Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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NSA chief Michael Rogers: Edward Snowden 'probably not' a foreign spy

New NSA director plays down speculation that 'our gentleman in Moscow' was working for a foreign intelligence agency

The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was "probably not" working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA's allies to the contrary.

In one of his first public remarks since becoming NSA director in April, Admiral Michael Rogers, who also leads the military’s cybersecurity and cyberattack command, distanced himself on Tuesday from contentions that Snowden is or has been a spy for Russia or another intelligence service.

“Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe that’s the case? Probably not,” Rogers said during a cybersecurity forum hosted by Bloomberg Government.

The recently installed NSA director struck a more nuanced tone on the man he called “our gentleman in Moscow” than his predecessor, Keith Alexander, or many of his congressional champions – chief among them his namesake Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, who has frequently intimated that Snowden is a Russian spy.

“You gotta be very balanced. I thought he was an intelligent individual, articulate. [He] seemed fairly arrogant to me,” the NSA’s Rogers said on Snowden’s interview with NBC last week.

“He clearly believes in what he’s doing. I question that; I don’t agree with it. I fundamentally disagree with what he did. I believe it was wrong, I believe it was illegal.”

Rogers declined to say that there were no other Snowdens waiting to leak documents from the NSA. He sounded cautious about how many documents Snowden actually took from the NSA, despite a still-classified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment asserting that Snowden absconded with 1.7 million documents – an assessment based on Snowden’s internal access to NSA documents.

“We have a fairly good idea here, and I’m not going to get into specifics here,” Rogers said.

In another departure from past practice, Rogers confirmed the broad outline of a New York Times story based on the Snowden disclosures that reported NSA’s mass collection of digitized images of people’s faces and other biometric identifiers.

“We use facial recognition as a tool to help us understand these foreign intelligence targets. Counter-terrorism is another big area – this has probably had more impact for us in the counterterrorism arena than anywhere else,” Rogers said.

The Guardian reported in February that the NSA has aided its British counterpart, GCHQ, in collecting imagery from millions of unsuspecting users of Yahoo webcam chats, which GCHQ used for experiments with automated facial recognition software. At the time, months before Rogers became NSA director, the NSA declined to answer questions about its involvement in the effort.

At the Tuesday event, Rogers pledged increased candor with the public about NSA’s operations, which he acknowledged was a cultural challenge for America’s most secret intelligence agency. But he indicated a desire to move the agency out from under the shadow of the Snowden revelations.

“One of the things that I try to tell the workforce out there is: this is not what is going to define us,” he said. “We cannot go into this hunched-down crunch. We have an important mission.”

Echoing a year’s worth of reluctant statements by intelligence leaders, Rogers told Reuters last month that transparency would be key to restoring confidence in the NSA, even as he declined to criticize the broad surveillance that prompted widespread outrage.

Fulfilling the agency’s transparency pledge has been complicated by measures from the US director of national intelligence to clamp down on public interaction, even on unclassified matters, without the approval of the secretive agencies’ press monitors. Critics, noting the government’s selective and incomplete intelligence disclosures, consider the NSA and its allies more interested in reasserting control over its public image than in shedding light on its practices and authorities.

Occasionally animated during his talk, Rogers appeared relaxed and jocular. While rejecting charges of NSA wrongdoing, he said he was open to public debate about the proper scope of the agency’s surveillance authorities – though he neglected to mention that the agency and its allies worked behind the scenes last month to weaken privacy and transparency provisions in a major surveillance reform bill.

“A broad dialogue of what we’re doing and why is a good thing for us as a nation. I don’t question that for one minute,” said Rogers, who repeatedly described himself, to laughter, as a “direct” person.

Rogers declined to discuss Bowe Bergdahl, a former Taliban captive in Afghanistan whom the Obama administration traded for five Taliban leaders detained at Guantanamo Bay. Responding generically to a question about the NSA monitoring the five ex-detainees, Rogers noted that the agency has “the means to track individuals with a foreign intelligence dimension to them” but said he could not guarantee tracking “every individual constantly.”

More broadly, Rogers warned of a danger in inflating national security threats to justify the expansion of government security powers.

“There are groups and individuals out there who if they had their way, we would no longer exist as a nation,” Rogers said.

“Now, I’m not one who’s going to sit here and overhype the threat [or say] that in the name of this threat we have to make dramatic changes and curtail our rights, because if we go down that road, in the end, they’ve won. If we change who we are and what we believe and what we represent in the name of security, they have won. I have always believed that.”

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New browser extensions let you hit the NSA where it hurts: in the data

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Flagger.io does just one thing: It adds a random selection of keywords, like “terrorist,” “pressure cooker,” “Al Qaeda,” etc. to the address of every website you visit. The idea is that, because the US National Security Agency (NSA) is gathering essentially all the internet traffic that passes through the US, the more noise it has to sort through—like the sort of faux-terroristic requests made by a web browser running Flagger.io—the harder the NSA’s job will be.

Lyon has also just released a second browser extension to help users thwart the NSA more directly: Turtl.it is an app for storing encrypted notes. (The main author of Turtl is actually Lyons’ brother, Andrew.) Eventually, says Lyon, it will also be usable for file storage—like Google’s document-sharing service, Google Drive. Because it’s open-source, users can be (relatively more) assured that it hasn’t been tainted by the NSA’s efforts to weaken commercial cryptography.

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Microsoft: US must act on 'unfinished business' of NSA surveillance

General counsel Brad Smith says in strongly-worded piece that government must 'reduce technology trust deficit it has created'

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Microsoft’s top lawyer on Wednesday called upon the US government to act on “unfinished business” a year after the Guardian and the Washington Post first broke news of the extent of the National Security Agency’s cyber-spying operations.

In an often toughly-worded blogpost, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith set out five areas where he believes the government needs to take more action in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. While there had been some “initial positive reforms,” Smith said, “the reality is clear. The US government needs to address important unfinished business to reduce the technology trust deficit it has created.”

Snowden’s revelations had shown that the government was “not just seeking a relatively small amount of content” via legal orders, said Smith.

“It’s now apparent that the government intercepted data in transit across the internet and hacked links between company data centres. These disclosures rightly have prompted a vigorous debate over the extent and scope of government surveillance, leading to some positive changes. But much more needs to be done.

“With the advent of mobile devices and cloud services, technology has never been more powerful or more personal. But as I encountered in virtually every meeting during a recent trip to Europe, as well as discussions with others from around the world, people have real questions and concerns about how their data are protected.

"These concerns have real implications for cloud adoption. After all, people won’t use technology they don’t trust. We need to strike a better balance between privacy and national security to restore trust and uphold our fundamental liberties,” he wrote.

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Nu al een succes: Secret Service koopt sarcasme-detector voor Twitter

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De Secret Service, onder meer verantwoordelijk voor de beveiliging van de Amerikaanse president Obama, wil een monitor kopen die sarcasme op sociale media kan herkennen. Dat blijkt uit online documenten van de Amerikaanse veiligheidsdienst. Op die manier hopen de geheim agenten straks beter in te kunnen schatten of dreigtweets serieus zijn, of dat ze de humor ervan moeten inzien. Op Twitter waren de reacties op het nieuws - niet geheel onverwacht - vooral sarcastisch.

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Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power

A year ago, Edward Snowden exposed the NSA's widespread surveillance practices. Privacy advocates demanded a change in the law – but today, the agency's powers remain largely intact

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For two weeks in May, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.

During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades. The revisions took place in secret after two congressional committees had passed the bill. The NSA and its allies took creative advantage of a twilight legislative period permitting technical or cosmetic language changes.

The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago today, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's history.

"This is not how American democracy is supposed to work," said congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who had supported the bill but ultimately voted against it.

Senior leaders at the agency say that Snowden thrust them into a new era. The NSA, adept at cultivating a low profile, is now globally infamous – so much so that even Snowden, in his recent NBC interview, cautioned against writing the agency off as a voracious privacy-killing monstrosity. James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said the intelligence agencies need to grant a greater degree of transparency or risk losing public confidence permanently.

But exactly one year on, the NSA’s greatest wound so far has been its PR difficulties. The agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data. Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data.

There are no other mandated reforms. President Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans' "personal information", but that has not been codified in law. The coalition of large internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers’ email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort. A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. (Obama, in defiance of a government privacy board, permits the NSA to exploit some software flaws for national security purposes.)

Even Clapper’s transparency call is questionable after the director recently clamped down on intelligence officials’ ability to speak to the press without the approval of their public-affairs shops, even when not discussing classified material.

Some NSA critics look to the courts for a fuller tally of their victories in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Judges have begun to permit defendants to see evidence gathered against them that had its origins in NSA email or call intercepts, which could disrupt prosecutions or invalidate convictions. At least one such defendant, in Colorado, is seeking the exclusion of such evidence, arguing that its use in court is illegal.

Still other cases challenging the surveillance efforts have gotten beyond the government’s longtime insistence that accusers cannot prove they were spied upon, as the Snowden trove demonstrated a dragnet that presumptively touched every American’s phone records. This week, an Idaho federal judge implored the supreme court to settle the question of the bulk surveillance's constitutionality.

"The litigation now is about the merits. It’s about the lawfulness of the surveillance program," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.

There have also been significant commercial changes brought by companies that fear the revelations imperiling their businesses. Google's Gmail service broadened its use of encryption and the company will soon present end-to-end encryption for its Chrome browser. After the Washington Post revealed that the NSA intercepts data transiting between Google and Yahoo storage centers, Google expanded encryption for Gmail data flowing across the internet and Yahoo implemented default email encryption.

But perhaps the bitterest disappointment has been the diminished ambitions for surveillance reform contained in the USA Freedom Act. "That," Jaffer said, "was a very frustrating process for us."

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Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

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In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.

“Mathematicians aiding in national defense goes all the way back to Archimedes, defending against the Roman siege and designing the catapult. Mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson destroyed his work after realizing researchers in poison gas were looking at it. Mathematicians were involved in the Manhattan Project, developing nuclear weapons,” says Hales. “Many mathematicians work for the NSA or organizations with ties to it. They’re involved in facial recognition development and big data aspects of mass surveillance. If privacy disappears from the face of the Earth, mathematicians will be some of the primary culprits.”

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Encouraging Words of Regret From Dean Baquet and Weasel Words From James Clapper

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NPR’s David Folkenflik has a revealing new look at what I have long believed is one of the most important journalistic stories of the last decade: The New York Times‘ 2004 decision, at the behest of George W. Bush himself, to suppress for 15 months (through Bush’s re-election) its reporters’ discovery that the NSA was illegally eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Folkenflik’s NPR story confirms what has long been clear: The only reason the Times eventually published that article was because one of its reporters, James Risen, had become so frustrated that he wrote a book that was about to break the story, leaving the paper with no choice (Risen’s co-reporter, Eric Lichtblau, is quoted this way: “‘He had a gun to their head,’ Lichtblau told Frontline. ‘They are really being forced to reconsider: The paper is going to look pretty bad’ if Risen’s book disclosed the wiretapping program before the Times“).

As Folkenflik notes, this episode was one significant reason Edward Snowden purposely excluded the Times from his massive trove of documents. In an interview with Folkenflik, the paper’s new executive editor, Dean Baquet, describes the paper’s exclusion from the Snowden story as “really painful”. But, as I documented in my book and in recent interviews, Baquet has his own checkered history in suppressing plainly newsworthy stories at the government’s request, including a particularly inexcusable 2007 decision, when he was the managing editor of The Los Angeles Times, to kill a story based on AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein’s revelations that the NSA had built secret rooms at AT&T to siphon massive amounts of domestic telephone traffic.

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Deutsche Telekom to follow Vodafone in revealing surveillance

Deutsche Telekom, operating in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published data for Germany

Germany's biggest telecoms company is to follow Vodafone in disclosing for the first time the number of surveillance requests it receives from governments around the world.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns half of Britain's EE mobile network and operates in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published surveillance data for its home nation – one of the countries that have reacted most angrily to the Edward Snowden revelations. In the wake of Vodafone's disclosures, first published in the Guardian on Friday, it announced that it would extend its disclosures to every other market where it operates and where it is legal.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom, which has 140 million customers worldwide, said: "Deutsche Telekom has initially focused on Germany when it comes to disclosure of government requests. We are currently checking if and to what extent our national companies can disclose information. We intend to publish something similar to Vodafone."

Bosses of the world's biggest mobile networks, many of which have headquarters in Europe, are gathering for an industry conference in Shanghai this weekend, and the debate is expected to centre on whether they should join Deutsche and Vodafone in using transparency to push back against the use of their technology for government surveillance.

Mobile companies, unlike social networks, cannot operate without a government-issued licence, and have previously been reluctant to discuss the extent of their cooperation with national security and law enforcement agencies.

But Vodafone broke cover on Friday by confirming that in around half a dozen of the markets in which it operates, governments in Europe and outside have installed their own secret listening equipment on its network and those of other operators.

Under this direct access system, wires suck up traffic at key points in the network, allowing unfettered access to the content of phone conversations and text messages, and in some cases delivering live data about the location of customers.

They allow surveillance without the usual warrants, and it means the phone company cannot know how many people are being targeted and what the justification is for any snooping.

Vodafone will formally table its Law Enforcement Disclosure report, which sets out country by country the laws that oblige it to help governments spy on citizens, at the GSMA industry group conference in Shanghai.

Disclosure may pose a dilemma for Orange, formerly France Telecom. Like Deutsche it is still partially state-owned, and French newspaper Le Monde reported this year that the company had deep links with its domestic intelligence agency.

A spokesperson for Orange said: "Orange respects the laws and regulations of every country in which it is present. Naturally, this means that the group rigorously adheres to the legal framework with regards to all surveillance requests emanating from state authorities across its footprint."

The newspaper confirmed, using files obtained by Snowden, that Orange had collaborated with the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) to break encryption codes, and that the agency was allowed free and total access to all traffic on its network.

Campaign group Access asked Orange at its annual meeting this year to begin publishing data on warrant numbers, and has called on all operators to do so. The biggest European companies, including Spain's Telefónica, Portugal Telecom and Telecom Italia, operate in many of the same markets for which Vodafone has published its numbers.

"Working together, operators can make a clear stand against unfettered surveillance," said Access policy counsel Peter Micek. "Competition on transparency is something we would welcome. It's not going to happen overnight, but I think Vodafone has made a great headstart for the sector and it is incumbent on the rest of the field to follow up quickly."

"Europe has a strong charter of fundamental rights, and those rights apply online as they do offline. There is a strong basis for Europe to act in a concernted manner to end practices like direct access."

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Jimmy Wales: UK needs US-style first amendment to protect whistleblowers

Wikipedia founder calls for new free speech laws at conference marking first anniversary of publication of Snowden files


Britain should introduce its own constitution with an enshrined right to freedom of speech similar to that of the US to ensure that whistleblowers can come forward, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said.

He said that doing so would help prevent governments from cracking down on media organisations that wanted to publish potentially damaging stories.

"One of the big differences between the US and the UK is the first amendment, so the idea of smashing computers in the basement of the New York Times is basically inconceivable," he said, referring to the British government's demand that the Guardian destroy hard-drives used to store Edward Snowden's secret files.

"One of the important things about the US is that something like the first amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights is very difficult to change – whereas here, it's not so easy to construct something that's difficult to change. Parliament can ultimately change anything with a majority vote and that's that."

Wales was speaking on Saturday at a London summit marking the anniversary of the start of Snowden's revelations, which were first published in the Guardian and the Washington Post.

The day of action has been billed as the biggest privacy event of 2014, with more than 500 people attending the event in east London.

The Wikipedia founder's call for a "British first amendment" echoed that of the Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, who was ordered to destroy the hard-drives by the government under threat of legal action.

Rusbridger said no right to free speech is enshrined in British law and said that he felt a "sense of foreboding, that something bad would happen" in the UK in reaction to the Guardian publishing Snowden's material.

He said he had no such concerns about the US government because of the protections afforded by that nation's constitution.

"By forcing the reporting out of the UK to the US, the British government lost any handle on this story at all. So, I hope the British government will think about that in the future," he said.

Wales, Rusbridger and a host of other speakers addressed a packed Shoreditch Town Hall on Saturday on the subject of privacy in the wake of Snowden's revelations of industrial-scale spying by the UK and US governments.

The event has been organised by the Guardian and the Don't Spy on Us Campaign, a coalition of privacy, free expression and digital rights organisations which is urging the UK government to end the mass surveillance of the web and mobile phone networks by the British eavesdropping centre, GCHQ.

The day started with a video address from performer Stephen Fry, who called the government's actions in spying on its own citizens "squalid and rancid".

In a prerecorded address, he said: "The idea of having your letters read by somebody, your telegrams, your faxes, your postcards intercepted, was always considered one of the meanest, most beastly things a human being could do, and for a government to do, without good cause.

"Using the fear of terrorism that we all have, the fear of the unknown that we all share, the fear of enemies that hate us, is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country," he said.

Fry added: "It's enough that corporations know so much about us and our spending habits, our eating habits, our sexual preferences, everything else.

"But that a government, something that we elect, something that should be looking out for our best interests, should presume without asking to take information that we swap, we hope privately, between ourselves is frankly disgraceful."

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A letter from Edward Snowden and the ACLU

Technology has been a liberating force in our lives. It allows us to create and share the experiences that make us human, effortlessly. But in secret, our very own government—one bound by the Constitution and its Bill of Rights—has reverse-engineered something beautiful into a tool of mass surveillance and oppression. The government right now can easily monitor whom you call, whom you associate with, what you read, what you buy, and where you go online and offline, and they do it to all of us, all the time.

Today, our most intimate private records are being indiscriminately seized in secret, without regard for whether we are actually suspected of wrongdoing. When these capabilities fall into the wrong hands, they can destroy the very freedoms that technology should be nurturing, not extinguishing. Surveillance, without regard to the rule of law or our basic human dignity, creates societies that fear free expression and dissent, the very values that make America strong.

In the long, dark shadow cast by the security state, a free society cannot thrive.

That’s why one year ago I brought evidence of these irresponsible activities to the public—to spark the very discussion the U.S. government didn’t want the American people to have. With every revelation, more and more light coursed through a National Security Agency that had grown too comfortable operating in the dark and without public consent. Soon incredible things began occurring that would have been unimaginable years ago. A federal judge in open court called an NSA mass surveillance program likely unconstitutional and “almost Orwellian.” Congress and President Obama have called for an end to the dragnet collection of the intimate details of our lives. Today legislation to begin rolling back the surveillance state is moving in Congress after more than a decade of impasse.

I am humbled by our collective successes so far. When the Guardian and The Washington Post began reporting on the NSA’s project to make privacy a thing of the past, I worried the risks I took to get the public the information it deserved would be met with collective indifference.

One year later, I realize that my fears were unwarranted.

Americans, like you, still believe the Constitution is the highest law of the land, which cannot be violated in secret in the name of a false security. Some say I’m a man without a country, but that’s not true. America has always been an ideal, and though I’m far away, I’ve never felt as connected to it as I do now, watching the necessary debate unfold as I hoped it would. America, after all, is always at our fingertips; that is the power of the Internet.

But now it’s time to keep the momentum for serious reform going so the conversation does not die prematurely.

Only then will we get the legislative reform that truly reins in the NSA and puts the government back in its constitutional place. Only then will we get the secure technologies we need to communicate without fear that silently in the background, our very own government is collecting, collating, and crunching the data that allows unelected bureaucrats to intrude into our most private spaces, analyzing our hopes and fears. Until then, every American who jealously guards their rights must do their best to engage in digital self-defense and proactively protect their electronic devices and communications. Every step we can take to secure ourselves from a government that no longer respects our privacy is a patriotic act.

We’ve come a long way, but there’s more to be done.

Edward J. Snowden, American

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'Nederland heeft zijn eigen Edward Snowden, en hij heet Brenno de Winter'

Is Brenno de W., in 2011 nog journalist van het jaar, echt de staatsvijand die de veiligheidsdiensten in hem zien?, vraagt Jean-Pierre Geelen zich af in zijn rubriek Medialogica.

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Veteranen VS moeten maanden op zorg wachten

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Naar aanleiding van het schandaal stapte de minister voor Veteranenzaken, Eric Shinseki, eind mei op.

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To defeat encryption, feds deploy the subpoena

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It's not shadowy spies or engineers from the National Security Agency secretly reading the hundreds of tips about government fraud that the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has received in less than a month.

Instead, it's lawyers from the President Barack Obama administration employing the power of the administrative subpoena in a bid to siphon data from POGO's encrypted submission portal. POGO's site encourages whistleblowers to use Tor as the gateway and has garnered more than 700 tips about abuse and mismanagement at the US Veterans Administration after less than a month of operation.

"If they are successful, that defeats the purpose of trying to improve our online security with encryption," Jon Newman, the project's communications director, said in a telephone interview.

The administrative subpoena, which does not require the Fourth Amendment standard of probable cause, comes as the number of so-called drop boxes from media organizations and other whistleblower groups is on the rise in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. The Washington Post and the Guardian were among the latest to deploy drop boxes on June 5. But no matter how securely encrypted the boxes might be, the subpoena is an old-school cracking tool that doesn't require any electronic decryption methods.

POGO launched its submission tool in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure of the Veterans Administration scandal, which on Monday blossomed to revelations that as many as 57,000 vets have been awaiting treatment for as long as three months each because of 1990s-era scheduling technology. The agency is also accused of trying to cover that up.

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The group said in an e-mail that 25 percent of the tips it has received "come from current or former VA staffers."

If the VA doesn't drop its subpoena, POGO said it would never turn the data over, even if ordered to by a judge.

"We are certainly prepared to go to court," Newman said. "We are certainly prepared to go to jail to prevent any of that information from being released."

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Hundreds sign up to protest outside GCHQ in Cheltenham

Hundreds of people have signed up to protest against Cheltenham-based listening post GCHQ.
The event, organised on social media site Facebook, aims to say “enough is enough” to the organisation following the Edward Snowden leaks.

Running from August 29 to September 1, it is organised by the group Anonymous.
A statement on the page said: “With all the latest leaks coming out about the power of GCHQ, the NSA and Five Eyes it is high time that we showed our faces and said enough is enough.”

A GCHQ spokes person said: "People have a right to protest peacefully within the law.

"All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position."

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AIVD heeft geen toegang tot providers in Nederland

De inlichtingendienst AIVD heeft geen toegang tot providers in Nederland. De dienst kan ook niet zomaar Nederlanders afluisteren zonder dat de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken of Defensie daar toestemming voor heeft gegeven. Maar als Nederlanders bellen met iemand in het buitenland waar inlichtingendiensten wel toegang hebben tot providers, zouden ze wellicht wel kunnen worden afgeluisterd.

Dat zei minister Ronald Plasterk van Binnenlandse Zaken vandaag in het vragenuurtje in de Tweede Kamer. Aanleiding is de bekendmaking vorige week van Vodafone dat overheden van zes landen directe toegang hebben geëist tot de netwerken van het telecombedrijf.

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Too Big To Comply? NSA Says It’s Too Large, Complex to Comply With Court Order

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In an era of too-big-to-fail banks, we should have known it was coming: An intelligence agency too big to rein in — and brazen enough to say so.

In a remarkable legal filing on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal court that its spying operations are too massive and technically complex to comply with an order to preserve evidence. The NSA, in other words, now says that it cannot comply with the rules that apply to any other party before a court — the very rules that ensure legal accountability — because it is too big.

The filing came in a long-running lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging the NSA's warrantless collection of Americans' private data. Recently, the plaintiffs in that case have fought to ensure that the NSA is preserving relevant evidence — a standard obligation in any lawsuit — and not destroying the very data that would show the agency spied on the plaintiffs' communications. Yet, as in so many other instances, the NSA appears to believe it is exempt from the normal rules.

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Universiteit Groningen dwingt onderzoekers tot gebruik van Gmail

De Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG) dwingt alle onderzoeksgroepen voortaan mail van Google te gebruiken. Een verzoek van de faculteit Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen om een eigen (en uit eigen zak betaald) mailsysteem te blijven gebruiken is afgewezen.

Daardoor denkt de faculteit contracten te verliezen. Bedrijven die met de onderzoekers samenwerken, zeggen dat correspondentie over bijvoorbeeld octrooiaanvragen niet veilig zijn bij Google. Onder meer IBM en DSM zouden daar volgens bronnen bij de faculteit bang voor zijn.

Volgens faculteitsbestuurder Peter van Haastert bedraagt de totale waarde van de contracten enkele tientallen miljoenen euro's, zo zei hij tegen de Groningse universiteitskrant UK. Daarin zei hoogleraar Michel Boesten, tevens werkzaam bij DSM Research, dat het delen van informatie via Google voor zijn bedrijf een probleem is. 'Dit wordt nu binnen het bedrijf aangescherpt.'

Veel Nederlandse universiteiten en hogescholen hebben het afgelopen jaar de e-mail van hun studenten overgeheveld naar Gmail van Google. De RUG is de eerste Nederlandse universiteit die ook de onderzoekers gaat overzetten. Daarmee zouden tonnen kunnen worden bespaard.

Namens vier onderzoeksgroepen (biotechnologen, farmaceuten, chemici en materiaalonderzoekers) en dertig individuele onderzoekers eiste de faculteit Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen een alternatief.

Nadelen
Volgens de wetenschappers wegen de voordelen van Gmail (grotere mailbox, goede beveiliging tegen hackers) niet op tegen de nadelen, zoals het mogelijke meekijken van de NSA en van Google zelf. Het faculteitsbestuur had 150 duizend euro per jaar over voor het behoud van de universitaire e-maildienst.

Maar de faculteit kon niet aantonen dat de bedrijven waarmee de onderzoekers samenwerken daadwerkelijk last zouden hebben van Google, zegt een woordvoerder van de universiteit. In de contracten staat wel dat informatie niet mag worden gedeeld met derden, maar Google wordt nergens expliciet als risico genoemd. De universiteit vindt dat onderzoekers hun mail maar moeten versleutelen, als de communicatie geheim moet blijven.

Individuele onderzoekers kunnen nog steeds een individueel bezwaar indienen, maar ook zij zullen moeten bewijzen dat contracten worden opgezegd als zij Gmail gaan gebruiken.

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CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

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As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet - previously employed in CIA "rendition" flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible "black" imprisonment - flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.

On the evening of 24 June 2013, as Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong intending to fly on to Cuba, an unmarked Gulfstream V business jet - tail number N977GA - took off from a quiet commercial airport 30 miles from Washington DC. Manassas Regional Airport discreetly offers its clients "the personal accommodations and amenities you can't find at commercial airports".

Early next morning, N977GA was detected heading east over Scotland at the unusually high altitude of 45,000 feet. It had not filed a flight plan, and was flying above the level at which air traffic control reporting is mandatory.

"The plane showed up on our system at 5:20 on 25 June," according to our source, a member of an internet aircraft-tracking network run by enthusiasts in the UK. "We knew the reputation of this aircraft and what it had done in the past."

N977GA was not reporting its progress to air-traffic controllers, and thus it would normally have been necessary to use a massive commercial or military radar installation to follow its path. But, even if pilots have turned off automated location data feeds, ordinary enthusiasts equipped with nothing more than suitable radio receivers connected to the internet can measure differences in the time at which an aircraft's radar transponder signal reaches locations on the ground. Using the technique of multilateration, this information is sufficient to calculate the transponder's position and so track the aircraft. (The ACMS/ACARS data feeds which automatically report an aircraft's position are a separate system from the transponder which responds to air-traffic radar pulses. They too can be picked up by receivers on the ground beneath, if they are activated.)

Several such online tracking networks are active in the UK, using this and other sources of information: they include www.flightradar24.com, www.planefinder.net, Planeplotter (www.coaa.co.uk/planeplotter.htm) and www.radarvirtuel.com. UK-based Planeplotter is one of the more sophisticated of these global "virtual radar" systems. It boasts 2,000 members with receivers hooked up to the internet.

The online tracking information reveals that the Gulfstream did not make it all the way to Moscow, but set down and waited at Copenhagen Airport.

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U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t.

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While Edward Snowden was trapped in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport last year, U.S. officials were confronting their own dearth of options in the White House Situation Room.

For weeks, senior officials from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies assembled nearly every day in a desperate search for a way to apprehend the former intelligence contractor who had exposed the inner workings of American espionage then fled to Hong Kong before ending up in Moscow.

Convened by White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, the meetings kept ending at the same impasse: Have everyone make yet another round of appeals to their Russian counterparts and hope that Snowden makes a misstep.

“The best play for us is him landing in a third country,” Monaco said, according to an official who met with her at the White House. The official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity, added, “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ”

U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.

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Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia until February, said he never had detailed information on the American fugitive’s whereabouts. “I do not know where Mr. Snowden is living, what his relationship to the Russian government is or how he makes a living,” said McFaul, who has returned to the faculty at Stanford University.

Several U.S. officials cited a complication to gathering intelligence on Snowden that could be seen as ironic: the fact that there has been no determination that he is an “agent of a foreign power,” a legal distinction required to make an American citizen a target of espionage overseas.

If true, it means that the former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, who leaked thousands of classified files to expose what he considered rampant and illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, is shielded at least to some extent from spying by his former employers.

Snowden is facing espionage-related charges, and the FBI has power to conduct wiretaps and enlist the NSA and CIA in its investigative efforts overseas. But even with such help, officials said, the bureau’s reach in Moscow is limited.

“The FBI doesn’t have any capability to operate in Moscow without the collaboration of the FSB,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who served in the Russian capital.

The lack of a warrant deeming Snowden a foreign agent would also cast doubt on the claims of some of his critics. U.S. officials, including Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have speculated that Snowden had Russian help in stealing U.S. secrets and probably works with the FSB now.

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The United States did not request that any country force down President Moraless plane, said Hayden, the National Security Council spokeswoman. What we did do ... was communicate via diplomatic and law enforcement channels with countries through which Mr. Snowden might transit.

Another U.S. official described the effort as a full-court press involving CIA station chiefs in Europe.

As it crossed Austria, the aircraft made a sudden U-turn and landed in Vienna, where authorities searched the cabin with Moraless permission, officials said but saw no sign of Snowden.

The initial, official explanation that Morales was merely making a refueling stop quickly yielded to recriminations and embarrassment.

Austrian officials said they were skeptical of the plan from the outset and noted that Moraless plane had taken off from a different airport in Moscow than where Snowden was held. Unless the Russians had carted him across the city, one official said, it was unlikely he was on board.

Even if Snowden had been a passenger, officials said, it is unclear how he could have been removed from a Bolivian air force jet whose cabin would ordinarily be regarded as that countrys sovereign domain especially in Austria, a country that considers itself diplomatically neutral.

We would have looked foolish if Snowden had been on that plane sitting there grinning, said a senior Austrian official. There would have been nothing we could have done.

Diverting Moraless plane was more than a diplomatic setback. It also probably caused Snowden to abandon any idea of leaving Russia, squandering what Monaco had described as the best play for the United States.

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Mass surveillance of social media is permitted by law, says top UK official

Charles Farr's statement marks first time government has commented on how it exploits the UK's legal framework to operate mass interception

Mass surveillance of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and even Google searches, is permissible because they are "external communications", according to the government's most senior security official.

In the first detailed justification of the UK's online interception policy, Charles Farr, director general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, has defended the way in which it sidesteps the need for individual search warrants.

The policy's rationale has been published as part of the government's defence against a case being brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International and other civil rights groups before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which deals with complaints against the intelligence services.

The claims have been brought in the wake of revelations from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden about mass surveillance under the Tempora programme by the UK monitoring agency GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA). Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), the interception of any domestic communications requires an individual warrant – a legal safeguard that previously was thought to extend to all users.

In a 48-page explanation, Farr sets out the history of monitoring online communications. He says: "Any regime that … only permitted interception in relation to specific persons or premises, would not have allowed adequate levels of intelligence information to be obtained and would not have met the undoubted requirements of intelligence for the protection of national security."

Farr's statement, published on Tuesday by the Privacy International and other human rights organisations, is the first time the government has commented on how it exploits the UK's legal framework to operate the mass interception programme.

Under section 8(1) of RIPA, internal communications between British residents within the UK may only be monitored pursuant to a specific warrant. These specific warrants should only be granted where there is some reason to suspect the person in question of unlawful activity. "External communications", however, may be monitored indiscriminately under a general warrant according to section 8(4).

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: "Intelligence agencies cannot be considered accountable to parliament and to the public they serve when their actions are obfuscated through secret interpretations of byzantine laws.

"Moreover, the suggestion that violations of the right to privacy are meaningless if the violator subsequently forgets about it not only offends the fundamental, inalienable nature of human rights, but patronises the British people, who will not accept such a meagre excuse for the loss of their civil liberties."

James Welch, legal director of Liberty, said: "The security services consider that they're entitled to read, listen and analyse all our communications on Facebook, Google and other US-based platforms. If there was any remaining doubt that our snooping laws need a radical overhaul, there can be no longer. The agencies now operate in a legal and ethical vacuum; why the deafening silence from our elected representatives?"

Michael Bochenek, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International, said: "British citizens will be alarmed to see their government justifying industrial-scale intrusion into their communications. The public should demand an end to this wholesale violation of their right to privacy."

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Britse veiligheidsdienst tapt Google en Facebook af

Britten die gebruikmaken van webdiensten als Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google of een e-mailadres hebben bij Hotmail of Yahoo worden massaal bespioneerd door de Britse veiligheidsdienst GCHQ. De Britse spionagechef Charles Farr gaf dat toe in een rechtszaak die verschillende burgerrechtenorganisaties hebben aangespannen tegen GCHQ.

Communicatie tussen Britten in Groot-Brittannië mag pas worden opgevangen als een minister daar nadrukkelijk toestemming voor heeft gegeven. Maar zodra Britten met elkaar communiceren via bijvoorbeeld Amerikaanse diensten als Facebook en Hotmail, gaat die vlieger niet op. Volgens Farr betekent dit overigens niet dat alle afgetapte berichten ook worden gelezen.

Het is de eerste keer dat de Britse regering toelicht hoe wetgeving GCHQ in staat stelt op grote schaal communicatie tussen Britse burgers in de gaten te houden.

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European court to rule on allegations Facebook passes personal data to NSA

High court in Dublin refers to Strasbourg a challenge by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems

A European court has been asked to rule on a landmark case which seeks to force watchdogs to audit the personal data Facebook allegedly releases to US spy chiefs.

The high court in Dublin has referred to Strasbourg a challenge by an Austrian privacy campaigner on the back of the Prism surveillance operation exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Max Schrems's initial attempt to have the social media giant audited over data that its Irish arm allegedly passes on to the US National Security Agency (NSA) was dismissed last year by Ireland's Data Protection Commission.

On Wednesday, Judge Desmond Hogan ordered the privacy challenge – taken in the Irish courts by Schrems's EuropeVFacebook campaign – be referred to the European court of justice.

The judge said evidence suggests that personal data is routinely accessed on a "mass and undifferentiated basis" by the US security authorities.

He said Facebook users should have their privacy respected under the Irish constitution.

"For such interception of communications to be constitutionally valid, it would, accordingly, be necessary to demonstrate that this interception and surveillance of individuals or groups of individuals was objectively justified in the interests of the suppression of crime and national security and, further, that any such interception was attended by the appropriate and verifiable safeguards," the judge said.

Judge Hogan adjourned the case in the Irish courts while European judges look at two questions.

He is asking Strasbourg to examine whether Ireland's data watchdog is bound by what is known as Safe Harbour – a European commission decision from 2000 that US data protection rules are adequate if information is passed by companies to its security agencies on a "self-certify" basis.

Judge Hogan is also asking whether an investigation can be launched in Ireland in light of the Snowden revelations that internet data and communications were being intercepted by the NSA on a global scale.

Examining the background to Schrems's challenge, Judge Hogan said only the naive or credulous could have been surprised by the Snowden expose.

"Only the foolish would deny that the US has, by virtue of its superpower status, either assumed – or, if you prefer, has had cast upon it – far-reaching global security responsibilities," he said.

"It is probably the only world power with a global reach which can effectively monitor the activities of rogue states, advanced terrorist groups and major organised crime, even if the support of allied states such as the UK is also of great assistance.

"The monitoring of global communications – subject, of course, to key safeguards – is accordingly regarded essential if the US is to discharge the mandate which it has assumed.

"These surveillance programmes have undoubtedly saved many lives and have helped to ensure a high level of security, both throughout the western world and elsewhere.

"But there may also be suspicion in some quarters that this type of surveillance has had collateral objects and effects, including the preservation and reinforcing of American global political and economic power."

The case will be mentioned in the high court in two weeks before the issue is sent to the European court.

Schrems is understood to be in Vienna examining the ruling.

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Hillary Clinton backs overhaul of surveillance powers in NSA criticism

Former secretary of state calls for the restoration of constitutional privacy protections weakened after 9/11 attacks

Hillary Clinton has thrown her weight behind political efforts to rein in US surveillance powers in her most forthright criticism yet of the National Security Agency (NSA).

The former secretary of state, who has hitherto largely stayed out of the debate sparked by leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, called on Congress to restore constitutional privacy protections weakened after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.

"We are finally taking stock of the laws that we passed after 9/11," she told Fox News interviewer Greta Van Susteren. "We did all of this in an a hurry because we were worried and scared and now we need to take a step back and figure out how we make sure that the balance between liberty and security is right."

Clinton, who admitted in an earlier CNN interview that she had disagreed with her husband's cautious support for Snowden, defended the government's legal right to carry out some bulk collection of American data but said she now backed efforts in Congress to change the law.

"Laws that were passed after 9/11 gave the executive very broad authority ... what has happened is that people have said, OK, the emergency is over and we want to get back to regular order," she said.

"It's a really difficult balancing act, but you are absolutely right that we need to make some changes to secure that constitutional right to privacy that Americans are due."

The House of Representatives recently passed a version of the USA Freedom Act that seeks to outlaw the bulk collection of American data, although civil liberties campaigners worry that it has been watered down by administration lawyers and are pushing for a tougher version in the Senate.

Clinton was also scathing the of NSA's spying on the leaders of foreign allies such as Germany and was asked whether chancellor Angela Merkel was right to be angry.

"Yes, she should be. That was absolutely uncalled for," replied Clinton. "There is [legitimate counter-terrorism] work that we need to do with the Germans and inside Germany ... that has nothing to do with Angela Merkel's cell phone and that should be off limits."

The Fox News interview, a rare foray by Clinton in hostile political territory, was dominated by familiar questions about her reaction to attacks on US consular staff in Benghazi but the former secretary of state also strayed into more contemporary diplomatic questions during a separate interview on CNN.

Clinton appeared to distance herself from suggestions by current secretary of state John Kerry that the US could seek assistance from Iran in stemming insurgent attacks in Iraq.

"I am not prepared to say that we go in with Iran right now until we have a better idea what we are getting ourselves into," she told CNN.

But Clinton also supported a growing consensus inside Democratic circles that unilateral US military intervention could also be a mistake.

She criticised Iraqi prime minister Maliki, claiming he had "purged the military that we trained ... and forced out some of the most able commanders" and suggested the White House was seeking tougher assurances from him before offering support.

"I think that right now there are those hard negotiations going on," said Clinton. "With respect to air attacks that needs to be part of a larger package and I believe that is part of the intense negotiations that are going on."

She also said it was a mistake for Iraq not to strike an agreement for an ongoing US troop presence after its main military withdrawal.