Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

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

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

Dit soort taferelen krijg je dan he. Snelkookpan incident

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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Video: Edward Snowden wins Sam Adams award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The German President, Joachim Gauck, concluded in an interview with the ZDF on 30.6.2013, that the NSA was not to be compared with the Stasi:

We know for example, that it is not like it was with the Stasi and the KGB – that there exist big filing cabinets in which all the content of our conversations are written down and nicely filed. This is not the case.
Wir wissen zum Beispiel, dass es nicht so ist wie bei der Stasi und dem KGB, dass es dicke Aktenbände gibt, in denen unsere Gesprächsinhalte alle aufgeschrieben und schön abgeheftet sind. Das ist es nicht.

This statement is completely correct. At the NSA, conversation contents are not written down nor filed - but digitally recorded, saved and can be searched and found within seconds.

In contrast to the Stasi, the NSA can count on new technologies and can therefore collect information in gigantic quantities. To get the picture, we compared the data volume in this little app:

According to a report by the NPR, the data center of the NSA in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30.000 pages of paper) uses up 0,4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers. Thereby the NSA can capture 1 billion times more data than the Stasi!

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.

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NSA Director Alexander Admits He Lied about Phone Surveillance Stopping 54 Terror Plots

The head of the National Security Agency (NSA) admitted before a congressional committee this week that he lied back in June when he claimed the agency’s phone surveillance program had thwarted 54 terrorist “plots or events.”

NSA Director Keith Alexander gave out the erroneous number while the Obama administration was defending its domestic spying operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He said surveillance data collected that led to 53 of those 54 plots had provided the initial tips to “unravel the threat stream.”

But Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Wednesday during a hearing on the continued oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that the administration was pushing incomplete or inaccurate statements about the bulk collection of phone records from communications providers.

“For example, we’ve heard over and over again that 54 terrorist plots have been thwarted by the use of (this program),” Leahy said. “That’s plainly wrong,” adding: “These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted.”

Alexander admitted that only 13 of the 54 cases were connected to the United States. He also told the committee that only one or two suspected plots were identified as a result of bulk phone record collection.

Leahy was not happy. “We’re told we have to [conduct mass phone surveillance] to protect us, and the statistics are rolled out that they’re not accurate,” he said. “It doesn’t have the credibility here in the Congress, it doesn’t have the credibility with this chairman and it doesn’t have the credibility with the country.”

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2013 09:07 schreef Ryan3 het volgende:
Kunnen we die NSA nu niet fucken, alle internetters bij elkaar... gewoon in elke post iets over terrorisme zeggen of zo...
Net als "...en overigens blijf ik van mening dat Carthago vernietigd moet worden...." van Cato....

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2013 10:13 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Dat zou op zich al een vorm van terrorisme zijn. Duizend bommen en granaten!

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2013 17:24 schreef raptorix het volgende:
Deze al voorbij gekomen?

http://www.theguardian.co(...)-guardian?CMP=twt_fd

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2013 17:38 schreef Nemephis het volgende:
Wat een **** die Plasterk slappe lul zonder ruggegraat

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2013 22:41 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Shoot the messenger. De persvrijheid staat aardig onder druk door de NSA-leaks.

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The Obama administration doesn’t want the Supreme Court to look at NSA spying

President Barack Obama’s administration is urging the Supreme Court not to take up the first case it has received on controversial National Security Agency cybersnooping.

US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

EPIC believes the NSA overstepped its authority by carrying out broad communications monitoring and surveillance worldwide, and demanded the program be stopped.

A US Supreme Court decision to take the case would be “a drastic and extraordinary remedy that is reserved for really extraordinary causes,” argued Donald Verrilli, an administration lawyer, in a statement released late Tuesday.

The US administration also believes the EPIC suit cannot move forward because it argues the court lacks authority under the 2001 Patriot Act to weigh in on the legality of NSA activities.

“This court lacks jurisdiction to issue a writ of certiorari to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” the secret intelligence affairs court, Verrilli added.