongside De Maiziere at the interior ministry, she has appointed Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, previously deputy head of the domestic intelligence service, Germany's equivalent of MI5.

http://www.theguardian.co(...)ares-nsa-stasi-obama

quote:

Red de democratie, doe als wij en word klokkenluider

Enkele internationaal bekende klokkenluiders en ex-inlichtingenfunctionarissen roepen vandaag in NRC Handelsblad mensen op zich in hun organisaties, net als zij ooit, verdienstelijk te maken als klokkenluider. Wilt u geen tirannie van spionnen in de wereld, meld u dan als klokkenluider, schrijven de zeven whistleblowers.

In elk geval na september 2001 hebben de westerse regeringen en inlichtingendiensten alles in het werk gesteld om het bereik van hun macht te vergroten, ten koste van onze privacy, burgerlijke vrijheden en publieke controle op het beleid.

De doofpot- en complotfantasieën die altijd als paranoïde en Orwelliaans werden beschouwd bleken na Snowden nog niet eens het hele verhaal te zijn.
Het opmerkelijkste is dat we al jaren voor deze gang van zaken worden gewaarschuwd: massale surveillance van hele bevolkingen, militarisering van het internet, het einde van de privacy.

Alles gebeurt in naam van de ‘nationale veiligheid’, die min of meer een kreet is geworden om discussie af te houden en te vermijden dat overheden verantwoording afleggen – verantwoording af kúnnen leggen – omdat alles zich in het duister afspeelt: geheime wetten, geheime uitleg van geheime wetten door geheime rechtbanken – en geen enkele doeltreffende parlementaire controle.