Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

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Battle brews as tech companies attempt to fend off NSA hacking

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The NSA allegedly gathered millions of records from Google and Yahoo data centers around the world, but soon, the agency might have a much harder time trying to collect this type of data.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and other prominent technology companies are investing heavily in stronger, 2048-bit encryption. Due to computing power constraints, it's expected to be more than a decade before this type of encryption can be easily overcome.

Google, one of the leaders in the effort, announced in May that it would switch over to 2,048-bit encryption keys by the end of 2013. Yahoo recently confirmed to Bloomberg, which spoke with several tech companies that are investing in new encryption, that it will make 2048-bit encryption standard by January 2014 for all its Mail users. Facebook also plans to move to 2048-bit encryption, a spokeswoman told Bloomberg, and will roll out "perfect forward secrecy," a feature that prevents snoopers from accessing user data even if they can access the company's security codes.

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UK's reputation is damaged by reaction to Edward Snowden, says UN official

Special rapporteur on freedom of expression says he is alarmed at political response to revelations of mass surveillance

A senior United Nations official responsible for freedom of expression has warned that the British government's response to the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is doing serious damage to the UK's international reputation for investigative journalism and press freedom.

Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said he was alarmed at the political reaction following the revelations about the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA).

"I have been absolutely shocked about the way the Guardian has been treated, from the idea of prosecution to the fact that some members of parliament even called it treason," said La Rue. "I think that is unacceptable in a democratic society."

La Rue's intervention comes as a delegation of the world's leading editors and publishers prepares for a "press freedom mission" to the UK to raise their own concerns about the British government's position.

Organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the delegation will arrive in January and include publishers and editors from five continents. WAN-IFRA says the mission is the first of its kind to the UK and has been prompted by growing concerns about UK government interference in press regulation and the political pressure on the Guardian. The delegation is expected to meet government and opposition leaders, press industry figures and civil society organisations.

"We are concerned that these actions not only seriously damage the United Kingdom's historic international reputation as a staunch defender of press freedom, but provide encouragement to non-democratic regimes to justify their own repressive actions," said Vincent Peyrègne, chief executive of the Paris-based WAN-IFRA.

The Guardian, and major media organisations in other countries, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by GCHQ and the NSA in June.

The articles have sparked a global debate on the scale and oversight of surveillance by the US and UK intelligence agencies. However, in the UK there has been growing political pressure on the Guardian, with calls for it to be prosecuted, a decision to call the editor, Alan Rusbridger, to give evidence to the home affairs select committee and a warning from David Cameron that he would take "tougher measures" against the newspaper unless it demonstrated "some social responsibility".

On Friday the New York Times voiced its concern over the political climate in the UK. In an editorial entitled "British press freedom under threat" it stated: "Britain has a long tradition of a free, inquisitive press. That freedom, so essential to democratic accountability, is being challenged by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron."

It pointed out that unlike the US, Britain has no constitutional guarantee of press freedom. "Parliamentary committees and the police are now exploiting that lack of protection to harass, intimidate and possibly prosecute the Guardian newspaper for its publication of information based on National Security Agency documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden … The global debate now taking place about intelligence agencies collecting information on the phone calls, emails and internet use of private citizens owes much to the Guardian's intrepid journalism. In a free society, the price for printing uncomfortable truths should not be parliamentary and criminal inquisition."

In an interview with the Guardian La Rue said the political fallout in the UK was unacceptable.

"When you are in public office you understand that the role of the press is to investigate things that are done right or things that are done wrong and make it known to the public. And if you are in office you know that you come under public scrutiny and public scrutiny comes with public criticism and you cannot use national security as an argument and much less challenge as treason something that is informing the public, even if it is embarrassing information for those that are in office."

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Britse geheime dienst bespioneert hotels

De Britse geheime dienst GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) houdt elke dag in de hele wereld reserveringen in hotels in de gaten waar doorgaans veel hoge regeringsfunctionarissen of diplomaten komen. De reserveringssystemen worden bespied met het programma 'Koninklijke Conciërge'. Dit blijkt zondag volgens het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel uit publicaties van de Amerikaanse 'klokkenluider' Edward Snowden.

Van minstens 350 hotels weet GCHQ wie er wanneer verblijven. Dat kan aanleiding zijn om telefoons of computers in de betreffende hotelkamers af te luisteren of spionnen naar het hotel in kwestie te sturen.

Systeembeheerder Snowden heeft een schat aan vertrouwelijke informatie gestolen bij zijn voormalige werkgever, de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA (National Security Agency). Hij doet sindsdien boekjes open over de omvangrijke en technisch geraffineerde wijze waarop de Amerikaanse en Britse geheime diensten communicatie bespioneren en in kaart brengen.

Diplomatieke rel
De Brits-Amerikaanse spionage leverde een diplomatieke rel op toen uitlekte dat ook regeringsleiders, onder wie de Duitse bondskanselier Angela Merkel, zijn afgeluisterd door de NSA. De Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken John Kerry hoopt die schade snel te repareren.

Volgens Der Spiegel wil Kerry naar Berlijn komen zodra de nieuwe Duitse regering geïnstalleerd is. Hij hoopt een 'renaissance' in de transatlantische betrekkingen te realiseren. President Barack Obama beloofde eerder al dat Merkel niet afgeluisterd wordt of zal worden. Over spionage in het verleden liet hij zich niet uit.

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Grilling of spy chiefs ‘a total pantomime’

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AN UNPRECEDENTED public appearance by UK spy chiefs has been labelled a “total pantomime” after it emerged that they were told of questions in advance.

A private deal was struck with the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to ensure they did not face any surprises when they were grilled before an audience, sources close to Westminster’s secretive intelligence and security committee (ISC) have revealed.

The agreement followed a year of delicate negotiations and was a condition for the three spy bosses to subject themselves to public cross- examination.

The disclosure explains the apparently “soft” line of questioning during the hearing and why there were relatively few revelations. Some MPs on the committee believe the meticulous choreography and scripted questions were a reasonable price for securing cooperation from the three agency's for the 90-minute televised session.

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Yahoo to add encryption to all services in wake of NSA spying revelations

CEO Marissa Mayer moves to calm privacy fears after reports US spy agency gained access to Google and Yahoo data centres

Yahoo will add encryption to all its products by spring 2014, chief Marissa Mayer has announced, in a bid to tackle users’ privacy fears in the wake of reports that the National Security Agency had accessed the tech firm's data centres.

In a blogpost on Monday, Mayer said: “We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it. As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo.

“I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy.”

Mayer’s move comes after the Washington Post reported last month that the NSA had broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centres around the world.

According to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with officials, the NSA, in partnership with its British counterpart GCHQ, has been copying large amounts of data as it flows across fibre-optic cables that carry information between the companies’ worldwide data centres.

After the story broke, Yahoo said government attempts to circumvent its online security systems offered “substantial potential for abuse”. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, called the news “really outrageous”.

Yahoo recently announced it was beefing up security on its email service by introducing https (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across its network by 8 January 2014.

The company said it would now:

Encrypt all information that moves between its data centers by the end of the first quarter of 2014;

Offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to/from Yahoo by the end of Q1 2014;

Work closely with international partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded mail accounts are https-enabled.

Google too is racing to encrypt its data. Executives at the tech giant refer to an “arms race” with US authorities and others who want unauthorised access to its users’ data. Executives say the company has been improving and extending its encryption of data since the Snowden stories first broke, doubling the length of its digital keys and implementing new measures to detect fraudulent attempts to access its information.

Similar moves to add greater encryption and other security measures are under way at Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. All the tech giants feel that their reputations have been damaged by the Snowden leaks and insist that they never hand over information to the NSA without a legal order.

The tech firms are currently lobbying to be allowed to make more disclosures about the number of NSA orders they receive. Currently those orders are dealt with under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the companies are gagged from disclosing details.

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Surveillance technology out of control, says Lord Ashdown

Former Lib Dem leader says it is time for high-level inquiry to address fundamental questions about privacy in 21st century

The technology used by Britain's spy agencies to conduct mass surveillance is "out of control", raising fears about the erosion of civil liberties at a time of diminished trust in the intelligence services, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown.

The peer said it was time for a high-level inquiry to address fundamental questions about privacy in the 21st century, and railed against "lazy politicians" who frighten people into thinking "al-Qaida is about to jump out from behind every bush and therefore it is legitimate to forget about civil liberties". "Well it isn't," he added.

Ashdown talks frequently to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, and is chair of the the Liberal Democrats' general election team. Though he said he was speaking for himself, his views are understood to be shared by other senior members of the Liberal Democrats in government, who are also keen for some kind of broad inquiry into the subject.

This idea is also supported by Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ. He told the Guardian he was in favour of an inquiry and thought it would be wrong to "dismiss the idea of a royal commission out of hand". It was important to balance the need for the agencies to have powerful capabilities, and the necessity of ensuring they did not use them in a way parliament had not intended, Omand added.

Ashdown is the latest senior politician to demand a review of the powers of Britain's intelligence agencies – GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – and the laws and oversight which underpin their activities.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ashdown said surveillance should only be conducted against specific targets when there was evidence against them. Dragnet surveillance was unacceptable, he added.

Ashdown made clear revelations in the Guardian about GCHQ and its American counterpart, the National Security Agency, had raised important issues that "could not be ignored or swept aside in a barrage of insults".

He also criticised the Labour party, which was in power when the agencies began testing and building many of their most powerful surveillance capabilities. Labour's former home secretary Jack Straw was responsible for introducing the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000 (Ripa), which made the programmes legal.

"Ripa was a disgraceful piece of legislation," Ashdown said. "Nobody put any thought into it. Labour just took the words they were given by the intelligence agencies. I don't blame the intelligence agencies.

"We charge them with the very serious business of keeping us secure and of course they want to have powers. But it's the duty of government to ensure those powers don't destroy our liberties and Labour utterly failed to do this."

One consequence of Labour's negligence was the development of surveillance techniques that could damage civil liberties and erode privacy, said Ashdown.

He said that he was "frightened by the erosion of our liberties" and while accepting that there was a need to keep the nation safe it was the "habit of politicians who are lazy about the preservation of our liberties or don't mind seeing them destroyed, to play an old game.

"They tell frightened citizens: 'If you give me some of your liberties, I will make you safer'".

Ashdown said that as a young man in 1960s he was taken to a vast Post Office shed in central London where spies were steaming open letters. Recalling being met by "a deep fog of steam" after entering the room, he said that the place was "filled with diligent men and women, each with a boiling kettle on their desk, steaming open letters". It was appropriate for the state to intervene in the private communications of its citizens, but the peer added "only in cases where there is good evidence to believe the nation's security is being threatened, or arguably, when a really serious crime has been committed".

The former party leader said that intercepting communications needed to be "targeted on an individual and not classes of individuals or, as at the moment, the whole nation" and argued that ought to be sanctioned by a third-party, preferably by a judge, or if not a member of the cabinet.

Ashdown said he did not believe Britain's intelligence agencies were out of control, but he said the same was not true of technology.

"We need a proper inquiry to decide what liberties and privacies ought to be accorded in the new interconnected world, and what powers of intrusion ought to be given to the state. The old laws that applied in the age of the steaming kettle will no longer do. The old protections are no longer good enough," he said.

Ashdown said the Guardian's reporting of the NSA files had been "helpful because it had raised this important issue to the point where sensible people understand this inquiry is now necessary".

An inquiry also needed to be set in the context of people's privacy expectations, he added, noting: "People today seem more casual about their privacy than they used to be. They don't seem to mind when their privacy is breached when they use Google, Facebook and other social media."

He added that he hoped this had not "changed the public's attitude towards the state's power to intrude into their privacy" but argued this was the fundamental question that needed to be addressed.

Ashdown said he thought the agencies would welcome an inquiry too, saying that they "recognise the mechanisms are no longer sufficient" and he doubted whether such an exercise would be "inimical to the heads of the secret services".

The Lib Dem also dismissed the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, which is supposed to scrutinise the agencies.

He said that it was an institution "wholly incapable of coping" with the new circumstances.

Although he was careful to be respectful of its Conservative chair, Ashdown argued that "we are no longer in the age when a grandee's emollient words are enough to assure us that our liberties are safe" and concluded that the committee was "past its time".

Ashdown defended the Guardian's reporting of the issues over the last five months, and the paper's right to publish material that it deemed in the public interest.

He said: "I am not going to back every single thing the Guardian has done. But overall, in my view, the Guardian has done a very important in job exposing a really important issue that must now be properly considered."

But he also criticised Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked files to the Guardian, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel.

"When Snowden first broke cover, I had quite a lot of admiration for him. Here was a whistleblower breaking surface on an issue that is certainly important. But I have to say that the way he has behaved since has diminished that admiration enormously. It seems to me this is becoming more about vanity."

Meanwhile, Omand said the ISC had to be given a chance to review the work of the agencies in an inquiry that it announced last month.

"Much now depends first upon the ISC and whether their latest inquiry can rise above the current clamour to a calm and dispassionate examination of the capabilities needed to keep our people safe and secure, and at the same time, how public confidence can be maintained that under no circumstances could these powerful capabilities be used in ways that parliament did not intend."

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Fisa court order that allowed NSA surveillance is revealed for first time

Fisa court judge who authorised massive tapping of metadata was hesitant but felt she could not stand in the way

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A secret court order that authorised a massive trawl by the National Security Agency of Americans' email and internet data was published for the first time on Monday night, among a trove of documents that also revealed a judge's concern that the NSA "continuously" and "systematically" violated the limits placed on the program.

The order by the Fisa court, almost certainly its first ruling on the controversial program and published only in heavily redacted form, shows that it granted permisson for the trawl in part beacause of the type of devices used for the surveillance. Even the judge approving the spying called it a “novel use” of government authorities.

Another later court order found that what it called "systemic overcollection" had taken place.

Transparency lawsuits brought by civil liberties groups compelled the US spy agencies on Monday night to shed new light on the highly controversial program, whose discontinuation in 2011 for unclear reasons was first reported by the Guardian based on leaks by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In a heavily redacted opinion Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former presiding judge of the Fisa court, placed legal weight on the methods of surveillance employed by the NSA, which had never before collected the internet data of “an enormous volume of communications”.

The methods, known as pen registers and trap-and-trace devices, record the incoming and outgoing routing information of communications – traditionally phone calls made between individual users. Kollar-Kotelly ruled that acquiring the metadata, and not the content, of email and internet usage in bulk was harmonious with the “purpose” of Congress and prior court rulings – even though no surveillance statute ever authorized it and top officials at the justice department and the FBI threatened to resign in 2004 over what they considered its dubious legality.

“The court recognizes that, by concluding that these definitions do not restrict the use of pen registers or trap-and-trace devices to communication facilities associated with individual users, it is finding that these definitions encompass an exceptionally broad form of collection,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly in an opinion whose date is redacted.

The type of data collected under the program included information on the "to", "from" and "bcc" lines of an email rather than the content. According to the government’s declaration to Kollar-Kotelly the NSA would keep the internet metadata “online” and available to analysts to search through for 18 months, after which it would be stored in an “‘offline’ tape system” available to relatively few officials. It would have to be destroyed four and a half years after initial collection.

Metadata, wrote Kollar-Kotelly, enjoyed no protection under the fourth amendment to the US constitution, a precedent established by the supreme court in 1979 in a single case on which the NSA relies currently.

Still, Kollar-Kotelly conceded that she was blessing “a novel use of statutory authorities for pen register/trap and trace surveillance”.

While at times Kollar-Kotelly appeared in her ruling to be hesitant about granting NSA broad authorities to collect Americans’ internet metadata, “deference”, she wrote, “should be given to the fully considered judgment of the executive branch in assessing and responding to national security threats and in determining the potential significance of intelligence-related information.”

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Repeated attacks hijack huge chunks of Internet traffic, researchers warn

Huge chunks of Internet traffic belonging to financial institutions, government agencies, and network service providers have repeatedly been diverted to distant locations under unexplained circumstances that are stoking suspicions the traffic may be surreptitiously monitored or modified before being passed along to its final destination.

Researchers from network intelligence firm Renesys made that sobering assessment in a blog post published Tuesday. Since February, they have observed 38 distinct events in which large blocks of traffic have been improperly redirected to routers at Belarusian or Icelandic service providers. The hacks, which exploit implicit trust placed in the border gateway protocol used to exchange data between large service providers, affected "major financial institutions, governments, and network service providers" in the US, South Korea, Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Libya, and Iran.

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Exclusive: Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable.

The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services. American representatives have made it clear that they won't tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network. The stakes are high, particularly in Washington -- which is seeking to contain an international backlash against NSA spying -- and in Brasilia, where Brazilian President Dilma Roussef is personally involved in monitoring the U.N. negotiations.

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Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work

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When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It's the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA's Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States' biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

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NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software

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The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this.

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NRC: NSA kijkt in 50.000 netwerken

_{zaterdag 23 nov 2013, 03:43 (Update: 23-11-13, 08:30)}

De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA heeft wereldwijd 50.000 computernetwerken besmet. Dat blijkt uit een geheime presentatie van de dienst, schrijft NRC Handelsblad. De krant heeft documenten ingezien van NSA-klokkenluider Edward Snowden.

Dat de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst buitenlandse computersystemen infiltreerde was al langer bekend. De NSA installeert in het geheim kwaadaardige software, zogenoemde malware, op computersystemen. Zo kan op grote schaal vertrouwelijke informatie worden weggesluisd.

85.000
De operatie draagt de codenaam GENIE. De Amerikaanse krant Washington Post meldde in augustus dat het aantal besmette netwerken in 2008 20.000 bedroeg.

Nu blijkt dus uit de niet eerder door Snowden openbaar gemaakte presentatie dat het aantal al meer dan verdubbeld is. Volgens de documenten die de NRC heeft ingezien moet het aantal computernetwerken waar de NSA mee kan kijken binnen een paar jaar zijn uitgegroeid naar 85.000.

Hackers
De operaties worden uitgevoerd door honderden hackers van een speciale NSA-eenheid. Niet alleen kan informatie worden weggesluisd, ook kan met de schadelijke software cyberaanvallen worden uitgevoerd.

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The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it

The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism

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Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

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But the work central to his prosecution began in 2009, when Brown created Project PM, "dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance." Brown was then moved by the 2010 disclosures by WikiLeaks and the oppressive treatment of Bradley Manning to devote himself to online activism and transparency projects, including working with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. He has no hacking skills, but used his media savvy to help promote and defend the group, and was often referred to (incorrectly, he insists) as the Anonymous spokesman. He was particularly interested in using what Anonymous leaked for his journalism. As Brown told me several days ago in a telephone interview from the Texan prison where he is being held pending trial, he devoted almost all of his waking hours over the last several years to using these documents to dig into the secret relationships and projects between these intelligence firms and federal agencies.

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N.S.A. May Have Penetrated Internet Cable Links

SAN FRANCISCO — The recent revelation that the National Security Agency was able to eavesdrop on the communications of Google and Yahoo users without breaking into either companies’ data centers sounded like something pulled from a Robert Ludlum spy thriller.

How on earth, the companies asked, did the N.S.A. get their data without them knowing about it?

The most likely answer is a modern spin on a century-old eavesdropping tradition.

People knowledgeable about Google and Yahoo’s infrastructure say they believe that government spies bypassed the big Internet companies and hit them at a weak spot — the fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world that are owned by companies like Verizon Communications, the BT Group, the Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications. In particular, fingers have been pointed at Level 3, the world’s largest so-called Internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo.

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NSA surveillance: Europe threatens to freeze US data-sharing arrangements

After Edward Snowden revelations, EU executive underlines US compliance with European law and 'how things have gone badly'

The EU executive is threatening to freeze crucial data-sharing arrangements with the US because of the Edward Snowden revelations about the mass surveillance of the National Security Agency.

The US will have to adjust their surveillance activities to comply with EU law and enable legal redress in the US courts for Europeans whose rights may have been infringed, said Viviane Reding, the EU's justice and rights commissioner who is negotiating with the US on the fallout from the NSA scandal.

European businesses need to compete on a level playing field with US rivals, Reding told the Guardian.

The EU commissioner said there was little she or Brussels could do about the activities of the NSA's main partner in mass surveillance, Britain's General Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, since secret services in the EU were the strict remit of national governments. The commission has demanded but failed to obtain detailed information from the British government on how UK surveillance practices are affecting other EU citizens.

"I have direct competence in law enforcement but not in secret services. That remains with the member states. In general, secret services are national," said the commissioner, from Luxembourg.

As a result of the Snowden disclosures, the EU has reviewed existing data-sharing agreements with the Americans concerning commercial swaps between US and European companies, information traded aimed at suppressing international terrorist funding, and the supply of information on transatlantic air passengers. It is also rethinking ongoing negotiations over exchanging data with the Americans on judicial and police co-operation. And it is drafting new Europe-wide data protection rules requiring US internet companies operating in the EU to obtain permission to transfer data to the US and to restrict US intelligence access to it.

Pressing the Americans in negotiations in Washington last week, Reding was unable to obtain US figures on the scale of the US surveillance of Europeans.

The commercial data exchange, known as "Safe Harbor", was found to be flawed.

"The commission will underline that things have gone very badly indeed. Our analysis is Safe Harbor seems not to be safe. We're asking the US not just to speak, but to act," Reding said. "There is always a possibility to scrap Safe Harbor … It's important that these recommendations are acted on by the US side by summer 2014. Next summer is a Damocles sword. It's a real to-do list. Enforcement is absolutely critical. Safe Harbor cannot be only an empty shell."

The commission is to come forward on Wednesday with a set of recommendations addressing the risks exposed by Snowden. The package was agreed in Brussels on Monday, said senior officials, but is opposed by Britain's representative in the commission, Lady Ashton.

The Snowden disclosures are "a wake-up call for the EU and its member states to advance swiftly on data protection reform", the commission is expected to say."The question has arisen whether the large-scale collection and processing of personal information under US surveillance programmes is necessary and proportionate to meet the interests of national security … EU citizens do not enjoy the same rights and procedural safeguards as Americans."

Reding stressed that US concessions on legal redress were central to Brussels' demands. American citizens in Europe can go to the courts if they feel their rights are infringed. Europeans without right of residence in America may not.

"For two years I have asked for reciprocity," said Reding. "I couldn't get that. It needs a change of [US] legislation and the administration has always told me they couldn't get that through."

Senior EU officials are cautiously confident that the Obama administration realises the damage done to transatlantic trust by the Snowden leaks and that it will act to assuage some of the EU concerns.

"The US tone has changed," said a senior official present at the Washington negotiations last week. "The Americans were always stonewalling. Now the cat is out of the bag. We are seeing movement."

US flexibility contrasted with outright British hostility to EU moves to reinforce privacy rights, the officials said. The new EU rules being drafted on data protection were opposed openly "150%" by the British, said another senior official. "There's nothing new here."

But the Germans were also opposed, arguing that the new regime was not strict enough. The Scandinavians and some east Europeans also had some reservations about new data privacy rules from Brussels, suggesting they will have trouble surviving in current form.

The aim is to get the new regulations through the legislative cycle by next May, but that looks unlikely.

Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner for home affairs, is to declare on Wednesday that the onus is on Washington to come clean about the Snowden disclosures.

"Serious concerns still remain following the revelations," she will say. "If the US wants to overcome current tensions, they need to shed full light on these allegations. Our co-operation with the US in the fight against terrorism has been put into question by the NSA revelations."

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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?

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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.

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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.

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NSA review panel to release findings on US surveillance practices – live

quote:

Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:39 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:42 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Ik had begrepen in een van de berichten van jouw vorige linkjes dat ze wel iets gaan reformen, vooral de items die Snowden reeds bekend heeft gemaakt, maar dat het qua surveillance grotendeels blijft zoals het nu is.

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Op donderdag 19 december 2013 01:48 schreef Woods het volgende:
Zou het zelfs zo kunnen zijn dat ze kunnen sturen wie er aan de macht komt in een bepaald land(als je anti-vs ofzo bent dat ze je dan eventueel killen ofzo)?

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Barack Obama’s NSA fine-print problem

quote:

An independent panel’s call for major changes to the nation’s surveillance programs ups the pressure on President Barack Obama to back serious reforms.
But the big changes the committee is calling for may be less vexing for Obama than one painful, half-buried conclusion: Vacuuming up all that data the National Security Agency collects in its call-tracking database, the panel says, hasn’t actually done much to protect the country from terrorism.

And so the panel’s report raises a pointed question: If collecting huge volumes of metadata on telephone calls from, to and within the United States doesn’t bring much benefit, just how much political capital is Obama willing to spend to keep the program going?

The review group’s finding that the much-debated metadata program hasn’t really accomplished much isn’t mentioned in the report’s executive summary or any of the 46 recommendations, but it appears, in an understated tone, about a third of the way into the 300-plus-page document released by the White House on Wednesday.

“Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders,” the report says.

In a footnote a few pages later, the panel members are even more blunt: The section 215 telephony meta-data program has made only a modest contribution to the nations security and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.

Under the current program, the NSA gets daily updates with information on calls made or received in the United States. That info is placed for five years in a database that authorities can search to try to establish with which numbers a terror suspect has been in contact. Authorities say they authorized fewer than 300 numbers last year for searches in that database.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwyRzybr

Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwx6TYUu

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Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts

quote:

Matt Blaze has been pointing out that when you read the new White House intelligence task force report and its recommendations on how to reform the NSA and the wider intelligence community, that there may be hints to other excesses not yet revealed by the Snowden documents. Trevor Timm may have spotted a big one. In the recommendation concerning increasing security in online communications, the second sub-point sticks out like a sore thumb:

quote:

Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

quote:

Obama concedes NSA bulk collection of phone data may be unnecessary

• President: 'There may be a better way of skinning the cat'
• 'Potential abuse' of collected data cited as concern

President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy.

In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence.

“In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

Though insisting he will not make a final decision until January, this is the furthest the president has gone in backing calls to dismantle the programme to collect telephone data, a practice the NSA claims has legal foundation under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This week, a federal judge said the program “very likely” violates the US constitution.

“There are ways we can do this potentially that give people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, sufficient oversight and transparency,” Obama added. “Programmes like 215 could be redesigned in ways that give you the same information when you need it without creating these potentials for abuse. That’s exactly what we should be doing: to evaluate things in a very clear specific way and moving forward on changes. And that’s what I intend to do.”

He promised a meaningful response to a review panel that reported earlier this week, which urged more transparency in surveillance activities. “Just because we can do something it doesn’t mean we necessarily should,” he told reporters at the White House.

The president also went further than his review panel in suggesting the US needed to rein in its overseas surveillance activities. “We have got to provide more confidence to the international community. In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter any more,” he said. “The values that we have got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders, perhaps more systematically than we have done in the past.”

Obama pointedly declined to be drawn into a debate about possible amnesty for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose revelations about the NSA have sparked intense internal deliberation about changing US surveillance activities. The president distinguished between Snowden’s leaks and the debate those leaks prompted, which he said was “an important conversation we needed to have”, but left open the question of whether Snowden should still be prosecuted.

“The way in which these disclosures happened has been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities,” Obama said. “I think that there was a way for us to have this conversation without that damage. As important and as necessary as this debate has been, it’s important to keep in mind this has done unnecessary damage.”

Ben Wizner, Snowden's attorney, told the Guardian: “The president said that we could have had this important debate without Snowden, but no one seriously believes we would have. And now that a federal court and the president’s own review panel have agreed that the NSA’s activities are illegal and unwise, we should be thanking Snowden, not prosecuting him.”

The president would not comment on a suggestion last weekend by Richard Ledgett, the NSA official investigating the Snowden leaks, that an amnesty might be appropriate in exchange for the return of the data Snowden took from the agency.

Obama said he could not comment specifically because Snowden was “under indictment”, something not previously disclosed. While the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden on espionage-related charges in June, there has been no public subsequent indictment, although it is possible one exists under gag order.

The Justice Department referred comment on a Snowden indictment to the White House. Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, clarified that Obama was referring to the criminal complaint against Snowden. It remains unclear if there is an indictment under seal.

Conspicuously, Obama declined to rebut one assessment from his surveillance review group – that the bulk collection of US call data was not essential to stopping a terrorist attack.

Instead, he contended that there had been “no abuse” of the bulk phone data collection. But in 2009, a judge on the secret surveillance court prevented the NSA from searching through its databases of US phone information after discovering “daily violations” resulting from NSA searches of Americans’ phone records without reasonable suspicion of connections to terrorism.

That data was inaccessible to the NSA for almost all of 2009, before the Fisa court was convinced the NSA had sufficient safeguards in place for preventing similar violations.

In another indication of the shifting landscape on surveillance, the telecoms giant AT&T announced on Friday that it will begin publishing a semi-annual report about its complicity with government surveillance requests. AT&T followed its competitor Verizon, which announced a similar move on Thursday.

“We believe clear legal frameworks with accountability and oversight are required to strike the right balance between protecting individual privacy and civil liberties, and protecting the national and personal security, a balance we all desire. We take our responsibility to protect our customers' information and privacy very seriously and pledge to continue to do so to the fullest extent possible,” said AT&T vice-president Wayne Watts.

The first such report is expected for early 2014, Watts said. While technology firms like Yahoo and Google have pushed for greater transparency about providing their customer data to the government, the telecommunications firms – which have cooperated with the NSA since the agency’s 1952 inception – did not join them before the events of the past week.

quote:

Op zondag 22 december 2013 18:33 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
http://m.volkskrant.nl/vk(...)avigationItemId=2664

Nederland wordt plotseling overspoeld met data centers

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

Internet privacy as important as human rights, says UN's Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay compares uproar over mass surveillance to response that helped defeat apartheid during Today programme

The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.

Pillay has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.

The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously. "I don't grade human rights," she said. "I feel I have to look after and promote the rights of all persons. I'm not put off by the lifetime experience of violations I have seen."

She said apartheid ended in South Africa principally because the international community co-operated to denounce it, adding: "Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections."

The UN general assembly unanimously voted last week to adopt a resolution, introduced by Germany and Brazil, stating that "the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy". Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, were among those spied on, according to the documents leaked by Snowden.

The resolution called on the 193 UN member states "to review their procedures, practices and legislation regarding the surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data, with a view to upholding the right to privacy of all their obligations under international human rights law". It also directed Pillay to publish a report on the protection and promotion of privacy "in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance ... including on a mass scale". She told Berners-Lee it was "very important that governments now want to discuss the matters of mass surveillance and right to privacy in a serious way".

Berners-Lee has warned that online surveillance undermines confidence in the internet, and last week published an open letter, with more than 100 free speech groups and leading activists, to protest against the routine interception of data by governments around the world.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 december 2013 23:26 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:
Dat zijn positieve geluiden van Obama. Dus hij begrijpt dat het abuse of power gevaar het grootste issue is in dat hele NSA afluistergebeuren.

quote:

The British firm laying the cable, Global Marine Systems, is plotting a new route that is shorter than any previously taken by a transatlantic cable. As closely as possible, it will follow "the great circle" flight path followed by London-to-New York flights.

"We spent 18 months planning the route," says Mike Saunders, Hibernia Atlantic's vice-president of business development. "If it ever gets beaten for speed we end up giving our customers their money back, basically, so my boss would kill me if we got it wrong."

quote:

When it opens in 2013, Project Express will be the fastest cable across the Atlantic, reducing the time it takes data to travel round-trip between New York and London to 59.6 milliseconds from the current top speed of 64.8 milliseconds, according to Hibernia Atlantic. Those five milliseconds might not seem like a big deal, but to the handful of electronic trading firms that will have exclusive access to the cable, it will be a huge advantage. “That extra five milliseconds could be worth millions every time they hit the button,” says Joseph Hilt, senior vice president of financial services at Hibernia Atlantic.

quote:

Hibernia Networks has halted all work on its flagship $300 million transatlantic cable, the Hibernian Express, after becoming embroiled in mounting tensions between the US and China over cyber security.

The company was forced to suspend all work on the project, the first attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic in more than a decade, after key US carriers gave warning that they would not be able to use the proposed network for fear of risking the loss of lucrative contracts with US federal government agencies.

The delay marks the first big casualty in the escalating row between the US and China over alleged links between Chinese equipment makers and the country’s secret services. The development also highlights the growing determination of US authorities to blacklist Chinese equipment makers from new infrastructure projects that could affect the integrity of US networks.

quote:

However, in January and February of 2013, important news about
both projects began to emerge. Emerald Networks’ news was
positive, as it indicated that it had received what it described as
a “preliminary commitment” from the US government’s Export-
Import Bank in the form of a “Preliminary Project Letter.”
Hibernia Networks’ news, on the other hand, appeared dire. The
company was reported to have “halted work with Huawei” on the
Hibernia Express project due to security concerns expressed by the
US government toward Chinese suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE.
Hibernia Networks’ reported decision followed a 2012 investigation
by the US House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence which the chairman of the committee, Republican
Congressman Mike Rogers, summarized by saying that “If I were
an American company today...and you are looking at Huawei, I
would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual
property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care
about the national security of the United States of America.”
Critics asserted that the 60-page report released by the Intelligence
Committee contained no scientific or engineering evidence of
security weaknesses unique to ZTE and Huawei, nor did it identify
any attempts at espionage; instead, the report based its assertions
on what it claimed was the failure of ZTE and Huawei to “provide
clear answers to Committee questions...provide supporting
documentation...or alleviate Committee concerns.” Critics also
claimed that the committee’s actions, which benefitted American
suppliers, could easily be construed as trade protectionism. For its
part, the committee said that more detailed information could be
found in the classified annex to the report, but “that information
cannot be shared publicly without risking US national security.”

quote:

TAT-14 transatlantic cable system upgrade goes to Mitsubishi Electric
May 18, 2011

Mitsubishi Electric Cor. (TOKYO:6503) says it has won a contract to upgrade the DWDM capacity of the transatlantic TAT-14 Cable Network to 40 Gbps per wavelength. The company expects to complete the two-phase upgrade, which will expand the fiber-optic network’s capacity 7X, by the fourth quarter of 2012.

TAT-14 comprises more than 15,000 km of fiber-optic cable and connects seven landing stations in the North Atlantic. It was commissioned in 2001 with a 10-Gbps DWDM system. The seven carriers in the consortium that owns the undersea fiber optic network include Abovenet Communications, Inc., AT&T Corp., Deutsche Telekom AG., France Télécom S.A., KPN B.V., TeliaSonera AB (publ)., and Verizon.
http://www.lightwaveonlin(...)ctric-122205469.html

quote:

Tokyo, November 6, 2012 - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that it has completed work on the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) Cable Network to upgrade the submarine cable network with 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. The upgrade involved installation of submarine line terminal equipment in eight countries.
http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2012/1106.html

quote:

GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second
[..]
The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".

The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".

quote:

Op maandag 11 november 2013 11:59 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:

[..]

Als de Russische geheime dienst computers niet meer vertrouwt, kan je er gerust van uit gaan dat er een heleboel mis is met die dingen.
Russen zijn bijzonder slimme mensen, hooggeschoold en de geheime Russische dienst bestaat niet uit een stel naïeve lullo's.

quote:

'NSA imiteert websites om malware te installeren'

De NSA blijkt in staat internetverkeer te injecteren met kwaadaardige software tijdens het surfen. Met mobiele kits zijn draadloze systemen tot op acht kilometer afstand aan te vallen. Ook blijkt de geheime dienst grote hoeveelheden hardware te infecteren.

Foto: AFP

Dat stelt beveiligingsonderzoeker Jacob Appelbaum maandag tijdens een presentatie op het 30C3-congres in Hamburg en in Der Spiegel.

Hij baseert zich op geheime documenten van de NSA, die afkomstig zijn van klokkenluider Edward Snowden.

De documenten beschrijven de systemen en apparatuur die de NSA inzet om internetverkeer in de gaten te houden en te beïnvloeden.

Infecteren

Via het een systeem met de naam Turmoil is het mogelijk om het internetverkeer van mensen te monitoren tijdens het surfen. Via het Turbine-systeem wordt een bezochte website vervolgens 'nagemaakt'. Via de nepversie van de site kan malware worden geserveerd of kan het gedrag van gebruikers worden bijgehouden.

Onder meer de site van Yahoo zou door de NSA worden gebruikt om gebruikers te treffen. "Om dit te kunnen doen moet je Yahoo kunnen nadoen. Dat is een belangrijk detail", stelt Appelbaum.

De NSA kan dit niet alleen op bekabelde netwerken, maar ook op draadloze netwerken. Daarvoor heeft de dienst mobiele sets, die netwerken tot op acht kilometer afstand kunnen aanvallen. "Wat je hier hebt is een systeem om sleepnetsurveillance uit te voeren", stelt Applebaum.

Anonimiteit opheffen

Via de in de documenten beschreven systemen FoxAcid en Quantum Copper is het mogelijk om internetverbindingen zo te resetten dat het feitelijk onmogelijk wordt om anonieme verbindingen op te zetten. Een ander systeem met de naam Quantum Insert maakt het mogelijk verbindingen te verstoren.

Uit de documenten blijkt dat de NSA verschillende netwerkkaarten kan gebruiken om gegevens te injecteren. Zo blijken chips van Dell – al dan niet abusievelijk – daarvoor geschikt te zijn. "Alles waarvan de Amerikaanse overheid zegt dat de Chinezen het doen, blijkt ze zelf ook te doen", stelt Appelbaum.

Mobiele telefoons

Om mobiele telefoons te vinden en af te luisteren gebruikt de NSA een zogenoemde Typhon Hx BSR .

Uit documenten blijkt ook dat er malware voor grote hoeveelheden hardware van computers en mobiele telefoons is ontwikkeld. Zo staat in de documenten expliciet dat alle iOS-apparaten kunnen worden geïnfecteerd met malware.

Daarnaast blijken ook harde schijven te infecteren. "Het maakt dus niet uit hoe vaak je een harde schijf opnieuw formatteert. De malware functioneert", stelt Appelbaum. Daarnaast wijst hij ook op de mogelijkheid om kwaadaardige software op SIM-kaarten te installeren.

Verder is het volgens Appelbaum mogelijk om beeldschermen op afstand af te lezen met straalverbindingen.

Sms

De malware op mobiele telefoons kan worden geactiveerd met een sms-bericht. "Als je alleen een sms nodig hebt, dan kunnen anderen dit ook ontdekken en misbruiken", vreest Appelbaum.

Hij vertelt dat hij bij een bezoek aan Julian Assange verschillende malen een Oegandees welkomstbericht op zijn telefoon kreeg. Volgens hem wijst dit erop dat surveillanceapparatuur eerder in dat land is ingezet, en vervolgens niet goed is geconfigureerd voor gebruik in Londen.

quote:

Op maandag 30 december 2013 16:37 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Heeft de VS al acties ondernomen om het massaal bespioneren te verminderen?

quote:

Op maandag 30 december 2013 17:11 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Daar hoor je niks over. Ik geloof niets dat er ook maar 1 server is uitgezet of wetten aangepast. En trouwens, worden er wat wetten aangepast, dan gaat alles achter gesloten deuren onverminderd verder. Als je het niet weet kun je er ook niets tegen beginnen.

quote:

Op maandag 30 december 2013 17:15 schreef polderturk het volgende:

[..]

Er moeten in ieder geval maatregelen genomen worden om het internetverkeer beter te beveiligen of versleutelen.

quote:

Op maandag 30 december 2013 17:11 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Daar hoor je niks over. Ik geloof niets dat er ook maar 1 server is uitgezet of wetten aangepast. En trouwens, worden er wat wetten aangepast, dan gaat alles achter gesloten deuren onverminderd verder. Als je het niet weet kun je er ook niets tegen beginnen.

quote:

Op maandag 30 december 2013 16:37 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Heeft de VS al acties ondernomen om het massaal bespioneren te verminderen?

quote:

Noam Chomsky, the Salon interview: Governments are power systems, trying to sustain power

quote:

Exclusive: The polymath looks back with Salon on this year's NSA revelations and ahead to the earth's destruction

In his 85th year, political theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky remains a fiercely busy polymath and dedicated activist. Indeed, his schedule is so demanding, our interview had to be booked a good number of weeks in advance and my time on the phone with the MIT professor was sandwiched between another press interview and another one of his many commitments.

Happily, though, speaking with Chomsky in late December gave occasion to look back on this year — a year of revelation and obfuscation regarding U.S. government activity.

Chomsky told Salon about his thoughts on the slew of NSA leaks, the future of the media, the neo-liberalization of the education system and the principle operations of governments. And, of course, the earth hurtling towards its own demise.

quote:

The New York Times en The Guardian pleiten voor clementie Snowden

De redacties van The New York Times en The Guardian dringen er bij de Amerikaanse president Barack Obama op aan om Edward Snowden te behandelen als een klokkenluider en hem clementie te verlenen.

quote:

If Snowden Returned to US For Trial, All Whistleblower Evidence Would Likely Be Inadmissible

There seems to be a new talking point from government officials since a federal judge ruled NSA surveillance is likely unconstitutional last week: if Edward Snowden thinks he's a whistleblower, he should come back and stand trial.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice said on 60 Minutes Sunday, We believe he should come back, he should be sent back, and he should have his day in court. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell made similar statements this weekend, as did Rep. Mike Rogers (while also making outright false claims about Snowden at the same time). Even NSA reform advocate Sen. Mark Udall said, "He ought to stand on his own two feet. He ought to make his case. Come home, make the case that somehow there was a higher purpose here.

These statements belie a fundamental misunderstanding about how Espionage Act prosecutions work.

If Edward Snowden comes back to the US to face trial, he likely will not be able to tell a jury why he did what he did, and what happened because of his actions. Contrary to common sense, there is no public interest exception to the Espionage Act. Prosecutors in recent cases have convinced courts that the intent of the leaker, the value of leaks to the public, and the lack of harm caused by the leaks are irrelevantand are therefore inadmissible in court.

This is why rarely, if ever, whistleblowers go to trial when theyre charged under the Espionage Act, and why the lawa relic from World War Iis so pernicious. John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who was the first to go on-the-record with the media about waterboarding, pled guilty in his Espionage Act case last year partially because a judge ruled he couldnt tell the jury about his lack of intent to harm the United States.

In the ongoing leak trial of former State Department official Stephen Kim, the judge recently ruled that the prosecution need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially. (emphasis added)

In the Espionage Act case against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake (which later fell apart), the government filed two separate motions to make sure the words "whistleblowing" or "overclassification" would never be uttered at trial.

The same scenario just played out in the Chelsea Manning trial this summer. Manning's defense wanted to argue she intended to inform the public, that the military was afflicted with a deep and unnecessary addiction to overclassification, and that the governments own internal assessments showed she caused no real damage to U.S. interests. All this information was ruled inadmissible until sentencing. Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in jaillonger than most actual spies under the Espionage Act.

If the same holds true in Snowdens case, the administration will be able to exclude almost all knowledge beneficial to his case from a jury until hes already been found guilty of felonies that will have him facing decades, if not life, in jail.

This would mean Snowden could not be able to tell the jury that his intent was to inform the American public about the governments secret interpretations of laws used to justify spying on millions of citizens without their knowledge, as opposed to selling secrets to hostile countries for their advantage.

If the prosecution had their way, Snowden would also not be able to explain to a jury that his leaks sparked more than two dozen bills in Congress, and half a dozen lawsuits, all designed to rein in unconstitutional surveillance. He wouldnt be allowed to explain how his leaks caught an official lying to Congress, that theyve led to a White House review panel recommending forty-six reforms for US intelligence agencies, or that they've led to an unprecedented review of government secrecy. He wouldn't be able to talk about the sea change in the public's perception of privacy since his leaks, or the fact that a majority of the public considers him a whistleblower.

He might not even be able to bring up the fact that a US judge ruled that surveillance he exposed was ruled to likely be unconstitutional.

The jury would also not be able to hear how theres been no demonstrable harm to the United States since much of this information has been published. And if the prosecution was able to prove there was some harm to the US, Snowden wouldnt be able to explain that the enormous public benefits of these disclosures far outweighed any perceived harm.

Every American should be outraged that leakers and whistleblowers are being prosecuted under an espionage statute without ever having to show they meant to harm the U.S. or that any harm actually occurred. Given there are two dozen bills calling for the reform of the NSA in the wake of Snowden's revelations, there should also be reform of the Espionage Act, so it cannot be used by the government as a sword to protect itself from accountability.

quote:

Op woensdag 1 januari 2014 00:17 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Brazilie heeft al maatregelen genomen. Zo willen ze een eigen lijn leggen glasvezel lijn naar Europa waardoor het Braziliaanse internetverkeer met Europa niet door de VS en Groot Brittanie hoeft te gaan. Europa moet deze lijn maar samen met Brazilie gaan aanleggen. Ook heeft Brazilie een wet aangenomen die google en Facebook en andere Amerikaanse bedrijven verplicht de servers in Brazilie te plaatsen, waardoor ze aan de Braziliaanse wetten moeten voldoen. Europa moet ook zulke maatregelen nemen. Van onze eigen Nederlandse regering hoeven we niets te verwachten aangezien VVD'ers de grootste kontenlikkers zijn van de Amerikanen.

quote:

Op woensdag 1 januari 2014 00:17 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Brazilie heeft al maatregelen genomen. Zo willen ze een eigen lijn leggen glasvezel lijn naar Europa waardoor het Braziliaanse internetverkeer met Europa niet door de VS en Groot Brittanie hoeft te gaan. Europa moet deze lijn maar samen met Brazilie gaan aanleggen. Ook heeft Brazilie een wet aangenomen die google en Facebook en andere Amerikaanse bedrijven verplicht de servers in Brazilie te plaatsen, waardoor ze aan de Braziliaanse wetten moeten voldoen. Europa moet ook zulke maatregelen nemen. Van onze eigen Nederlandse regering hoeven we niets te verwachten aangezien VVD'ers de grootste kontenlikkers zijn van de Amerikanen.

quote:

NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong

quote:

In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.

quote:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Official Washington from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to NSA Director Keith Alexander to former Vice President Dick Cheney to former FBI Director Robert Mueller has been speaking from the same set of NSA talking points acquired recently via a Freedom of Information request. It is an artful list, much of it designed to mislead. Take this one, for example:

NSA AND ITS PARTNERS MUST MAKE SURE WE CONNECT THE DOTS SO THAT THE NATION IS NEVER ATTACKED AGAIN LIKE IT WAS ON 9/11

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, Senator Feinstein showed her hand when she said: I will do everything I can to prevent this [NSAs bulk] program from being canceled. Declaring that 9/11 can never be allowed to happen in the United States of America again, Feinstein claimed that intelligence officials did not have enough information to prevent the terrorist attacks.

Mr. President, we trust you are aware that the lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinsteins next dubious premise that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSAs bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information much of it hidden until now that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

The drafting process sparked lively discussion of the relative merits of your Review Groups recommendations. We have developed very specific comments on those recommendations. We look forward to an opportunity to bring them to your attention.

quote:

NSA and GCHQ activities appear illegal, says EU parliamentary inquiry

Civil liberties committee report demands end to indiscriminate collection of personal data by British and US agencies

Mass surveillance programmes used by the US and Britain to spy on people in Europe have been condemned in the "strongest possible terms" by the first parliamentary inquiry into the disclosures, which has demanded an end to the vast, systematic and indiscriminate collection of personal data by intelligence agencies.

The inquiry by the European parliament's civil liberties committee says the activities of America's National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, GCHQ, appear to be illegal and that their operations have "profoundly shaken" the trust between countries that considered themselves allies.

The 51-page draft report, obtained by the Guardian, was discussed by the committee on Thursday. Claude Moraes, the rapporteur asked to assess the impact of revelations made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, lsocondemns the "chilling" way journalists working on the stories have been intimidated by state authorities.

Though Snowden is still in Russia, MEPs are expected to take evidence from him via video-link in the coming weeks, as the European parliament continues to assess the damage from the disclosures. Committee MEPs voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to have Snowden testify, defying warnings from key US congressmen that giving the "felon" a public platform would wreck the European parliament's reputation and hamper co-operation with Washington.

While 36 committee members voted to hear Snowden, only two, both British Conservatives, voted against. "Snowden has endangered lives. Inviting him at all is a highly irresponsible act by an inquiry that has had little interest in finding out facts and ensuring a balanced approach to this delicate issue," said Timothy Kirkhope, a Tory MEP. "At least if Snowden wants to give evidence, he will now have to come out of the shadows and risk his location being discovered."

The Lib Dem MEP Sarah Ludford denounced the Conservative position. "To ignore [Snowden] is absurd. The issue of whether the intelligence services are out of control merits serious examination in Europe as in the US. The Tories' ostrich-like denial is completely out of step with mainstream opinion in both continents, including Republicans in the US and Merkel's centre-right party in Germany. But their line is consistent with the obdurate refusal of Conservatives at Westminster to clarify and strengthen safeguards on snooping by GCHQ."

The draft by Moraes, a Labour MEP, describes some of the programmes revealed by Snowden over the past seven months – including Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which is operated by GCHQ.The former allows the NSA to conduct mass surveillance on EU citizens through the servers of US internet companies. The latter sucks up vast amounts of information from the cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the UK.

he report says western intelligence agencies have been involved in spying on "an unprecedented scale and in an indiscriminate and non-suspicion-based manner". It is "very doubtful" that the collection of so much information is only guided by the fight against terrorism, the draft says, questioning the "legality, necessity and proportionality of the programmes".

The report also:

• Calls on the US authorities and EU states to prohibit blanket mass surveillance activities and bulk processing of personal data.

• Deplores the way intelligence agencies "have declined to co-operate with the inquiry the European parliament has been conducting on behalf of citizens".

• Insists mass surveillance has potentially severe effects on the freedom of the press, as well as a significant potential for abuse of information gathered against political opponents.

• Demands that the UK, Germany, France, Sweden and the Netherlands revise laws governing the activities of intelligence services to ensure they are in line with the European convention on human rights.

• Calls on the US to revise its own laws to bring them into line with international law, so they "recognise the privacy and other rights of EU citizens".

The draft, still to be voted on by the chamber, has no legal force and does not compel further action, but adds to the growing body of criticism and outrage at the perceived intelligence abuses.

Separately, the European parliament has drafted new legislation curbing the transfer of private data to third countries outside the EU and setting stiff conditions for the information transfers.

But hopes of getting the new rules into force before elections for the parliament in May are fading because of resistance from the UK and EU governments. "This is a tough issue, even thorny," Greece's justice minister, Charalampos Athanasiou, told the Guardian. Greece took over the running of the EU for six months this week. "There are different views in the member states. I can't be sure about being successful."

Moraes condemns the way the Guardian was forced to destroy the Snowden files it had in London, and says the detention at Heathrow of David Miranda, the partner of the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, constituted an interference with the right of freedom of expression under article 10 of the European convention on human rights.The report is also highly critical of the data exchange scheme Safe Harbor, which allow swaps of commercial information between US and European companies. The draft also questioned the Swift scheme supplying European financial transactions information to the Americans to try to block terrorist funding and the supply of information on transatlantic air passengers.

The European commissioner Viviane Reding says the Safe Harbor scheme is flawed and may need to be frozen.

She wants to make it harder for the big US internet servers and social media providers to transfer European data to third countries. She also wants to subject the firms to EU law rather than secret American court orders.

The Moraes report says the web companies taking part in Safe Harbor have "admitted that they do not encrypt information and communications flowing between their data centres, thereby enabling intelligence services to intercept information".

He calls for the suspension of information sharing until companies can show they have taken the all necessary steps to protect privacy.

The report calls on the European commission to present by this time next year an EU strategy for democratic governance of the internet, and warns there is currently "no guarantee, either for EU public institutions or for citizens, that their IT security or privacy can be protected from intrusion by well-equipped third countries or EU intelligence agencies".

It adds: "Recent revelations in the press by whistleblowers and journalists, together with the expert evidence given during this inquiry, have resulted in compelling evidence of the existence of far-reaching, complex and highly technologically advanced systems designed by US and some member states' intelligence services, to collect, store and analyse communication and metadata of all citizens around the world on an unprecedented scale and in an indiscriminate and non-suspicion-based manner."

quote:

How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet

quote:

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.

quote:

Op vrijdag 10 januari 2014 20:17 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

https://thedaywefightback.org/

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Dianne Feinstein Admits That Her 'NSA Reform' Bill Is About Protecting Existing Surveillance Programs

See, there's a problem when you lie: you always forget how to keep your story straight. You may remember, for example, that Senator Dianne Feinstein, at the end of October, released a bill that pretended to be about reforming the NSA and its surveillance programs. The bill was spun in a way that was designed to make people think it was creating real reforms, with a fact sheet claiming that it "prohibited" certain actions around bulk data collection, but which actually codified them in the law, by including massive loopholes. It was an incredibly cynical move by Feinstein and her staff, pretending that their bill to actually give the NSA even greater power and to legalize its abuses, was about scaling back the NSA. But that's the spin they put on it -- which almost no one bought.

But, it seems that even Feinstein has forgotten that her bill is supposed to pretend that it's about reining in the NSA. On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee met with the White House's task force, to discuss its recommendations for surveillance reform (which don't go far enough, but go way beyond what Feinstein wants). In discussing what happened in the meeting, Feinstein basically lets slip that she disagrees with the reforms suggested, and that support for her bill means that others are against reform as well:

. Those recommendations were criticized by supporters of the NSA’s programs, including Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has said that taking the information out of the government’s hands could put the country at risk. Feinstein has spoken out against proposed reforms that would require as much, and has sponsored her own committee bill that would preserve the agency’s methods.

“Our bill passed by 11-4, so you know there’s substantial support for the programs,” she said.

In other words, "my bill is for people who already support these programs." Exactly the opposite of what her marketing and public statements about the bill have been. Oops. Next time, she should try to not misrepresent her own bill, and maybe she can keep her story straight.

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Out in the Open: An NSA-Proof Twitter, Built With Code From Bitcoin and BitTorrent

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His alternative is called Twister. It’s a decentralized social network that, in theory, can’t be shut down by any one entity. What’s more, Twister is designed to prevent other users from knowing whether you’re online, what your IP address is, or who you follow. You can still post public messages a la Twitter, but when you send direct and private messages to others, they’re protected with the same encryption scheme used by LavaBit, the e-mail provider used by Edward Snowdan.