Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

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"Nederland opent deur voor NSA"

<sub>zaterdag 21 sep 2013, 09:33 (Update: 21-09-13, 10:02)

Door research-redacteur Hugo van der Parre</sub>

Onder de leden van de Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) is onrust ontstaan omdat het bestuur een filiaal wil openen in de Verenigde Staten. Ze vrezen dat Amerikaanse spionagediensten dan heel eenvoudig in Nederlandse netwerken kunnen grasduinen.

De Amsterdam Internet Exchange is het belangrijkste internetknooppunt van Nederland en het een na grootste ter wereld. Een groot deel van het internetverkeer met het buitenland en het internetverkeer tussen Nederlandse internetproviders verloopt via dit knooppunt. Meer dan 600 bedrijven en organisaties zijn lid van de vereniging AMS-IX. Daaronder zijn alle internet-providers in ons land.

Felle discussie
Het bestuur wil dat de leden volgende week toestemming geven om onder de vleugels van de AMS-IX een vestiging in de Verenigde Staten te beginnen. Dat zou zakelijk aantrekkelijk zijn.

Een aantal leden noemt uitbreiding in de VS levensgevaarlijk. De Amerikaanse overheid kan dan op grond van de Patriot Act en de FISA-wet eenvoudig data verzamelen die via het knooppunt worden verstuurd. Dat betreft vrijwel alles in Nederland. Inmiddels is op internet een felle discussie losgebarsten tussen de leden.

Een van de initiaftienemers van de discussie is Eric Bais. Hij is directeur van A2B, een bedrijf dat netwerkdiensten levert. Bais is bezorgd dat de Nederlandse infrastructuur met een Amerikaanse vestiging van de AMS-IX vatbaar is voor bemoeienis door geheime diensten als de NSA.

Risico's
Dat denkt ook hoogleraar informatierecht Nico van Eijk van de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Van Eijk: "Amerika kan met de Patriot Act inzage eisen in de datastromen. En dat beperkt zich niet tot de vestiging op Amerikaanse grondgebied. Dat strekt zich ook uit tot alle buitenlandse vertakkingen van het bedrijf".

De directie van AMS-IX wil niet reageren op de kritiek van de leden of een toelichting geven op de plannen. Dat gebeurt pas na de vergadering van 27 september. AMS-IX benadrukt dat tot die tijd met een advocaat alle risico's goed worden afgewogen.

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A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison. And he feels ‘vindicated’ by Snowden leaks.

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Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.

Prosecutors claim Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was guilty of insider trading, and that his prosecution had nothing to do with his refusal to allow spying on his customers without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But to this day, Nacchio insists that his prosecution was retaliation for refusing to break the law on the NSA's behalf.

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http://www.volkskrant.nl/(...)in-Luther-King.dhtml

De Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA heeft in de late jaren '60 en in de jaren '70 telefoongesprekken afgeluisterd van prominente critici van de oorlog in Vietnam. Onder hen waren Martin Luther King en bokser Mohammed Ali.

Dat blijkt uit recent vrijgegeven documenten waarover The Guardian bericht. Het gaat over de periode waarin steeds meer mensen bezwaar kregen tegen de oorlog in Vietnam. Volgens de Britse krant trok de NSA in 'operatie Minaret' alles uit de kast om te proberen het tij te keren. Mogelijk gaat het zelfs om illegale praktijken, aldus The Guardian.

Zo werden telefoongesprekken afgeluisterd van twee Amerikaanse senatoren: de democraat Frank Church uit Idaho en de Republikein Howard Baker uit Tennessee. Overigens was laatstgenoemde juist een groot voorstander van die oorlog. Ook van enkele prominente journalisten werd communicatie onderschept.

Mohammed Ali
In 1967 werd de bokser Mohammed Ali op de spionagelijst geplaatst nadat hij zich openlijk tegen de Vietnamoorlog had gesproken. Ali zat op dat moment in de gevangenis omdat hij weigerde in het leger te dienen. Ook was hij gestript van zijn overwinningen en mocht hij in de VS niet meer vechten. Hij zou in de zes jaar daarna doelwit zijn geweest van de afluisterpraktijken van de NSA.

Ook mensenrechtenactivist Martin Luther King staat op de lijst van mensen die in die periode door de NSA zijn bespioneerd. In totaal gaat het om 1.650 personen, maar van het grootste deel daarvan is de identiteit niet bekendgemaakt.

De afluisterpraktijken kwamen al eerder aan het licht, maar het is voor het eerst dat er namen van mensen die zijn bespioneerd bekend zijn geworden. De NSA deed volgens The Guardian erg veel moeite om de documenten geheim te houden. Alle rapporten werden bijvoorbeeld persoonlijk afgeleverd bij het Witte Huis, nadat ze waren ontdaan van alle logo's en markeringen die ze terug zouden kunnen herleiden naar de NSA. Een aantal topfiguren binnen de NSA zouden de operatie later zelf 'schandelijk, indien niet compleet illegaal' hebben genoemd.

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NSA chief’s admission of misleading numbers adds to Obama administration blunders

The Obama administration’s credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as the chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism successes of the government’s warrantless bulk collection of all Americans’ phone records.

Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.

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Snowden Files: NSA and GCHQ Target TOR Web Browser

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The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity".

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.

Despite Tor's importance to dissidents and human rights organizations, however, the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have devoted considerable efforts to attacking the service, which law enforcement agencies say is also used by people engaged in terrorism, the trade of child abuse images, and online drug dealing.

Privacy and human rights groups have been concerned about the security of Tor following revelations in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica about widespread NSA efforts to undermine privacy and security software. A report by Brazilian newspaper Globo also contained hints that the agencies had capabilities against the network.

While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale online surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps.

One such technique is based on trying to spot patterns in the signals entering and leaving the Tor network, to try to de-anonymise its users. The effort was based on a long-discussed theoretical weakness of the network: that if one agency controlled a large number of the "exits" from the Tor network, they could identify a large amount of the traffic passing through it.

The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated in the documents would rely on the NSA's cable-tapping operation, and the agency secretly operating computers, or 'nodes', in the Tor system. However, one presentation stated that the success of this technique was "negligible" because the NSA has "access to very few nodes" and that it is "difficult to combine meaningfully with passive Sigint".

While the documents confirm the NSA does indeed operate and collect traffic from some nodes in the Tor network, they contain no detail as to how many, and there are no indications that the proposed de-anonymization technique was ever implemented.

Other efforts mounted by the agencies include attempting to direct traffic toward NSA-operated servers, or attacking other software used by Tor users. One presentation, titled 'Tor: Overview of Existing Techniques', also refers to making efforts to "shape", or influence, the future development of Tor, in conjunction with GCHQ.

Another effort involves measuring the timings of messages going in and out of the network to try to identify users. A third attempts to degrade or disrupt the Tor service, forcing users to abandon the anonymity protection.

Such efforts to target or undermine Tor are likely to raise legal and policy concerns for the intelligence agencies.

Foremost among those concerns is whether the NSA has acted, deliberately or inadvertently, against internet users in the US when attacking Tor. One of the functions of the anonymity service is to hide the country of all of its users, meaning any attack could be hitting members of Tor's substantial US user base.

Several attacks result in implanting malicious code on the computer of Tor users who visit particular websites. The agencies say they are targeting terrorists or organized criminals visiting particular discussion boards, but these attacks could also hit journalists, researchers, or those who accidentally stumble upon a targeted site.

The efforts could also raise concerns in the State Department and other US government agencies that provide funding to increase Tor's security – as part of the Obama administration's internet freedom agenda to help citizens of repressive regimes – circumvent online restrictions.

Material published online for a discussion event held by the State Department, for example, described the importance of tools such as Tor.

"[T]he technologies of internet repression, monitoring and control continue to advance and spread as the tools that oppressive governments use to restrict internet access and to track citizen online activities grow more sophisticated. Sophisticated, secure, and scalable technologies are needed to continue to advance internet freedom."

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency whose mission is to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy" through networks such as Voice of America, also supports Tor's development, and uses it to ensure its broadcasts reach people in countries such as Iran and China.

The governments of both these countries have attempted to curtail Tor's use: China has tried on multiple occasions to block Tor entirely, while one of the motives behind Iranian efforts to create a "national internet" entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of those controls.

The NSA's own documents acknowledge the service's wide use in countries where the internet is routinely surveilled or censored. One presentation notes that among uses of Tor for "general privacy" and "non-attribution", it can be used for "circumvention of nation state internet policies" – and is used by "dissidents" in "Iran, China, etc".

Yet GCHQ documents show a disparaging attitude towards Tor users. One presentation acknowledges Tor was "created by the US government" and is "now maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)", a US freedom of expression group. In reality, Tor is maintained by an independent foundation, though has in the past received funding from the EFF.

The presentation continues by noting that "EFF will tell you there are many pseudo-legitimate uses for Tor", but says "we're interested as bad people use Tor". Another presentation remarks: "Very naughty people use Tor".

The technique developed by the NSA to attack Tor users through vulnerable software on their computers has the codename EgotisticalGiraffe, the documents show. It involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs, designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. Among these is a version of the Firefox web browser.

The trick, detailed in a top-secret presentation titled 'Peeling back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe', identified website visitors who were using the protective software and only executed its attack – which took advantage of vulnerabilities in an older version of Firefox – against those people. Under this approach, the NSA does not attack the Tor system directly. Rather, targets are identified as Tor users and then the NSA attacks their browsers.

According to the documents provided by Snowden, the particular vulnerabilities used in this type of attack were inadvertently fixed by Mozilla Corporation in Firefox 17, released in November 2012 – a fix the NSA had not circumvented by January 2013 when the documents were written.

The older exploits would, however, still be usable against many Tor users who had not kept their software up to date.

A similar but less complex exploit against the Tor network was revealed by security researchers in July this year. Details of the exploit, including its purpose and which servers it passed on victims' details to, led to speculation it had been built by the FBI or another US agency.

At the time, the FBI refused to comment on whether it was behind the attack, but subsequently admitted in a hearing in an Irish court that it had operated the malware to target an alleged host of images of child abuse – though the attack did also hit numerous unconnected services on the Tor network.

Roger Dingledine, the president of the Tor project, said the NSA's efforts serve as a reminder that using Tor on its own is not sufficient to guarantee anonymity against intelligence agencies – but showed it was also a great aid in combating mass surveillance.

"The good news is that they went for a browser exploit, meaning there's no indication they can break the Tor protocol or do traffic analysis on the Tor network," Dingledine said. "Infecting the laptop, phone, or desktop is still the easiest way to learn about the human behind the keyboard.

"Tor still helps here: you can target individuals with browser exploits, but if you attack too many users, somebody's going to notice. So even if the NSA aims to surveil everyone, everywhere, they have to be a lot more selective about which Tor users they spy on."

But he added: "Just using Tor isn't enough to keep you safe in all cases. Browser exploits, large-scale surveillance, and general user security are all challenging topics for the average internet user. These attacks make it clear that we, the broader internet community, need to keep working on better security for browsers and other internet-facing applications."

The Guardian asked the NSA how it justified attacking a service funded by the US government, how it ensured that its attacks did not interfere with the secure browsing of law-abiding US users such as activists and journalists, and whether the agency was involved in the decision to fund Tor or efforts to "shape" its development.

The agency did not directly address those questions, instead providing a statement.

It read: "In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, NSA collects only those communications that it is authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes, regardless of the technical means used by those targets or the means by which they may attempt to conceal their communications. NSA has unmatched technical capabilities to accomplish its lawful mission.

"As such, it should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets' use of technologies to hide their communications. Throughout history, nations have used various methods to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others use technology to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that."

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Cabinet was told nothing about GCHQ spying programmes, says Chris Huhne

Ex-minister says he was in 'utter ignorance' of Prism and Tempora and calls for tighter oversight of security services

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Cabinet ministers and members of the national security council were told nothing about the existence and scale of the vast data-gathering programmes run by British and American intelligence agencies, a former member of the government has revealed.

Chris Huhne, who was in the cabinet for two years until 2012, said ministers were in "utter ignorance" of the two biggest covert operations, Prism and Tempora. The former Liberal Democrat MP admitted he was shocked and mystified by the surveillance capabilities disclosed by the Guardian from files leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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Op dinsdag 8 oktober 2013 11:26 schreef andreas612 het volgende:

[..]

volgens mij is dat echt zo'n ruimte als in de serie '24' allemaal geeks jan en alleman te checken met satelieten en shit

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Op dinsdag 8 oktober 2013 13:55 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Zou me niks verbazen als dat ding gewoon eigenlijk al operationeel is

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Op dinsdag 8 oktober 2013 15:31 schreef andreas612 het volgende:

[..]

Die met will smith toch? zo kan het ook inderdaad

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Op dinsdag 8 oktober 2013 18:44 schreef Revolution-NL het volgende:
Wat ik met nog steeds zit af te vragen is wat voor techniek ze gebruiken voor de opslag van alle data. Met conventionele storage lijkt mij dit praktisch onmogelijk.

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Op dinsdag 8 oktober 2013 18:44 schreef Revolution-NL het volgende:
Wat ik met nog steeds zit af te vragen is wat voor techniek ze gebruiken voor de opslag van alle data. Met conventionele storage lijkt mij dit praktisch onmogelijk.

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Op woensdag 9 oktober 2013 10:39 schreef Killaht het volgende:
http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/55(...)op-snelkookpan.dhtml

Dit soort taferelen krijg je dan he. Snelkookpan incident

Het is een geautmatiseerd systeem dat op basis van alle vergaarde informatie van een individu een bepaald profiel maakt, dat het niet altijd klopt blijkt maar weer.

Om het systeem te verzieken zou eigenlijk iedereen dezelfde rare dingen moeten posten via mobiel, internet en telefoon.

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Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.

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Guardian 'naive and arrogant' to publish Snowden articles, says Straw

Former foreign secretary says newspaper not in a position to judge whether its stories will damage national interest


The Guardian has shown "extraordinary naivety and arrogance" over the publication of articles based on NSA documents leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former foreign secretary Jack Straw has said.

Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq war in 2003, said the Guardian was wrong to assume that it could judge whether details from the files would pose a threat to anyone's security. The Guardian has said that it is taking care not to publish documents that would threaten national security or the security of individuals.

The former foreign secretary told the BBC: "I'm not suggesting for a moment anybody in the Guardian gratuitously wants to risk anybody's life. But what I do think is that their sense of power of having these secrets and excitement almost adolescent excitement about these secrets has gone to their head.

"They're blinding themselves about the consequence and also showing an extraordinary naivety and arrogance in implying that they are in a position to judge whether or not particular secrets which they have published are not likely to damage the national interest, and they're not in any position at all to do that."

The remarks by Straw reflect the claim by Oliver Robbins, the cabinet office's deputy national security adviser, that apparently innocuous information in the leaked files could be helpful to terrorists. David Cameron said on Thursday that the Guardian has "on some occasions" acknowledged the sensitivity of the material it holds.

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Video: Edward Snowden wins Sam Adams award

This week Edward Snowden received the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. These videos from the award ceremony are the first of Mr Snowden after being granted asylum in Russia.

The videos show Mr Snowden as he was given the award by Ray McGovern (ex-CIA) who said "Sam Adams Associates are proud to honor Mr. Snowden’s decision to heed his conscience and give priority to the Common Good over concerns about his own personal future. We are confident that others with similar moral fiber will follow his example in illuminating dark corners and exposing crimes that put our civil rights as free citizens in jeopardy.... Just as Private Manning and Julian Assange exposed criminality with documentary evidence, Mr. Snowden’s beacon of light has pierced a thick cloud of deception. And, again like them, he has been denied some of the freedoms that whistleblowers have every right to enjoy."

Also present at the ceremony was WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison who took Mr Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow and obtained his asylum. The previous award winners, all United States Government whistleblowers, Thomas Drake (NSA), Jesselyn Raddack (DoJ) and Coleen Rowley (FBI), were also in attendance. These videos were filmed on the October 9 and are released for the first time today.

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Patriot Act author prepares bill to put NSA bulk collection 'out of business'

Exclusive: Bipartisan bill pulls together existing efforts to dramatically reform the NSA in the wake of Snowden disclosures

The conservative Republican who co-authored America's Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who worked with president George W Bush to give more power to US intelligence agencies after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said the intelligence community had misused those powers by collecting telephone records on all Americans, and claimed it was time "to put their metadata program out of business".

His imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sensenbrenner has called his bill the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring Act – or USA Freedom Act, and a draft seen by the Guardian has four broad aims.

It seeks to limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects; to end "secret laws" by making courts disclose surveillance policies; to create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests; and to allow companies to disclose how many requests for users' information they receive from the USA. The bill also tightens up language governing overseas surveillance to remove a loophole which it has been abused to target internet and email activities of Americans.

Many lawmakers have agreed that some new legislation is required in the wake of the collapse in public trust that followed Snowden's disclosures, which revealed how the NSA was collecting bulk records of all US phone calls in order to sift out potential terrorist targets.

In July, a temporary measure to defund the NSA bulk collection programme was narrowly defeated in a 217 to 205 vote in the House, but Sensenbrenner said the appetite for greater privacy protections had only grown since.

"Opinions have hardened with the revelations over the summer, particularly the inspector general's report that there were thousands of violations of regulations, and the disclosure that NSA employees were spying on their spouses or significant others, which was very chilling," he told the Guardian in an interview.

Instead, the main opposition to Sensenbrenner and Leahy's twin-pronged effort is likely to come from the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, who is supportive of the NSA but who has proposed separate legislation focusing on greater transparency and checks rather than an outright ban on bulk collection.

Sensenbrenner and other reformers have been scathing of this rival legislative approach, calling it a "fig leaf" and questioning the independence of the intelligence committee. "I do not want to see Congress pass a fig leaf because that would allow the NSA to say 'Well, we've cleaned up our act' until the next scandal breaks," he said.

"[Party leaders] are going to have to review what kind of people they put on the intelligence committee. Oversight is as good as the desire of the chairman to do it."

Sensenbrenner also called for the prosecution of Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who admitted misleading the Senate intelligence committee about the extent of bulk collection of telephone records.

"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution," said the congressman.

Clapper has apologised for the incident, but reformers expect a fierce backlash to their proposals to rein in his powers in future. "I anticipate a big fight, and Senator Feinstein has already basically declared war," said Sensenbrenner. "If they use a law like Senator Feinstein is proposing, it will just allow them to do business as usual with a little bit of a change in the optics."

His twin effort with Leahy to introduce legislation via the House and Senate judiciary committees is partly intended to circumvent such opposition among intelligence committee leaders.

But there is plenty of support among other intelligence committee members. Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who were first to seize on Snowden's disclosures as a way to make public their longstanding concerns, recently teamed up with Republican Rand Paul and colleague Richard Blumenthal to propose similar reforms of the NSA in their own bill.

Sensenbrenner insisted the different reform efforts were likely to converge, rather than compete. "I wanted to get a bill passed, and the best way to get a bill passed is to have the chairman of the judiciary committee and the most senior US senator [Leahy] co-sponsoring it," he said. "We need to change the law, and we need to change the law quickly."

Publication of the House version of the USA Freedom bill, jointly sponsored by Democrat John Conyers, has been held up by the government shutdown, which has furloughed a number of congressional legal staff, but is still expected within the next few days.

A spokesman for Leahy's office told the Guardian on Thursday that the senator was still on track to introduce his version of the legislation through the Senate judiciary committee once the shutdown effects had passed.

The main thrust of the bill would tighten section 215 of the Patriot Act to limit the collection of business records such as telephone metadata, to instances where the NSA was able to convince courts set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) that the target was "an agent of a foreign power", was "subject of an investigation" or thought to be "in contact with an agent of a foreign power".

Sensenbrenner said this tighter definition was needed because previous language had been improperly interpreted by Fisa courts. "Having the three qualifications would make it very clear that they have to find out who a bad person is first, get the Fisa order, and then see who that bad person was contacting to get the information rather than find the needle in a very large haystack, which is what the metadata was," he said.

"We had thought that the 2006 amendment, by putting the word 'relevant' in, was narrowing what the NSA could collect. Instead, the NSA convinced the Fisa court that the relevance clause was an expansive rather than contractive standard, and that's what brought about the metadata collection, which amounts to trillions of phone calls."

This approach has been justified by intelligence agencies as the only way to get enough data to allow them to sift through it looking for connections, but Sensebrenner claimed that NSA director general Keith Alexander only pointed to 13 possible suspicious individuals found through this method during his recent Senate testimony.

"The haystack approach missed the Boston marathon bombing, and that was after the Russians told us the Tsarnaev brothers were bad guys," added Sensenbrenner.

Another important aspect to the bill, in the draft seen by the Guardian, is a set of measures that would prevent the NSA using other legal powers to carry on collecting bulk data – even if the Patriot Act language is tightened.

"The concern that I have had is that if the shoe starts pinching on what the NSA is doing, they will simply try to use another mechanism to try to get the metadata and national security letters is the one that would rise to the top," said Sensenbrenner, who described ways to close this potential loophole.

"I have always had a lot of questions about administrative subpoenas such as national security letters, and the bill adds a sunset date for national security letters, which were originally authorised in 1986."

Staff members have been holding discussions behind the scenes about how to make sure the NSA can continue to get access to individual phone records when they do have specific concerns about terrorism activity.

"We will have to figure out some kind of way for the NSA to get records, wether through a Fisa court order or a grand jury subpoena," said Sensenbrenner.

This is likely to be opposed by the security services, who argued in recent congressional testimony that such a system would impose unacceptable delays in obtaining records.

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Op woensdag 9 oktober 2013 21:57 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

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New York Times says UK tried to get it to hand over Snowden documents

Jill Abramson says she was approached by UK embassy officials after announcing collaboration with Guardian over NSA files

The editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, has confirmed that senior British officials attempted to persuade her to hand over secret documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Giving the newspaper's first official comments on the incident, Abramson said that she was approached by the UK embassy in Washington after it was announced that the New York Times was collaborating with the Guardian to explore some of the files disclosed by Snowden. Among the files are several relating to the activities of GCHQ, the agency responsible for signals interception in the UK.

"They were hopeful that we would relinquish any material that we might be reporting on, relating to Edward Snowden. Needless to say I considered what they told me, and said no," Abramson told the Guardian.

The incident shows the lengths to which the UK government has gone to try to discourage press coverage of the Snowden leaks. In July, the government threatened to take legal action against the Guardian that could have prevented publication, culminating in the destruction of computer hard drives containing some of Snowden's files.

Abramson said the spectacle of angle grinders and drills being used to destroy evidence in a newspaper basement was hard to conceive in the US, where the First Amendment offers free speech guarantees. "I can't imagine that. The only equivalent I can think of is years ago when the New York Times was enjoined by a lower court from publishing the Pentagon papers, but the supreme court came in and overruled that decision. Prior restraint is pretty much unthinkable to me in this country."

Abramson has been executive editor of the New York Times, America's largest and most influential newspaper, since 2011. She said that the conversation with the UK's Washington embassy was the extent so far of British attempts to influence the paper's editorial decisions in relation to Snowden.

Within the US, the Obama administration has asked on several occasions for the New York Times to consider withholding certain information from its stories, and the paper always gives sober consideration to the requests, she said, based on a careful assessment of the possible damage to national security accruing from publication. "Our default position is usually to weigh on the side of informing the public."

In both the US and Britain, Abramson argued, "there's a war on terror being waged in the name of the public, and the public has a right to have information about it. That's critical. The Guardian as well as the New York Times are providing a very valuable service, allowing people to decide for themselves whether the intelligence agencies are being too intrusive in their data collection.

"President Obama has said he welcomes such a debate, and I think it's not only healthy but vital to have that."

Abramson added that she found the reaction of the Daily Mail to the series of stories published by the Guardian on the back of the Snowden leaks "unusual to me". On Thursday, the Mail accused the Guardian of "lethal irresponsibility" in revealing the vast data grab of ordinary people's phone and internet records by the NSA.

"The political tradition is different, and British press laws are more restrictive," she said. "There isn't the same acceptance or devotion to the idea that we have here: that a free press is fundamental to free society, and that the free flow of information is essential to having an informed public making decisions about how they want to be governed."