Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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Snowden elected as rector by students at University of Glasgow

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David Miranda detention at Heathrow airport was lawful, high court rules

Detention of former Guardian journalist's partner was justified by 'very pressing' interests of national security, judges say

Three high court judges have dismissed a challenge that David Miranda, the partner of the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was unlawfully detained under counter-terrorism powers for nine hours at Heathrow airport last August.

The judges accepted that Miranda's detention and the seizure of computer material was "an indirect interference with press freedom" but said this was justified by legitimate and "very pressing" interests of national security.

The three judges, Lord Justice Laws, Mr Justice Ouseley and Mr Justice Openshaw, concluded that Miranda's detention at Heathrow under schedule 7 of the Terrorism 2000 Act was lawful, proportionate and did not breach European human rights protections of freedom of expression.

The ruling says that Miranda was stopped in transit between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro after meeting the film-maker Laura Poitras, who had been involved in making disclosures based on documents leaked by the US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Miranda was carrying encrypted files, including an external hard drive containing 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents, "in order to assist the journalistic activity of Greenwald". The Guardian made his travel reservations and paid for the trip.

Laws said he noted that the seized material included personal information that would allow staff to be identified, including those deployed overseas.

Greenwald told the judges that the security services were well aware that the seized material was in connection with journalism and not terrorism. He said there was no evidence to indicate that any disclosure had actually threatened or endangered life or any specific operation.

"In my view, this is not surprising, given the care we took not to create such a risk," Greenwald said in his witness statement. Miranda said the material was so heavily encrypted that he was unable to open it.

The judges dismissed Greenwald's claims, saying there was "no perceptible foundation" for the suggestion that they were not putting national security or lives at risk by possessing the material.

Laws accepted that agreeing not to publish material simply because a government official had said it might damage national security was antithetical to the most important traditions of responsible journalism, but said this was trivial compared with the threat to security.

He said that neither Greenwald nor Miranda was in a position to form an accurate judgment on the matter because they would depend on knowing the whole "jigsaw" of disparate pieces of intelligence.

Laws said he had no reason to doubt any of the evidence from Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser at the Cabinet Office, that the material was likely to cause very great damage to security interests and possible loss of life.

"In my judgment, the schedule 7 stop was a proportionate measure in the circumstances. Its objective was not only legitimate but very pressing," he said.

Miranda said he would challenge the decision. "I will appeal [against] this ruling, and keep appealing until the end, not because I care about what the British government calls me, but because the values of press freedom that are at stake are too important to do anything but fight until the end," he told The Intercept website, which is edited by Greenwald. "I'm of course not happy that a court has formally said that I was a legitimate terrorism suspect, but the days of the British empire are long over and this ruling will have no effect outside of the borders of this country."

A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: "We're disappointed by today's judgment, which means that an act designed to defeat terrorism can now be used to catch those who are working on fundamentally important issues. The judgment takes a narrow view of what 'journalism' is in the 21st century and a very wide view of the definition of 'terrorism'. We find that disturbing."

Miranda's solicitor, Gwendolen Morgan of Bindmans, said her client had no option but to take the case to the court of appeal as the ruling meant that journalism was at risk of being conflated with terrorism. The high court turned down a direct appeal, but Miranda has the right to petition the appeal court judges to hear the case.

The ruling was widely condemned by human rights groups, including Liberty, English Pen, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Coalition of Media and Free Speech Organisations, who actively intervened in the case, but Helen Ball, the Metropolitan police's national counter-terrorism co-ordinator,welcomed the ruling. She said Miranda's detention was lawful and undertaken for pressing reasons of national security. "Some commentators have characterised the stop as an attack on journalistic freedom. This was never the case. The judgment is a clear vindication of the officers' conduct, demonstrating that they acted lawfully and in good faith throughout," she said.

The ruling prompted strong criticism from some politicians. Former Conservative shadow home secretary, David Davis, said that when the counter-terrorism law was passed it was never thought that its powers would be used against journalists.

"There can be no suggestion that Mr Miranda was a terrorist or that he was seeking to abet terrorism, and it was for these purposes that this power was given to the politicians and the security agencies," he said.

Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said the ruling showed schedule 7 was too broadly drafted. "We have already made some changes to the law which are about to take effect, but I think there is still more to do," he said.

The Tory MP Julian Smith, a strong critic of the Guardian, said: "This always seemed a bizarre complaint for Mr Miranda to have made since he was transporting such sensitive information about our national security. Let's hope the full truth about the risks to which he and the Guardian continue to expose the UK is now given the full focus it deserves. That is where there is a real legal case to be made."

Rosie Brighouse, Liberty's legal officer, said: "If such a barefaced abuse of power is lawful, then the law must change. Miranda's treatment showed schedule 7 for what it is: a chillingly over-broad power, routinely misused. People are held and interrogated for hours, their property confiscated while they're swabbed for saliva – all without any suspicion that they've done anything wrong."

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On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism

As my colleague Ryan Devereaux reports, a lower UK court this morning, as long expected, upheld the legality of the nine-hour detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport last August, even as it acknowledged that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom”. For good measure, the court also refused permission to appeal (though permission can still be granted by the appellate court). David was detained and interrogated under the Terrorism Act of 2000.

The UK Government expressly argued that the release of the Snowden documents (which the free world calls “award-winning journalism“) is actually tantamount to “terrorism”, the same theory now being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists. Congratulations to the UK government on the illustrious company it is once again keeping. British officials have also repeatedly threatened criminal prosecution of everyone involved in this reporting, including Guardian journalists and editors.

Equating journalism with terrorism has a long and storied tradition. Indeed, as Jon Schwarz has documented, the U.S. Government has frequently denounced nations for doing exactly this. Just last April, Under Secretary of State Tara Sonenshine dramatically informed the public that many repressive, terrible nations actually “misuse terrorism laws to prosecute and imprison journalists.” When visiting Ethiopia in 2012, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns publicly disclosed that in meetings with that nation’s officials, the United States “express[ed] our concern that the application of anti-terrorism laws can sometimes undermine freedom of expression and independent media.” The same year, the State Department reported that Burundi was prosecuting a journalist under terrorism laws.

It should surprise nobody that the UK is not merely included in, but is one of the leaders of, this group of nations which regularly wages war on basic press freedoms. In the 1970s, British journalist Duncan Campbell was criminally prosecuted for the crime of reporting on the mere existence of the GCHQ, while fellow journalist Mark Hosenball, now of Reuters, was forced to leave the country. The monarchy has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. The UK government routinely threatens newspapers with all sorts of sanctions for national security reporting it dislikes. Its Official Secrets Act makes it incredibly easy to prosecute journalists and others for disclosing anything which political officials want to keep secret. For that reason, it was able to force the Guardian to destroy its own computers containing Snowden material precisely because the paper’s editors knew that British courts would slavishly defer to any requests made by the GCHQ to shut down the paper’s reporting.

That such repressive measures come from British political culture is to be expected. The political elite of that country cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire. The wig-wearing presiding judge who issued this morning’s ruling equating journalism with terrorism is addressed as “Lord Justice Laws”, best known for previously approving the use of evidence to detain people that had been derived from torture at Guantanamo (he can be seen here).

None of this behavior bears any relationship to actual reality: it’s as though the elite political class of an entire nation somehow got stuck in an adolescent medieval fantasy game. But the political principles of monarchy, hereditary privilege, rigid class stratification, and feudal entitlement embedded in all of this play-acting clearly shape the repressive mentality and reverence for state authority which Her Majesty’s Government produces. That journalism disliked by the state can be actually deemed not just a crime but “terrorism” seems a natural by-product of this type of warped elite mindset, as does the fact that much of the British press led the way in demanding that the Guardian’s journalism be criminalized (not unlike how many members of the American media have become the most devoted defenders of the NSA and have taken the lead in demonizing the journalistic transparency brought to that and other government agencies).

As we made clear long ago, the obvious objective of these attacks – to intimidate the journalists working on this story and deter future disclosures – will remain completely unfulfilled. Since David’s detention and the compelled destruction of the Guardian’s computers, there have been a spate of top secret GCHQ documents reported on and published around the world: many of which, to its credit, have been published by the Guardian itself.

They include detailed reports on GCHQ’s attempts to compromise basic encryption methods used to safeguard internet security, the GCHQ’s role in spying on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, the GCHQ’s targeting of UN charities and officials, the GCHQ’s use of “dirty tricks” including “honey traps” and fake victim blog posts, the GCHQ’s attacks on “hactivists”, GCHQ’s surveillance of YouTube and Blogger activity and related activities to covertly influence internet discourse, GCHQ’s surveillance through phone apps such as “Angry Birds”, and – just yesterday – GCHQ’s covert monitoring of visitors to the WikiLeaks website. Needless to say, there is much more GCHQ reporting to do, and nothing about today’s ruling – or anything else the UK Government can do – will stop that.

It is not difficult to apprehend the reason the UK government is so desperate to criminalize this reporting. The GCHQ itself made the reason clear in a once-secret memo previously reported by the Guardian. The British agency “has repeatedly warned it fears a ‘damaging public debate’ on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes.” Among other things, “GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.” In particular, the spying agency feared that disclosures “could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.” Privacy groups have now commenced such lawsuits against the GCHQ.

In sum, the UK Government wants to stop disclosure of its mass surveillance activities not because it fears terrorism or harm to national security but because it fears public debate, legal challenges and accountability. That is why the UK government considers this journalism to be “terrorism”: because it undermines the interests and power of British political officials, not the safety of the citizenry. I’ve spent years arguing that the word “terrorism” in the hands of western governments has been deprived of all consistent meaning other than “that which challenges our interests”, and I never imagined that we would be gifted with such a perfectly compelling example of this proposition.

As David told The Intercept this morning, he intends to appeal this ruling, and to keep appealing it, until the end if necessary – up to the highest UK court and then to the European Court of Human Rights – not because he cares what the British Government calls him, but because of the press freedoms at stake. But whatever the outcome, the reporting will continue as aggressively as ever no matter how many threats are made by the British (or American) governments to prosecute.

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Unnamed Officials Tell Wall Street Journal They May Keep More Data Because of NSA Lawsuits

Unnamed United States government officials have apparently told the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency might have to expand its “collection” of Americans’ phone records because people are suing the government to stop what they consider to be intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance.

This idea being floated in a major national newspaper is the first that any lawyer involved in cases against the government have heard this wild argument. Is it some kind of ham-handed attempt to help the NSA retain control of the phone records?

What government lawyers happen to believe, suddenly, is that federal court rules for preserving evidence “related to lawsuits require the agency to stop routinely destroying older phone records.” So, in theory, they should store more data on Americans while lawsuits are pending because they can’t destroy “evidence.”

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed a lawsuit over the phone records collection program under the PATRIOT Act, questioned why the government was just now “considering this move.” EFF has had a lawsuit over NSA surveillance since 2008. “I think they’re looking for any way to throw rocks at the litigation…To the extent this is a serious concern, we should have had this discussion in 2008,” Cohn added.

What Patrick Toomey, an ACLU lawyer involved in also suing the government over the program, said is “it’s difficult to understand why the government would consider taking this position, when the relief we’ve requested in the lawsuit is a purge of our data.”

The EFF lawsuits involves a coalition of organizations, which allege the NSA is violating their First Amendment right of association by “illegally collecting their call records.”

In that case, the government has argued plaintiffs do not have “standing” for the suit. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court considers the collection to be “lawful.” The Court has never decided that collection violates the Fourth Amendment, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to details of “intelligence-gathering activities that could undermine the government’s compelling interest in preventing terrorist attacks.”

The government has also called allegations that calls could be “used to glean the identities” of associations’ members, constituents and others who wish to associate an allegation that is “attributable to misperceptions and conjecture about the government’s activities, but not one fairly traceable to the government’s actual conduct.”

In the ACLU lawsuit, the government has made similar arguments. It has argued, “Even if the government’s conduct implicated a protected Fourth Amendment interest, the bulk collection of telephony metadata would be ‘reasonable’ and permissible in light of the strong national interest in preventing terrorist attacks, and the minimal intrusion on individual privacy.”

A federal judge in December 2013 defended the government’s interest in maintaining secrecy and dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit. The ACLU has now appealed.

Recently, Sen. Rand Paul filed a lawsuit against the government. Lawyer in the case, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, said what the government is suggesting it may do is “just silly.” He even said he thought destroying phone records the government had “without demanding those records in pretrial discovery” would be acceptable to his clients.

Federal judge Richard Leon ruled, also in December, that the program did, in fact, infringe upon privacy and was “likely unconstitutional.” That case was brought by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. The government has appealed the decision.

Why the government would need to make this argument now is very unclear and seems ill-conceived, but journalist Marcy Wheeler points out that the government has made this argument before to the FISA Court.

EFF has another lawsuit filed in 2008 to “stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government and government officials behind the program accountable. A federal judge actually ruled in July 2013 that the government could not use the “state secrets privilege” to block a challenge to the constitutionality of the program. (It’s what Cohn is probably referring to in her comments to WSJ.)

Wheeler asks, “If the NSA is so cautious about retaining evidence in case of a potential crime, then why did it just blast away the 3,000 files of phone dragnet information they found stashed on a random server, which may or may not have been mingled in with STELLAR WIND data it found in 2012?”

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board described the data and its destruction like this:

. In one incident, NSA technical personnel discovered a technical server with nearly 3,000 files containing call detail records that were more than five years old, but that had not been destroyed in accordance with the applicable retention rules. These files were among those used in connection with a migration of call detail records to a new system. Because a single file may contain more than one call detail record, and because the files were promptly destroyed by agency technical personnel, the NSA could not provide an estimate regarding the volume of calling records that were retained beyond the five-year limit.

This seems like “evidence” the government lawyers would want to protect for lawsuits like the one being brought by EFF. But, as Wheeler notes, this evidence of illegal surveillance is “all gone.”

Perhaps, the appropriate response from EFF and the ACLU is to go to court and express concern that the government has, up until this point, not been preserving evidence of possible illegal or unconstitutional surveillance in this program.

What else have technical personnel discovered and deleted that is relevant to pending lawsuits, which aim to protect Americans’ privacy?

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'NSA luistert nu Duitse ministers af'

De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA luistert de Duitse bondskanselier Angela Merkel niet langer af, maar houdt ambtenaren en politici uit haar omgeving scherper in de gaten. Dat schrijft het Duitse zondagsblad Bild am Sonntag, dat bekendstaat om zijn goede contacten met de Duitse inlichtingendienst.

De Duitsers waren vorig jaar geschokt door de onthulling dat de NSA in Duitsland zeer actief was en zelfs de mobiele telefoon van Merkel afluisterde. President Barack Obama beloofde dat de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst Merkel niet meer zou bespioneren, maar volgens het zondagsblad is nu onder anderen minister Thomas de Maizière van Binnenlandse Zaken een doelwit. Hij is een van de belangrijkste vertrouwelingen van de bondskanselier.

'Wij hebben de opdracht geen verlies aan informatie toe te staan, nu de communicatie van de bondskanselier niet meer direct mag worden gecontroleerd', zei een anonieme NSA-medewerker tegen Bild am Sonntag. Het Duitse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken wilde niet op het bericht reageren. 'Wij geven nooit commentaar op wat 'anonieme individuen beweren', werd daar gezegd.

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Inside the Mind of James Clapper
^{By Glenn Greenwald}

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I’m going to have a story published later today about a new document, but until then, this new interview with (and profile of) Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by the Daily Beast‘s Eli Lake is worth spending a few moments examining. Last week, Lake published one excerpt of his interview where Clapper admitted that the U.S. Government should have told the American people that the NSA was collecting their communications records: as pure a vindication of Edward Snowden’s choice as it gets, for obvious reasons. But there are several new, noteworthy revelations from this morning’s article:

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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

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One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

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Attorney for Edward Snowden Interrogated at U.K. Airport, Placed on "Inhibited Persons List"

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Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency’s vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were awarded one of journalism’s highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was recently detained while going through customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack joins us today to tell her story. Radack says she was subjected to "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an "inhibited persons list," a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower support organization.

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:25 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:
Wie hebben er een kopie / al die bestanden van Snowden nu dan? En waarom kwakken ze die hele mik niet gewoon online?

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:39 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:

[..]

Het gaat om duizenden bestanden, dan kunnen andere mensen daar toch ook duiding aan geven. Heb je niet alleen dat handjevol journalisten voor nodig die constant worden lastiggevallen door GCHQ zelf.

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Wat is er precies erg aan dat instanties zich dieper in de ellende liegen?

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:47 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:

[..]

Oh op die fiets inderdaad. Nu snap ik dat 2e inderdaad ook, dat las ik anders.

Maar GCHQ hebben toch al eens ingevallen bij één van die nieuwsbedrijven en daar allerlei bestanden geconfisqueerd? Dan weten ze misschien ondertussen toch ook wel wat ze kunnen verwachten lijkt me.

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Why is this story being removed from all the popular subs over and over by mods?

Message the admins about the censorship of this article by /r/news and /r/worldnews mods. They have never seemed to care about this in the past but if enough users message them it will hopefully at least provoke a response of some kind. Something needs to be done about this or this site needs to be abandoned as a platform for legitimate political discourse.

Important Update: So, it turns out that the /r/news mod /u/BipolarBear0 who has been deleting all the instances of this story has previously been caught running a voting brigade to get anti-Semitic content upvoted on /r/conspiracy to discredit the sub. A fact which he admitted to me in another thread just a few minutes ago (he claims he was doing an "experiment"...) . This guy needs to be banned from the site.

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This was all over the front page around 4am this morning. came back and really had to dig to find any mention of this story.

kind of alarming.

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GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide

• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

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A Key NSA Overseer's Alarming Dismissal of Surveillance Critics

The NSA's inspector general mischaracterized Edward Snowden's critique of the agency in remarks at Georgetown.

The National Security Agency's overseers have a spotty-at-best post-9/11 track record. The NSA carried out an illegal program of warrantless wiretapping during the Bush Administration. Even after the President's Surveillance Program was reformed, the agency built a surveillance dragnet that collected information on the private communications of millions of totally innocent Americans, a dramatic change in approach carried out without popular input or consent. And according to the FISA-court judges charged with overseeing the NSA—the very people who signed off on the phone dragnet, among other things—the agency has violated the Fourth Amendment and the law on at least thousands of occasions.

Some of those violations affected millions of people.

As well, insufficient operational security recently resulted in the theft of a still unknown number of highly classified documents by an employee of an NSA subcontractor. Civil libertarians and national-security statists alike have reason to be upset.

For all of these reasons, it must be a tough time to be George Ellard, the NSA's inspector general. The entity that he heads declares itself "the independent agent for individual and organizational integrity" within the NSA. "Through professional inspections, audits, and investigations," its website adds, "we work to ensure that the Agency respects Constitutional rights, obeys laws and regulations, treats its employees and affiliates fairly, and uses public resources wisely."

Since taking his post in 2007, Ellard has scarcely made a public statement. This week, however, he participated in a conference at Georgetown, and while efforts were reportedly made to keep his press exposure to a minimum, his remarks have been reported.

They're interesting—and do not inspire confidence. We begin with the account provided by Kevin Gosztola:

. Ellard was asked what he would have done if Snowden had come to him with complaints. Had this happened, Ellard says would have said something like, "Hey, listen, fifteen federal judges have certified this program is okay." (He was referring to the NSA phone records collection program.) "I would also have an independent obligation to assess the constitutionality of that law," Ellard stated. "Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do."

Even on their own, these comments are strange. Many aspects of the Section 215 phone dragnet are now public. Edward Snowden is on record with specific objections to them. The same goes for lots of other NSA initiatives: As they've been publicly fleshed out, Snowden has articulated why he believes the public ought to know about them. If Ellard understands what has transpired since last June, why is he speaking as if Snowden's leaks could've been averted if his supposed "misperceptions" had been corrected? That possibility isn't consistent with the facts. Knowing their actual nature, Snowden still thinks the programs should be public.

Misunderstanding Snowden so completely is strange. A subsequent statement is worrisome. It comes via Politico:

. “Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

. And if Snowden wasn’t satisfied, Ellard said the NSA would have then allowed him to speak to the House and Senate intelligence committees. ”Given the reaction, I think somewhat feigned, of some members of that committee, he’d have found a welcoming audience,” Ellard said in a reference to outspoken NSA critics on the panel, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).

It is difficult to know exactly what this means, but it certainly appears as if the inspector general of the NSA is questioning whether the Senate Intelligence Committee members expressing alarm at surveillance practices are actually earnest.

The Politico article continues:

. “Whether in the end he’d have been satisfied, I don’t know,” Ellard added. “But allowing people who have taken an oath to protect the constitution, to protect these national security interest, simply to violate or break that oath, is unacceptable.”

It's worth mentioning that Snowden never took an oath to protect national-security interests. As a CIA employee, he did take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Many Americans, myself included, believe that Snowden upheld his oath when he alerted the public to mass surveillance, Fourth Amendment violations, and thousands of instances of NSA lawbreaking. Other Americans believe that he violated his oath by leaking classified information to the press.

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Why Reddit mods are 'censoring' Greenwald's latest bombshell

It’s been called “Censorship Fiasco 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

News over the past 72 hours has been dominated by the implosion of Mt. Gox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, and a report from Glenn Greenwald on how British intelligence agents have engaged in an extensive disinformation program to mislead Internet users.

Mt. Gox’s imminent demise has particularly gripped Reddit communities like r/Bitcoin and r/news following rumors of a $300 million hack that crippled the Japan-based business. Redditors from r/news have also obsessed over Greenwald’s latest Edward Snowden leak—only his story has been banned from the default subreddit.

All links to Greenwald’s piece on the Intercept, a publication founded by First Look Media and h ome to Snowden’s leaked materials, titled “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations,” has been removed more than six different times from r/news and at least once from r/worldnews.

In the article, Greenwald provides images from a Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) documents that show how the clandestine agency has tried to “control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the Internet itself.”

Greenwald also provides a great deal of context and explanation in his article, comparing it to similar programs allegedly carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA). Greenwald’s story was subsequently picked up on Boing Boing, RT.com, Daily Kos, Zero Hedge, and Der Speigel.

The removals have been the subject of numerous threads on r/subredditdrama (where redditors discuss “Internet fights and other dramatic happenings from other subreddits”) and r/undelete (home to submissions that moderators remove from the top 100 in r/all). Redditors are calling it an act of censorship.

“Sooo... the topic of discussion is direct evidence, in the form of leaked top secret documents, that the intelligence community goes to rather remarkable lengths to manipulate online social media,” damnface commented. “Does anyone see how the comments in this thread might look a little ironic at some point in the near future?”

The removal of the article was carried out by r/news moderators, volunteer gatekeepers of subreddits who have the power to ban users and content that either break Reddit’s official rules or rules instituted by each individual forum.

Moderator positions, particularly those on default subreddits like r/news, are coveted positions. All new registered Reddit users are automatically subscribed to these subreddits when they join, and most never unsubscribe from them. And thanks to Reddit's 112 million–plus unique visitors last month, a permanent place on Reddit's front page results in tremendous traffic and attention for sites submitted to these forums.

One r/news moderator who has drawn the ire of the community is BipolarBear0. He has defended the removal of the article citing r/news’s rule against posting “opinion/analysis or advocacy” pieces.

“Since the Firstlook article is primarily analytic and non-objective in nature, it wouldn't be allowed in /r/news,” he commented. “The story itself is irrelevant, it's simply how the story is presented—which is why any unbiased, objective and wholly factual news article on the event would be (and is) allowed in /r/news.”

Tuesday night, a rewrite of Greenwald’s article on examiner.com was posted on r/news and has since made its way to the third spot on the subreddit, gathering more than 900 comments.

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Senators to investigate NSA role in GCHQ 'Optic Nerve' webcam spying

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Reacting to the Guardian’s revelation on Thursday that UK surveillance agency GCHQ swept up millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chats, senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich said in a joint statement that “any involvement of US agencies in the alleged activities reported today will need to be closely scrutinized”.

The senators described the interception as a “breathtaking lack of respect for privacy and civil liberties”.

On Friday, the Internet Association – a trade body representing internet giants including Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, AOL and Twitter – joined the chorus of condemnation, issuing a statement expressing alarm at the latest GCHQ revelations, and calling for reform.

According to documents provided to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the GCHQ program codenamed Optic Nerve fed screengrabs of webcam chats and associated metadata into NSA tools such as Xkeyscore.

NSA research, the documents indicate, also contributed to the creation of Optic Nerve, which attempted to use facial recognition technology to identify intelligence targets, particularly those using multiple anonymous internet IDs.

Neither NSA nor GCHQ addressed the Guardian’s questions about US access to the images themselves. Outgoing NSA director Keith Alexander walked away from a reporter on Thursday who asked the army four-star general about the NSA’s role in Optic Nerve.

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Tor Instant Messaging Bundle - A New Anonymous and Encrypted messaging Software

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We are living in an era of Mass Surveillance, conducted by the Government Agencies like the NSA and GCHQ, and we ourselves gave them an open invitation as we all have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go i.e. Smartphone. Encryption and security are more important today than any other time in our history. So, the best proactive way to keep your tracks clear is - Always use only trusted privacy tools and services.

The same folks behind the Anonymity Tool, Tor Browser Bundle is currently working on a new Privacy tool called 'Tor Instant Messaging Bundle' (TIMB), that will help you with encrypted communication to keep your online conversations private.

The Tor is the free software that lets users browse the Internet anonymously and mostly used by activists, journalists and to conceal their online activities from prying eyes.

Tor Instant Messaging Bundle, or TIMB is a real time anonymous chat system, that will simply route all of your chat data through the Tor's encrypted network, which uses proxy servers to hide the identities of its users, according to the documents posted from the Tor Project's 2014 Winter Dev Meeting. The client itself will be built on top of Instantbird, an open source instant messaging service.

The Tor Instant Messaging Bundle will encrypt user messages multiple times, including destination IP, making it sufficiently difficult to trace the original source.

Since the governments are engaged in the widespread data collection and analysis, using various gateways such as Cell phone location information, the Internet, Camera observations, and Drones. As technology and analytics advance, mass surveillance opportunities continue to grow. In which, the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle can come out to be the world's most secure real-time communication tool.

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On the meaning of journalistic independence

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In fact, I’ve been accused more times than I can count – including by a former NSA employee and a Eurasia Foundation spokesman - of being a Putin shill for not supporting the Ukrainian opposition and not denouncing Russian involvement there (by which they mean I’ve not written anything on this topic). Now we seem to have the exact opposite premise: that the real evil is supporting the opposition in Ukraine and any journalist who works at First Look – including ones who are repeatedly called criminals by top U.S. officials for publishing top secret government documents; or who risk their lives to go around the world publicizing the devastation wrought by America’s Dirty Wars and its dirty and lawless private contractors; or who have led the journalistic attack on the banks that own and control the government - are now tools of neo-liberal, CIA-cooperating imperialism which seeks to undermine Putin by secretly engineering the Ukrainian revolution. To call all of that innuendo muddled and incoherent is to be generous.

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Labour to overhaul spy agency controls in response to Snowden files

Yvette Cooper says debate over privacy, civil liberties and the role of the intelligence agencies has barely started in Britain

Labour will on Monday propose substantial changes to the oversight of the British intelligence agencies, including the legal framework under which they operate, in response to the revelations emerging from files leaked by Edward Snowden.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is preparing to argue that the current arrangements are unsustainable for the government, and that it is damaging to trust in the agencies if ministers continue to hide their heads in the sand.

In a speech that represents Labour's most serious intervention since the controversy about the scale of state surveillance broke last summer, she will say: "The oversight and legal frameworks are now out of date. In particular that means we need major reforms to oversight and a thorough review of the legal framework to keep up with changing technology."

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, by coincidence will also this week make a speech setting out his party's views on privacy and security.

Cooper will call for sweeping changes to strengthen the accountability of the intelligence agencies and a replacement to the out-of-date Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). Her speech eschews direct criticism of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, and accepts that the leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Snowden have damaged national security while highlighting legitimate concerns about privacy in the internet age.

She will also argue that ministers have responded to the revelations in a patronising way by trying to stifle debate on the online role of the police, intelligence and security agencies, or of the legal framework that governs their work. "The government can't keep burying its head in the sand and hoping these issues will go away," she will say in the speech to the thinktank Demos.

She will urge David Cameron to learn instead from President Obama, who has welcomed, and led, a debate in the US about the balance between security and liberty in the wake of the Snowden leaks.

British ministers, Cooper is expected to argue, "have provided neither reassurance nor reform. They have simply asserted that the British agencies are abiding by the law. They haven't explained what the law does, what the privacy safeguards are, whether the law is still up to date, or why the work the agencies do is important. Neither prime minister, deputy prime minister, home secretary nor foreign secretary have provided any leadership or response.

In contrast President Obama commissioned an independent review and set out areas for reform to protect US citizens' privacy and civil liberties, while also robustly defending the purpose and work of the security and intelligence agencies. "So in the US the debate is moving on. But here in Britain, it's barely started. That's not sustainable."

The speech is the product of extensive soundings with civil liberty groups, the spy agencies and the police, and makes the prospect of changes to the law on communications after the election highly likely. Cooper singles out the three intelligence commissioners as needing a "major overhaul", saying they operate as much in the shadow as the spies they oversee.

Her criticism is aimed at the secrecy of the work of three commissioners – Sir Anthony May, responsible for intercepts (covering the police and agencies), Sir Mark Waller, responsible for the intelligence services, and Sir Christopher Rose, responsible for surveillance by public bodies. She is expected to complain: "None of them have made substantial public statements in response to the Snowden leaks. They are responsible for checking whether the agencies are abiding by the law. Yet in the face of allegations that GCHQ was breaking the law they have been silent – neither saying they would investigate, nor providing reassurance."

Her speech concedes that Waller, the interception of communications commissioner, has said he will review the legal framework, but Cooper says: "Few know it is happening and there is no opportunity for the public to submit views." Waller has also been summoned to appear in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee later this month, after earlier declining to give evidence .

She will suggest Britain may need to consider an inspector general, along Australian lines, with the resources to provide wide-ranging and stronger oversight of all the agencies. She will argue that Britain lacks a fast and flexible system that can not only check current legal compliance but can regularly review the law.

Cooper will also argue the government needs to conduct a full review of Ripa, which governs interception regulation, including whether the new forms of communication have dissolved the once clear distinction between content and communications data – especially given the information agencies and private companies such as Facebook can gather on the pattern of visited websites.

Cooper's speech criticises the response to Snowden by the intelligence and security committee, a group of MPs appointed by the prime minister and currently chaired by former Tory foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, arguing it simply has not had the capacity or resources for a full inquiry into the revelations. The committee's legitimacy would be strengthened, she adds, if it were always chaired by an MP from an opposition party, so it is not viewed as an extension of the government.

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Overheid waarschuwde voor journalist Brenno de Winter

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Volgens de Landelijke Politie is de informatie intern verspreid 'om collega's erop te attenderen dat de heer De Winter mogelijk zou proberen om met niet-correcte legitimatie terreinen of gebouwen binnen te komen'. Het gaat om onder andere het huisadres en de geboortedatum van De Winter.

Verder werd in de interne communicatie de indruk gewekt dat de journalist van plan zou zijn om de ICT-systemen van de politie binnen te dringen. Ten onrechte, oordeelt de Landelijke Politie nu. 'Dit had nooit mogen gebeuren.' Het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken heeft een rectificatiebrief gepubliceerd.

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Volgens De Winter is de roddel ontstaan bij de politie Rotterdam. Volgens hem bouwt de overheid 'een dossier van hinderen' op. 'Als ik iets geleerd heb, is het dat je de overheid dus niet zomaar met onze gegevens kunt vertrouwen.'

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Nick Clegg orders review into data gathering by spy agencies

Deputy PM commissions independent report after failing to persuade David Cameron of need for reform of oversight

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, has commissioned a review into the new intrusive capabilities of British intelligence agencies and the legal framework in which they operate, after failing to persuade David Cameron that the coalition government should act now to tighten the accountability of Britain's spies.

Clegg has been trying for months inside government to persuade the Conservatives and intelligence agencies that the existing accountability structure is inadequate and could corrode trust, but in a Guardian article before a big speech on Tuesday the deputy prime minister admits he has failed to persuade Cameron of the need for reform.

In private discussions, Clegg had been urging the Conservatives to accept that the current oversight of the intelligence agencies could be reformed. "There was a lot of low-hanging fruit about the way in which the intelligence agencies are overseen that we could have made progress on now, but in the end we could not get agreement," explained a Clegg aide.

Clegg has as a result opted for an independent review, modelled on a report commissioned by Barack Obama, into the implications of the information harvesting technologies developed by US and UK intelligence agencies and exposed by leaks from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

He warns: "It is not enough for the agencies to claim that they accurately interpret the correct balance between privacy and national security; they must be seen to do so, and that means strong, exacting third-party oversight."

The independent review, to be led by the intelligence and military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, will look at the proportionality of the data gathered for surveillance purposes and the legal framework in which this happens.

The review, to be chaired by Rusi's director general, Michael Clarke, is in part modelled on the work commissioned in January by Obama from John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, into big data and privacy. Clegg says the aim of the review, due to report after the general election, will be to bring the issue into the mainstream of public debate, noting the "quality of the debate in the US provides an unflattering contrast to the muted debate on this side of the Atlantic".

The Clegg initiative by coincidence comes the day after Labour fully joined the debate for the first time when Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, called for a thorough overhaul of the way in which UK intelligence agencies are held to account. But Clegg appears to go further than Labour by questioning in greater detail the extent to which agencies are now routinely gathering data on private citizens.

The Lib Dem leader stresses he is not in principle opposed to the state gathering big data, but says this has to be governed by the principle that the government should intrude as little as possible into private affairs.

The deputy prime minister says the Rusi review needs to answer serious questions on how long the data is stored, by whom, and whether ministers or agencies should authorise its gathering. In the US Obama has suggested bulk data may need to be stored by a third party so that the state does not have untrammelled access.

Clegg also says the legal framework by which agencies can examine the content of communications is governed by laws written 14 years ago, before the internet revolution took hold.

He argues that although Britain's GCHQ listening headquarters primarily targets threats from abroad, the way internet communications are now sourced means that the old distinctions between external and internal communications are all but redundant, raising the threat that the content and metadata of domestic communications are being routinely collected and stored by GCHQ.

The government also has to examine the explosion of information, he says, pointing out that "in 2013, it took the world 10 minutes to generate the same amount of information that was created in the whole period from the dawn of history to 2002".

He sets out a programme that could be implemented immediately for reform of oversight of the agencies. Clegg's aides said this reform had been the focus of his behind-closed-doors and ultimately fruitless discussions with Cameron.

Clegg calls for reform of the parliamentary body responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies, the intelligence and security committee chaired by the former Conservative foreign secretary Sir Malcom Rifkind. The ISC is belatedly starting an inquiry into the Snowden revelations nearly nine months after they first emerged, but Clegg writes the body "is widely seen as being too deferential to the bodies it scrutinises". He adds: "The coalition has recently given the committee more powers and resources, but we should go further. The membership of the committee should be expanded from 9 to 11, to match the standard size of select committees. The chair should in future be an opposition party member, to avoid accusations that the committee is too cosy with the government of the day. Hearings should be held wherever possible in public. Budgets should be set for 5 years ahead, to allow it the stability to plan a long term work programme".

He also calls for changes to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which considers complaints against the use of intrusive powers by the intelligence agencies and others.

He points out: "There is currently no right of appeal. If the IPT rules against an individual, his or her only recourse is to the European Court of Human Rights. We should enable appeals to be heard in this country, and publish the reasons for rulings."

Like Labour, he calls for the creation of an Inspector General for the UK intelligence services, with reinforced powers, remit and resources. The aim would be to bring together two existing offices, the Interception of Communications Commissioner and the Intelligence Services Commissioner.

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NSA Director’s Comments Suggest Anti-Leaks Legislation Being Secretly Developed in Response to Snowden

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At a panel on cyber security at Georgetown University, the National Security Agency (NSA) director made statements that suggested the NSA has been working on some kind of “media lHet artikel gaat verder. eaks legislation.” The legislation would obviously be in response to the disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, but, until now, there has been no public indication that any anti-leaks legislation would be proposed in response to what Snowden disclosed.

Spencer Ackerman, a journalist for The Guardian, reported that NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander said during the event, “Recently, what came out with the justices in the United Kingdom …they looked at what happened on [David] Miranda and other things, and they said it’s interesting: journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues. They don’t know how to weigh the fact of what they’re giving out and saying, is it in the nation’s interest to divulge this.”

It was his first public comments endorsing the British security services decision to have journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner, Miranda, detained under a terrorism law in the country. The security services detained him to get their hands on Snowden documents he was believed to be carrying.

Alexander said: “My personal opinion: these leaks have caused grave, significant and irreversible damage to our nation and to our allies. It will take us years to recover.”

He argued, according to the New York Times, that the nation had not been able to pass legislation to protect against cyber attacks on Wall Street or other “civilian targets” because of Snowden.

“We’ve got to handle media leaks first,” Alexander additionally declared. “I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks. I am an optimist. I think if we make the right steps on the media leaks legislation, then cyber legislation will be a lot easier.”

Two individuals who specifically track developments such as leaks legislation had no idea what Alexander was talking about when he mentioned the legislation. Ackerman reported, “Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists,” who posts regularly at Secrecy News.

Whatever Alexander has been working on behind the scenes likely has been developed with the support of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers, who have been some of the most vocal critics of the disclosures (as well as the most fervent defenders of the NSA in the aftermath of the leaks).

In 2012, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which Feinstein chairs, approved anti-leaks measures as part of an intelligence authorization bill. The measures were being considered as a response to leaks that had occurred on cyber warfare against Iran, President Barack Obama’s “kill list,” and a CIA underwear bomb plot sting operation in Yemen.

The measures would have required: that Congress be notified when “authorized public disclosures of national intelligence” are made; that “authorized disclosures” of “classified information” be recorded; that procedures for conducting “administrative investigations of unauthorized disclosures” be revamped by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) ; that the DNI assess the possibility of expanding procedures for detecting and preventing “unauthorized disclosures” to other Executive Branch personnel; that certain people be prohibited from serving as consultants or having contracts with media organizations; that only a limited number of individuals in intelligence agencies be permitted to speak with members of the media and that responsibilities intelligence community employees have to protect “classified information” be made more clear.

The anti-leaks proposals also called for disciplinary measures against people who violated “classified information” by making “unauthorized disclosures.” This would have included: letters of reprimand, placing notice of violations in personnel files and informing congressional oversight committees of such notices, revoking security clearances, prohibiting employees from obtaining new security clearances and firing employees. Additionally, a provision would also have made it possible for an employee to lose his or her federal pension benefits if they were responsible for an “unauthorized disclosure.”

There was much condemnation of the proposals. A letter to the Senate signed by civil liberties, open government and watchdog groups argued the policy would not “protect” the “nation’s legitimate secrets” but would instead open the door to “abuse” and chill “critical disclosures of wrongdoing.” It described how the measure on surrendering pension benefits was an “extreme approach” to security that “would imperil the few existing safe channels for those in the intelligence community who seek to expose waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality. Conscientious employees or former employees considering reporting wrongdoing to Congress and agency Inspectors General, for example, would risk losing their pensions without adequate due process.”

Multiple newspapers published editorials criticizing the proposals and urging caution in the midst of all the leaks hysteria in Washington, DC.

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C.I.A. Employees Face New Inquiry Amid Clashes on Detention Program

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The agency’s inspector general began the inquiry partly as a response to complaints from members of Congress that C.I.A. employees were improperly monitoring the work of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to government officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The committee has spent several years working on a voluminous report about the detention and interrogation program, and according to one official interviewed in recent days, C.I.A. officers went as far as gaining access to computer networks used by the committee to carry out its investigation.

The events have elevated the protracted battle — which began as a fight over who writes the history of the program, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks — into a bitter standoff that in essence is a dispute over the separation of powers and congressional oversight of spy agencies.

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The origins of the current dispute date back more than a year, when the committee completed its work on a 6,000-page report about the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. People who have read the study said it is a withering indictment of the program and details many instances when C.I.A. officials misled Congress, the White House and the public about the value of the agency’s brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding.

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In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Mr. Udall made a vague reference to the dispute over the C.I.A.’s internal report.

“As you are aware, the C.I.A. has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal C.I.A. review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he wrote.

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Journalist: NSA won’t give me a secure channel to communicate on

SAN FRANCISCO—Barton Gellman, one of the few journalists that has been given access to the entire trove of documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, told the RightsCon conference Tuesday that American federal authorities have declined to provide him with a secure means to communicate with them.

Gellman told the assembled crowd that he had never before revealed this information in public.

“There's a peculiar thing: [intelligence agencies and I] do have conversations about stories that I'm going to publish,” he said. “I want to know context and I want to authenticate information or not be radically out of context. And sometimes they want to make a case to me about something that I don't know that would make a difference on what to publish. So I’ve said to them: 'How would you like to communicate other than open e-mail or telephone?' And they've yet to give me a secure channel—which I find surprising.”

Gellman explained that the government has set up a self-imposed classified trap, where officials are not allowed to discuss classified materials on nonclassified channels. They also can’t discuss declassified materials over open networks.

“It seems to me that they could solve this problem and ought to,” he said.

Last week, Gellman told another conference at Georgetown University that he had been informed that his phone records had been subject to a National Security Letter.

Gellman's book, Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney, was the only book that Snowden took with himwhen he fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong in June 2013.

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Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims

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A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

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'Nieuwe spionagewet bij voorbaat achterhaald'

De vernieuwde spionagewet, waartoe het kabinet volgende week een aanzet geeft, lijkt bij voorbaat achterhaald, zegt hoogleraar computerbeveiliging Bart Jacobs. 'Ondanks alle onthullingen hebben ze geen idee wat er gaande is.'

Komende week komt het kabinet met een reactie op de commissie-Dessens, die in december een evaluatie van de Wet op de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten uit 2002 presenteerde. De boodschap: de bevoegdheden moeten worden verruimd, en het toezicht moet worden vergroot. Voortaan zou alle communicatie ongericht, met digitale sleepnetten moeten kunnen worden onderschept, zegt Dessens. Jacobs ziet daar geen heil in. 'De diensten zouden juist veel gerichter moeten gaan werken.'

Zijn tweede punt van kritiek: dat de adviseurs van het kabinet niet zien dat inlichtingendiensten steeds meer in de 'eindpunten' van communicatie proberen binnen te dringen. Ze hacken computers en telefoons bij de gebruiker, en proberen in de servers van internetbedrijven te kijken. 'Die operaties worden in het rapport-Dessens niet als belangrijke trend onderkend', zegt Jacobs. 'Het lijkt wel of Dessens achteruit heeft gekeken in plaats van vooruit.'

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Snowden: NSA adviseerde landen bij spionagewetten

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De Amerikaanse veiligheidsdienst NSA heeft lidstaten van de Europese Unie geadviseerd in de procedure afluisteren wettelijk mogelijk te maken. Dat stelt klokkenluider Snowden, die de afluisterpraktijken van de NSA onthulde, in een schriftelijke verklaring aan het Europees Parlement (EP).

Een van de belangrijkste taken van de afdeling Buitenlandse Zaken van de NSA was volgens Snowden 'het aanmoedigen van EU-lidstaten om wetten te veranderen om massaspionage mogelijk te maken', en 'het zoeken naar lokale mazen in de wet om het spioneren van willekeurige burgers te rechtvaardigen'. Snowden noemt hierbij specifiek Nederland als land waar de NSA 'juridisch advies' gaf.

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Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex

OAKLAND—On February 18, several hundred privacy, labor, civil rights activists and Black Bloc anarchists packed Oakland’s city hall. They were there to protest the construction of a citywide surveillance center that would turn a firehouse in downtown Oakland into a high-tech intelligence hub straight outta Mission Impossible.

It was a rowdy crowd, and there was a heavy police presence. Some people carried “State Surveillance No!” signs. A few had their faces covered in rags, and taunted and provoked city officials by jamming smartphones in their faces and snapping photos.

Main item on the agenda that night: The “Domain Awareness Center” (DAC) — a federally funded project that, if built as planned, would link up real time audio and video feeds from thousands of sensors across the city — including CCTV cameras in public schools and public housing projects, as well as Oakland Police Department mobile license plate scanners — into one high-tech control hub, where analysts could pipe the data through face recognition software, surveil the city by location and enrich its intelligence with data coming in from local, state and federal government and law enforcement agencies.

During the meeting, city officials argued that the DAC would help police deal with Oakland’s violent crime and invoked 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, saying that a streamlined intelligence system would help protect residents in the event of natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Their explanation was met with hisses, boos, outbursts and constant interruption from the packed gallery, and the city council struggled to retain order, repeatedly threatening to clear the room.

The anger wasn’t just the standard objection to surveillance — or at least it was, but it had been intensified by a set of documents, obtained through a public records request by privacy activists, that showed city officials were more interested in using DAC’s surveillance capabilities to monitor political protests rather than fighting crime. The evidence was abundant and overwhelming: in email after email, Oakland officials had discussed the DAC usefulness for keeping tabs on activists, monitoring non-violent political protests and minimize port disruption due to union/labor strikes.

In particular, officials wanted to use the surveillance center to monitor Occupy Wall Street-style activists, and prevent union organizing and labor strikes that might shut down the Port of Oakland.

This revelation was particularly troubling in Oakland — a city with a large marginalized black population, a strong union presence and a long, ugly history of police brutality aimed at minority groups and political activists. Police conduct is so atrocious that the department now operates under federal oversight.

Ultimately, the information contained in the document helped anti-DAC activists convince Oakland’s city council to somewhat limit the scope and size of the surveillance center. It was a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless.

But buried deep in the thousands of pages of planning documents, invoices and correspondence was something that the activists either seemed to have missed or weren’t concerned by. A handful of emails revealing that representatives from Oakland had met with executives from Google to discuss a partnership between the tech giant and the DAC.

The emails showed that Google, the largest and most powerful megacorp in Surveillance Valley, was among several other military/defense contractors vying for a piece of DAC’s $10.9-million surveillance contracting action.

Here’s an email exchange from October 2013. It is between Scott Ciabattari, a Google “strategic partnership manager,” and Renee Domingo, an Oakland official spearheading the DAC project:

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An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web

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Berners-Lee's Magna Carta plan is to be taken up as part of an initiative called "the web we want", which calls on people to generate a digital bill of rights in each country – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government officials and corporations.

"Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it."

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken critic of the American and British spy agencies' surveillance of citizens following the revelations by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed.

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The documents that disappeared: how a furious CIA-Senate row erupted

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The documents are known as the “internal Panetta review”, after the former CIA director who presumably ordered them. How they came into the hands of staff members working for Senate select committee on intelligence is a story of intrigue and double-dealing worthy of the agency itself. The review was a sensitive, internal assessment of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which included techniques such as water-boarding that most experts say amounts to torture.

So furious was the CIA to have lost control of the set of documents it believed should never have become public, it is thought to have been behind the anonymous briefers who told newspapers that congressional staff had obtained them by somehow hacking into its networks – a feat that would challenge even the most determined international cyber-terrorist.

The review seems originally to have been intended for CIA eyes only, but according to Feinstein, it appeared in 2010 on the computer network established by the agency at a secret location in Virginia to facilitate an extensive investigation by her committee into post-9/11 interrogation techniques. It was just one in a remarkable series of events that culminated with a printed-out portion of the review being slipped out of the custody of the CIA to US Capitol, where it now resides in a safe of a second-floor Senate building, as an expanding controversy explodes around it.

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How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware

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Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”

In a top-secret presentation, dated August 2009, the NSA describes a pre-programmed part of the covert infrastructure called the “Expert System,” which is designed to operate “like the brain.” The system manages the applications and functions of the implants and “decides” what tools they need to best extract data from infected machines.

Mikko Hypponen, an expert in malware who serves as chief research officer at the Finnish security firm F-Secure, calls the revelations “disturbing.” The NSA’s surveillance techniques, he warns, could inadvertently be undermining the security of the Internet.

“When they deploy malware on systems,” Hypponen says, “they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties.”

Hypponen believes that governments could arguably justify using malware in a small number of targeted cases against adversaries. But millions of malware implants being deployed by the NSA as part of an automated process, he says, would be “out of control.”

“That would definitely not be proportionate,” Hypponen says. “It couldn’t possibly be targeted and named. It sounds like wholesale infection and wholesale surveillance.”

The NSA declined to answer questions about its deployment of implants, pointing to a new presidential policy directive announced by President Obama. “As the president made clear on 17 January,” the agency said in a statement, “signals intelligence shall be collected exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose to support national and departmental missions, and not for any other purposes.”

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Renowned Technologists, Journalists Join Freedom of the Press Foundation Technical Advisory Board

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Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting and defending public-interest journalism, is announcing a new technical advisory board that includes top-notch journalists, technologists and academics.

The new board’s mission, according to foundation director Trevor Timm, is to function as a think-tank for digital security. The panel will discuss and devise methods for journalists and news organizations to better protect their electronic communications from the prying eyes of governments, criminals and others.

“Protecting digital communications is now the primary press freedom issues we’re going to face over the next decade,” Timm says. “The record number of source prosecutions, coupled with revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown journalists must protect their sources from the moment they start speaking with them.”

The foundation, which crowd-funded more than $480,000 that went to journalism focused on transparency and accountability last year, has at its main mission the preservation and strengthening of journalists’ First and Fourth Amendment rights. Their most recent campaign has focused on crowd-funding for free and open source encryption tools that journalists can use to better communicate.

The new nine-member Technology Advisory Board includes Christopher Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Elleanor Saitta, Morgan Marquis-Boire, Eva Galperin, Ashkan Soltani, Oktavia Jonsdottir, Kevin Poulsen, Runa Sandvik and Kelly Caine. A list of the advisory board members' bios can be found here.

Soghoian, ACLU's principal technologist and senior policy analyst, has long pushed for journalists and news organizations to upgrade their security practices to account for governments' invasive surveillance practices.

"Journalists have an obligation to both their sources and readers to practice proper digital security," Soghoian says. "Unfortunately their knowledge on how to protect themselves falls far below the various actors attempting to spy on them. Freedom of the Press Foundation can fill a much-needed hole for journalists and we hope this advisory board can help them do it in effective way possible."

Soltani, an independent privacy researcher and consultant, has also reported on many privacy and surveillance related stories with the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

“A common issue, a common mistake, is that no one is really investing time to figure out what solutions journalists need and what tools will work for them,” Soltani says. “It requires a number of experts to really take the time and delve into the underlying security and usability of tools to help journalists secure their communications.”

The advisory board is a mixture of technologically sophisticated journalists, technologists, researchers and academics. “We’re getting all of these people together to create an ideas lab for how we can better help journalists and news organizations protect themselves,” Timm says.

Toward that goal, advisory board member Kevin Poulsen, the investigations editor at WIRED, originally developed SecureDrop along with current Freedom of the Press Foundation staffer James Dolan and the late Aaron Swartz. “Press freedom today depends as much on technology as policy,” Poulsen says.

The foundation currently assists news agencies and journalists on how to use SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that is being deployed by the New Yorker, Forbes, Pro Publica, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Intercept. For installation and inquires about training assistance, click here.

Two other respected technologists, Micah Lee and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also sit on the foundation's board of directors. FPF has previously published a comprehensive guide to digital security, called "Encryption Works: How to Protect Yourself in the Age of NSA Surveillance."

Contact Information

Trevor Timm
Executive Director
trevor@pressfreedomfoundation.org

Website and where to donate: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org
About FPF: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/about
Board and staff: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/about/staff

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NSA 'hijacked' criminal botnets to install spyware

(Reuters) - While U.S. law enforcement agencies have long tried to stamp out networks of compromised computers used by cyber criminals, the National Security Agency has been hijacking the so-called botnets as a resource for spying.

The NSA has "co-opted" more than 140,000 computers since August 2007 for the purpose of injecting them with spying software, according to a slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept news website on Wednesday. (r.reuters.com/xut57v)

Botnets are typically used by criminals to steal financial information from infected machines, to relay spam messages, and to conduct "denial-of-service" attacks against websites by having all the computers try to connect simultaneously, thereby overwhelming them.

In November, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey told the Senate that botnets had "emerged as a global cyber security threat" and that the agency had developed a "comprehensive public-private approach to eliminate the most significant botnet activity and increase the practical consequences for those who use botnets for intellectual property theft or other criminal activities."

According to the NSA slide published by The Intercept, one technique the intelligence agency used was called QUANTUMBOT, which "finds computers belonging to botnets, and hijacks the command and control channel." The program was described as "highly successful."

Reuters reported in May that U.S. agencies had tapped botnets to harvest data from the machines' owners or to maintain the ability to issue the infected computers new commands.

The slide leaked by Snowden is the first confirmation of the practice, and underscores the complications for the NSA of balancing its major mission of providing eavesdropping capability with the less well-funded missions of protecting critical national assets and assisting law enforcement.

The Top Secret slide was marked for distribution to the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance, which includes the United States and Britain.

The NSA declined to confirm or deny the existence of the program. It is not known if the botnets hijacked by the agency

were in other counties or in the United States, or if the botnets could have been recaptured by criminals.

Many botnet operations disable the machines' security software, leaving them vulnerable to new attacks by others.

In a written statement, an NSA spokeswoman said: "As the President affirmed on 17 January, signals intelligence shall be collected exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose to support national and departmental missions, and not for any other purposes.

"Moreover, Presidential Policy Directive 28 affirms that all persons - regardless of nationality - have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information, and that privacy and civil liberties shall be integral considerations in the planning of U.S. signals intelligence activities."

The Intercept article and supporting slides showed that the NSA had sought the means to automate the deployment of its tools for capturing email, browsing history and other information in order to reach as many as millions of machines.

It did not say whether such widespread efforts, which included impersonating web pages belonging to Facebook Inc and other companies, were limited to computers overseas.

If it did pursue U.S. computers, the NSA also could have minimized information about those users.

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Britain is treating journalists as terrorists – believe me, I know

My links to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden mean I am treated as a threat and can't return to the UK. We need a free speech roadmap

^{Sarah Harrison}

Free speech and freedom of the press are under attack in the UK. I cannot return to England, my country, because of my journalistic work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and at WikiLeaks. There are things I feel I cannot even write. For instance, if I were to say that I hoped my work at WikiLeaks would change government behaviour, this journalistic work would be considered a crime under the UK Terrorism Act of 2000.

This act defines terrorism as "the use or threat of action [...] designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation" or "is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause" or "is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system". Elsewhere the act says "the government" means the government of any country – including the US. Britain has used this act to open a terrorism investigation relating to Snowden and the journalists who worked with him, and as a pretext to enter the Guardian's offices and demand the destruction of their Snowden-related hard drives. Britain is turning into a country that can't tell its terrorists from its journalists.

The recent judgment in the Miranda case proves this. David Miranda was assisting journalist Glenn Greenwald and transited through Heathrow with journalists' documents when he was held under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act last summer. Schedule 7 means a person can be stopped and detained at a UK port for up to nine hours and affords no right to silence. It compels you to answer questions and give up any documents you possess, and so forced Miranda to hand over his Snowden documents. Subsequently Miranda fought a case against the UK government over the legality of his detainment, to show how this act infringes upon journalists' ability to work freely. Outrageously, the court found politically transparent excuses to ignore the well-defined protections for freedom of expression in the European convention on human rights.

If Britain is going to investigate journalists as terrorists take and destroy our documents, force us to give up passwords and answer questions – how can we be sure we can protect our sources? But this precedent is now set; no journalist can be certain that if they leave, enter or transit through the UK this will not happen to them. My lawyers advise me not to return home.

Snowden's US legal adviser, Jesselyn Radack, was questioned about Julian Assange and her client when she entered the UK recently. I am strongly connected to both men: I work for one, and rescued and watched over the other for four months. In addition, if schedule 7 is used to stop me upon entering the country . I could not answer such questions or relinquish anything, as this would be a risk to WikiLeaks's journalistic work, our people and our sources. As I would have no right to silence under this act, I would be committing a crime in the government's eyes. A conviction for "terrorism" would have severe consequences for free movement across international borders.

Schedule 7 is not really about catching terrorists, even in its own terms. The Miranda judgment states that it has in this case "constituted an indirect interference with press freedom" and is admittedly "capable, depending on the facts, of being deployed so as to interfere with journalistic freedom". Officers can detain someone not because they suspect them of being involved in terrorist activities, but to see "if someone appears" to – even indirectly – be "facilitating" the bizarre definition of terrorism used in the act.

Mr Justice Ouseley, who also presided over Assange's extradition case, stated in his judgment that an officer can act on "no more than hunch or intuition". It is now decreed by our courts that it is acceptable to interfere with the freedom of the press, based on a hunch – all in the name of "national security". Today instead of meaning "to ensure the stability of a nation for its people", national security is a catchphrase rolled out by governments to justify their own illegalities, whether that be invading another country or spying on their own citizens. This act – it is now crystal clear – is being consciously and strategically deployed to threaten journalists. It has become a tool for securing the darkness behind which our government can construct a brand new, 21st-century Big Brother.

This erosion of basic human civil rights is a slippery slope. If the government can get away with spying on us – not just in collusion with, but at the behest of, the US – then what checks and balances are left for us to fall back on? Few of our representatives are doing anything to act against this abusive restriction on our press freedoms. Green MP Caroline Lucas tabled an early day motion on 29 January but only 18 MPs have signed it so far.

From my refuge in Berlin, this reeks of adopting Germany's past, rather than its future. I have thought about the extent to which British history would have been the poorer had the governments of the day had such an abusive instrument at their disposal. What would have happened to all the public campaigns carried out in an attempt to "influence the government"? I can see the suffragettes fighting for their right to vote being threatened into inaction, Jarrow marchers being labelled terrorists, and Dickens being locked up in Newgate prison.

In their willingness to ride roughshod over our traditions, British authorities and state agencies are gripped by an extremism that is every bit as dangerous to British public life as is the (real or imaginary) threat of terrorism. As Ouseley states, journalism in the UK does not possess a "constitutional status". But there can be no doubt that this country needs a freedom of speech roadmap for the years ahead. The British people should fight to show the government we will preserve our rights and our freedoms, whatever coercive measures and threats it throws at us.

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How the NSA Is Trying to Sabotage a U.S. Government-Funded Countersurveillance Tool

The NSA called it the king of Internet anonymity. But while the privacy-protecting Tor browser has proven to be a serious burden to the spy agency, that hasnt stopped it trying to secretly subvert the popular counter-surveillance tool.

On Friday, newly released documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s attempts to monitor Tor users’ Internet activity. Top-secret slides shed light on how the NSA has worked to infiltrate the Tor anonymity network in apparent cooperation with allied agencies in Britain and the other members of the “Five Eyes” network—Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. But the spies’ efforts to infiltrate Tor have not been entirely successful, which will come as welcome news to privacy advocates. One NSA slide notes: “we will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.”

Tor works by masking users’ IP addresses, bouncing their connection through a complex network of computers. Each day, the tool is used by about 500,000 people, many of whom are pro-democracy activists in authoritarian countries, journalists, human rights advocates, and others whose work can be compromised by government surveillance or censorship. But the software can also be used by criminal groups and terrorist plotters, which makes it of particular interest to spy agencies.

According to the leaked slides published Friday by the Guardian, the NSA has devised a way to identify targeted Tor users, and it has the capacity to covertly redirect targets to a set of special servers called “FoxAcid.” Once identified as a target, the spy agency can try to infect a user with malware by preying on software vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Firefox browser. This capability was hinted at in a report by Brazilian TV show Fantastico in September. As I noted at the time, the British spy agency GCHQ appeared to be monitoring Tor users as part of a program called “Flying Pig.”

Notably, the leaked Snowden files on Tor may shed light on some of the tactics used by the U.S. government to identify the recently outed alleged mastermind of the Silk Road online drug empire. Silk Road operated on a hidden Tor server, which was tracked down by the feds and shut down. Back in August, the feds also managed to shut down a Tor server allegedly used to host images of child abuse. In a malware attack that was linked by researchers to the NSA, the FBI reportedly exploited a Mozilla vulnerability to target users—similar to the spy methods described in the Snowden documents.

Going after Tor users is clearly not easy for the spies, however, and they appear to have considered sabotaging the anonymity tool because it has proven difficult to infiltrate. One NSA presentation titled “Tor Stinks” shows the agency considering whether it would be possible to “deny/degrade/disrupt Tor users.” One option for degrading the stability of Tor posed by the NSA, the 2012 presentation states, could be to set up a “relay” used by Tor users to access the service, but deliberately making it frustratingly slow in order to destabilize the network. Other slides suggest British spooks at GCHQ set up clandestine Tor “nodes” used to monitor users, with Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate also assisting in GCHQ’s efforts.

Somewhat ironically, the Tor Project was originally borne out of a U.S. Navy program to protect government communications. The initiative still receives a large portion of its funding from the U.S. government: In 2012, for instance, the State Department and the Defense Department wrote checks to the Tor Project worth more than $1.2 million. This means that the U.S. government is publicly investing in keeping Tor strong—while at the same time, in secret, the NSA is trying to weaken it.

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Top Democrat on House intelligence panel offers new NSA reform plan

Top Democrat on House intelligence committee says details are still being worked on but proposal would end bulk collection

Supporters of a stalled congressional effort to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ metadata are looking warily at an alternative proposal by a key NSA advocate purporting to seek the same goal.

This week, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, who represents the Maryland district home to the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, came out in favor of a remedy for the controversial surveillance.

Ruppersberger, in interviews with the Washington Post, National Journal and Politico, said he was working to craft a proposal that would require court orders for government requests for Americans’ phone records – perhaps on an individual basis – from the telephone companies, without requiring the companies to expand retention of their customer records beyond current practice.

It’s an idea that on its face aligns with what privacy advocates have wanted since the Guardian exposed the NSA bulk phone records collection in June, thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.

But his idea also attracted suspicion. Not only has Ruppersberger been a staunch advocate for the NSA – and a fervent critic of Snowden – but his proposal would compete with the civil-libertarian alternative, the USA Freedom Act, that has 163 co-sponsors in both congressional chambers and would go further than Ruppersberger’s effort, as initially described.

Ruppersberger’s office concedes that the details of the proposal, which are crucial in the arcane world of surveillance authorities, are still being worked out – something giving privacy advocates pause.

On the other hand, sources said, Ruppersberger’s evolving position represents what one called a “huge step forward” toward an outright end to bulk domestic metadata collection. Ruppersberger’s credibility with the NSA might also be an asset for such an effort.

In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, Ruppersberger signaled that surveillance “reform” was necessary, framing it as critical to restoring confidence in the NSA.

“I believe that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be reformed. We must improve the American public’s confidence in, and perception of, our national security programs, by increasing transparency, strengthening oversight, and safeguarding civil liberties,” Ruppersberger said.

“I also believe that any proposal to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must preserve critical intelligence tools that protect our country and its allies. I am concerned with any approach that would eliminate this important intelligence tool and make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, without providing a workable alternative.”

Ruppersberger is a close partner of the intelligence committee’s chairman, congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, who has earlier signaled outright opposition to taking the phone records database away from the NSA.

But several sources were skeptical of any effort that would move surveillance reform through the intelligence committees instead of the judiciary committees, which have been more concerned with privacy issues. The judiciary committee, which has yet to move on the USA Freedom Act, insists on primary legislative jurisdiction over surveillance law.

The Obama administration has yet to take an outright position on the USA Freedom Act, an ambivalence that several members of Congress consider the equivalent of a rejection several months after the bill was introduced.

On Thursday, Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican on the judiciary committee, called on Ruppersberger to embrace the USA Freedom Act that Sensenbrenner co-authored.

“I urge him to cosponsor the USA Freedom Act. It strikes the proper balance between security and privacy, and I am confident it has the votes to pass,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement to which Ruppersberger has yet to respond.

With the details still undetermined in Ruppersberger’s proposal, it is difficult to know how far the new effort would go in requiring court-ordered individual suspicion to access phone records, as well as requiring a specific “relevance” connection to an ongoing terrorism investigation, as required in the Patriot Act and the proposed USA Freedom Act – without which, privacy advocates argue, would leave the door open to dubious searches of government records.

“This certainly doesn’t go as far as the USA Freedom Act,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s surveillance lobbyist.

“Of course, the devil will be in the details. We’re going to see if we can get an advance copy and talk to the sponsors.”

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White House withholding over 9,000 docs in CIA torture probe

For the last five years, the White House has withheld over 9,000 top-secret documents from a Senate investigation of the CIA’s former detention and torture program. The report comes one day after the CIA was accused of interfering in the probe.

Though the White House has publicly supported the investigation into Bush-era torture, the Obama administration has routinely rejected requests by the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence to see the records, McClatchy news service reported Wednesday.

It is not clear how substantial the documents are for the investigation, yet the White House has shielded them without wielding the claim of executive privilege that has been used often by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to cover CIA and other government secrets following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The White House told McClatchy a “small percentage” of the 6.2 million pages of documents given to the Committee were “set aside because they raise executive branch confidentiality interests.” The White House added that it had worked with the Committee “to ensure access to the information necessary to review the CIA’s former program.”

Neither the CIA nor the Committee would offer comment to McClatchy.

On Tuesday, Committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) alleged that the CIA secretly removed classified documents from a computer system used by Congress in the torture probe. Feinstein claimed the CIA improperly searched a stand-alone computer network at the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters that was put in place so that Intelligence Committee staffers could view sensitive documents.

The CIA denied the allegations, and the White House has stood behind CIA leadership on the matter. Reuters reported Wednesday the White House had previously tried to alleviate the longstanding tension between the CIA and the Committee after both entities alleged the other spied on it. Yet the failure to assuage the feud led Sen. Feinstein to write several letters appealing to Obama’s chief legal adviser, Kathryn Ruemmler, seeking a resolution. Those attempts also fell short.

Feinstein made no mention of the 9,400 White House documents during her Tuesday speech on the Senate floor. The held materials came to the Committee’s attention in 2009, though it is not clear whether the White House had given the Democrat-led Committee access to them and then rescinded the collection. Why the documents have been kept from the Committee is yet unknown.

“The most nefarious explanation is that they are not privileged and the White House simply doesn’t want to hand them over,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School.

“Executive privilege is generally asserted after negotiations and brinksmanship behind the scenes. People put on paper what they want to be formalized, and these negotiations by their very nature are very informal.”

The documents have been referenced in public. Most prominently was in August, when Committee member Mark Udall [D] pressed the administration’s Pentagon general counsel nominee, Stephen W. Preston, for an answer on how he, as former CIA general counsel, played a role in the agency’s protection of the documents.

Preston responded by saying that “a small percentage of the total number of documents was set aside for further review. The agency [CIA] has deferred to the White House and has not been substantially involved in subsequent discussions about the disposition of those documents.”

In her speech Tuesday, Feinsten also intimated that the Committee found sometime in 2010 that it had mysteriously lost access to materials it had previously had clearance to read.

“This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff and in violation of our written agreements,” she said, going on to say the “matter was resolved” after CIA evasion and a subsequent appeal to the White House.

The documents in questions are separate from materials compiled by an internal CIA review of around 6.2 million pages of emails, operational cables, and other secret documents made available to the Committee in a secret electronic reading room at the CIA’s Langley headquarters.

The Committee approved a final draft of the 6,300-page study in December 2012, yet the report has been kept from the public.

As for Senate Republicans, who long ago opted out of involvement in the CIA torture probe, the party’s top member on the Committee has cast doubt on Feinstein’s assertions.

“Although people speak as though we know all the pertinent facts surrounding this matter, the truth is, we do not,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

“No forensics have been run on the CIA computers…at the CIA facility to know what actually happened,”he said Tuesday.

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Revealed: the MoD's secret cyberwarfare programme

Multimillion pound project will look at how internet users can be influenced by social media and other psychological techniques

The Ministry of Defence is developing a secret, multimillion-pound research programme into the future of cyberwarfare, including how emerging technologies such as social media and psychological techniques can be harnessed by the military to influence people's beliefs.

Programmes ranging from studies into the role of online avatars to research drawing on psychological theories and the impact of live video-sharing are being funded by the MoD in partnership with arms companies, academics, marketing experts and thinktanks.

The Guardian has seen a list of those hired to deliver research projects, which have titles such as Understanding Online Avatars, Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities, and Novel Techniques for Public Sentiment and Perception Elicitation.

The projects are being awarded by a "centre of excellence" managed by BAE Systems, which has received about £20m-worth of MoD funding since 2012. The MoD plans to procure a further £10m-worth of research through the centre this year.

While the centre commissions a wide range of research, such as studies of alcohol consumption in the armed forces, a substantial stream of research comes under the heading of "information activities and outreach". The term is significant in that it has its roots in Britain's 2010 strategic defence review and national security strategy. Its aims include understanding the behaviour of internet users from different cultures, the influence of social media such as Twitter and Facebook and the psychological impact of increased online video usage on sites such as YouTube.

Typical targets, for now, would include groups of young internet users deemed at risk of being incited or recruited online to commit terrorism.

Dr Tim Stevens of Kings College London, who studies cyberwar and strategy, said there was increased state interest in the role of emergent technologies such as social media and the development of powerful psychological techniques to wield influence.

"The current furore over inter-state cyberwar is probably not where the game's at. What is far more likely is that states will seek to influence their own populations and others through so-called 'cyber' methods, which basically means the internet and the device du jour, currently smartphones and tablets," he said.

"With the advent of sophisticated data-processing capabilities (including big data), the big number-crunchers can detect, model and counter all manner of online activities just by detecting the behavioural patterns they see in the data and adjusting their tactics accordingly.

"Cyberwarfare of the future may be less about hacking electrical power grids and more about hacking minds by shaping the environment in which political debate takes place," he added.

The current MoD research drive in the area is being run by the Defence Human Capability Science and Technology Centre (DHCSTC), which is administered by BAE.

While most projects remain under wraps an insight into the area of research has been provided by a previous report commissioned by the MoD, and which has been released under the Freedom of Information Act. It examined how chatbots – computer programmes that make human-sounding small talk and which have been used in everything from customer relations to sex industry marketing – could take on military roles in intelligence and propaganda operations to influence targets.

The research into the programmes, which are designed to emulate human conversation and are familiar as "virtual assistants" on retailers' websites, envisages a future in which "an influence bot could be deployed in both covert and overt ways – on the web, in IM/chatrooms/forums or in virtual worlds".

"It could be a declared bot and fairly overt influence play, or pretend to be a human and conduct its influencing in less obvious ways," says the 2011 report by Daden, a technology group that develops chatbots for commercial and educational clients.

Daden also suggested chatbots could be used as "cyberbuddies" shadowing soldiers through their careers or as data-gatherers in digital environments such as chatrooms and forums, where they could "scout for targets, potentially analyse behaviour, and record and relay conversation".

The report cautions, however, that the barriers to their use in data-gathering and influence operations include ethical issues, adding that "the adverse effect that the unmasking of a non-declared bot would have on the subject, and their wider group needs to be carefully considered".

It says: "One approach, as in real life, is for the bot to withdraw if it thinks it may be compromised. In the early days, it may be better that the bot activity is declared and overt – in the same way as much broadcast and UK plc promotional activity."

BAE declined to provide a comment when contacted.

The projects

• Full Spectrum Targeting – a sophisticated new concept that is growing in influence at the MoD and measures future battlefields in social and cognitive terms rather than just physical spaces. Emphasis is put on identifying and co-opting influential individuals, controlling channels of information and destroying targets based on morale rather than military necessity. The £65,285 project is being delivered by the Change Institute (a London-based thinktank whose previous work includes carrying out research for the government into understanding Muslim ethnic communities), the BAE subsidiary, Detica and another defence and security-orientated company, Montvieux.

• Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities – £310,822 project being delivered by Baines Associates, a strategic marketing firm, i to i Research, a consultancy in "social and behavioural change", and universities including Northumbria, Kent and University College London.

• Innovation: Tools and Techniques for Influence Activities – a £28,474 project being delivered by the Change Institute, the University of Kent and QinetiQ, a company spun out of the MoD research department.

• Understanding Online Avatars – a £17,150 project being delivered by the Change Institute.

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Small Drones Are a Bigger Privacy Threat Than the NSA, Says Senate Intel Chair

Dianne Feinstein has a bone to pick with drones, especially since she confronted one on her own lawn.

“I’m in my home and there’s a demonstration out front, and I go to peek out the window, and there’s a drone facing me,” the California Democratic senator recalled to correspondent Morley Safer on "60 Minutes" Sunday night.

Demonstrators from Code Pink, who were protesting NSA surveillance outside her house in July, said it was just a tiny pink toy helicopter.

The confusion points to the problems with understanding and regulating and at least defining drones: a drone and a remote-controlled helicopter are the same thing.

Big, armed capital-D Drones with creepy names like the Predator and the Reaper have earned a shadowy reputation because they've been used—largely in secret by the CIA—to dramatically extend the reach of the military (and through lawfare, extend the boundaries of what's lawful), within politically vacuous spaces. In a way, this use of Drones is not unlike the use of electronic surveillance by other parts of the intelligence community.

But for the purposes of privacy in America, drones are nothing fancier than flying remote controlled GoPro cameras.

“When is a drone picture a benefit to society? When does it become stalking? When does it invade privacy? How close to a home can a drone go?” Feinstein asked, listing off questions she had to Safer.

In an extra segment, Safer asked Feinstein if she believed that "the drones were the worst thing that could happen to our privacy ever."

"To a great extent that's the way I feel right now," she said, "because the drone can take pictures. The sophisticated drone, which isn't necessarily the drone that's going to be used by the average person from 17,000, 20,000 feet and you don't know it's there."

CODEPINK Surveils Feinstein for the Iraq War, Domestic Spying

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The NSA's spying technology may not produce spectacular video, but both it and the drone involve potential intrusions on personal privacy. But Feinstein has said she sees drones as more risky to privacy than government internet surveillance because they are largely unregulated.

Privacy groups have challenged that view, criticizing what they've called Sen. Feinstein's contradictory views about government surveillance.

"I really wish the DiFi that just testified at #droneprivacy hearing could be chair of the Senate Intel Committee," Amie Stepanovich, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, tweeted after a hearing in January.

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NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of discriminants,” as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests.

In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.

In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities.” Speaking generally, she said “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.”

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that “continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.”

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a “unique one-off capability,” but last year’s secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.

The budget did not say whether the NSA now records calls in quantity in those countries, or expects to do so. A separate document placed high priority on planning “for MYSTIC accesses against projected new mission requirements,” including “voice.”

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

In a presidential policy directive, Obama instructed the NSA and other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather intelligence on one of six specified threats, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that limits on bulk collection “do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection.”

The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a telephone-headed staff. Among the agency’s bulk collection programs disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique. Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of either metadata — which does not include content — or text, such as e-mail address books.

Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. Indeed, there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.

In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the project “has long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle.”

Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems and a gargantuan new “mission data repository” in Utah. According to its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed “to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network.”

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said history suggests that “over the next couple of years they will expand to more countries, retain data longer and expand the secondary uses.”

Spokesmen for the NSA and the Office of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declined to confirm or deny expansion plans or discuss the criteria for any change.

Based on RETRO’s internal reviews, the NSA has strong motive to deploy it elsewhere. In the documents and interviews, U.S. officials said RETRO is uniquely valuable when an analyst first uncovers a new name or telephone number of interest.

With up to 30 days of recorded conversations in hand, the NSA can pull an instant history of the subject’s movements, associates and plans. Some other U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to RETRO.

Highly classified briefings cite examples in which the tool offered high-stakes intelligence that would not have existed under traditional surveillance programs in which subjects were identified for targeting in advance. Unlike most of the government’s public claims about the value of controversial programs, the briefings supply names, dates, locations and fragments of intercepted calls in convincing detail.

Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates.

The NSA does not attempt to filter out their calls, defining them as communications “acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets.”

Until about 20 years ago, such incidental collection was unusual unless an American was communicating directly with a foreign intelligence target. In bulk collection systems, which are exponentially more capable than the ones in use throughout the Cold War, calls and other data from U.S. citizens and permanent residents are regularly ingested by the millions.

Under the NSA’s internal “minimization rules,” those intercepted communications “may be retained and processed” and included in intelligence reports. The agency generally removes the names of U.S. callers, but there are several broadly worded exceptions.

An independent group tasked by the White House to review U.S. surveillance policies recommended that incidentally collected U.S. calls and e-mails — including those obtained overseas — should nearly always “be purged upon detection.” Obama did not accept that recommendation.

Vines, in her statement, said the NSA’s work is “strictly conducted under the rule of law.”

RETRO and MYSTIC are carried out under Executive Order 12333, the traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for operations outside the United States.

Since August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on that panel have been working on plans to assert a greater oversight role for intelligence gathering abroad. Some legislators are now considering whether Congress should also draft new laws to govern those operations.

Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.

“Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence collection is not regulated by any statute passed by Congress,” said Timothy H. Edgar, the former director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama’s national security staff. “There’s a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but that’s only a slice of what the intelligence community does.”

All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate intelligence purpose, he said, but that “still leaves a gap for activities that otherwise basically aren’t regulated by law because they’re not covered by FISA.”

Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed U.S. territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents whose calls and e-mails now routinely cross international borders.

Vines noted that the NSA’s job is to “identify threats within the large and complex system of modern global communications,” where ordinary people share fiber-optic cables with legitimate intelligence targets.

For Peter Swire, a member of the president’s review group, the fact that Americans and foreigners use the same devices, software and networks calls for greater care to safeguard Americans’ privacy.

“It’s important to have institutional protections so that advanced capabilities used overseas don’t get turned against our democracy at home,” he said.

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Hackers may leak Microsoft spying docs, grant Bill Gates's wish for 'intense debates'

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There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints. But we need explicit rules. If you were in a divorce lawsuit 20 years ago, is that a public document on the Web that a nosy neighbor should be able to pull up with a Bing or Google search? When I apply for a job, should my speeding tickets be available? Well, I'm a bus driver, how about in that case? And society does have an overriding interest in some activities, like, "Am I gathering nuclear-weapons plans, and am I going to kill millions of people?" If we think there's an increasing chance of that, who do you trust? I actually wish we were having more intense debates about these things.

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If it's an intense debate about surveillance and the cloud that Gates would like, then the Syrian Electronic Army may be about to grant that wish. SEA has twice hacked Microsoft in 2014, giving Microsoft a red face and a pair of black eyes. SEA hackers warned that Microsoft is "spying on people" and not to "use Microsoft emails (Hotmail, Outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments." The pro-Assad hackers vowed to deliver the digital dirt by publishing stolen documents that "prove" Microsoft spies on email for governments.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft admitted that targeted phishing attacks allowed SEA to steal law enforcement documents.

If Gates really wants an intense debate, that may be about to happen (again) for Microsoft. Yesterday, the Syrian Electronic Army tweeted that it will soon leak the documents showing what Microsoft is paid for email surveillance.

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Why Isn't the Fourth Amendment Classified as Top Secret?

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Notice how much the Fourth Amendment tells our enemies. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated," it states, "and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The Framers are usually considered patriots. Yet they gave traitors and criminals in their midst such powerful knowledge about concealing evidence of skullduggery! Today every terrorist with access to a pocket Constitution is privy to the same text. And thanks to the Supreme Court's practice of publishing its opinions, al-Qaeda need only have an Internet connection to gain a very nuanced, specific understanding of how the Fourth Amendment is applied in individual cases, how it constrains law enforcement, and how to exploit those limits.

Such were my thoughts Friday at UCLA Law School, where Stewart Baker, an attorney who worked in the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush Administration, participated in a debate about Edward Snowden. Some of his remarks focused on the NSA whistleblower's professed desire to trigger a debate among Americans, many of whom think it's their right to weigh in on all policy controversies.

Baker disagrees.

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The next step would be obvious. There are ways in which the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments help to inform terrorists too. The same goes for related case law. Think how much less terrorists and criminals alike would know if all constitutional law, indeed all law of any kind, were interpreted before a secret body like the FISA court, rather than in open court where anyone can listen. Until then, our judges and constitutional-law scholars will regularly be putting out information that could be useful to our enemies. Stopping them would create an undemocratic system in which prosecutorial and police abuse would often be essentially undiscoverable and unchallengeable, and would inevitably end in civil liberties abuses of millions of innocents. But if, like Baker, you're not much bothered by mass surveillance of innocents, perhaps that price isn't too high to pay.

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After Snowden, Australia’s cops worry about people using crypto

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Several Australian law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) have submitted proposals asking the country's senate for more surveillance power, and state police have even asked that the government move to log its citizens' Web browsing history.

Several months ago, on the heels of revelations that Australian Intelligence had been sharing surveillance information with its partners in foreign nations, the Australian Senate opened an inquiry into whether the country's Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act of 1979 should be revised to better protect AU citizens' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the ASIO—along with Northern Territory, Western, and Victoria state police—has submitted commentary asking for more data retention and offering little in the way of more privacy protection.

In particular, the ASIO said that Snowden's leaks will make it more difficult for the organization to collect meaningful data about a person, so the organization should be given more leeway to perform its surveillance duties. In its proposal, the ASIO asserted that certain technological advances are detrimental to its spying on bad actors (a refrain that is not often heard, as it's generally accepted that technology is making it easier to spy on citizens).

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Anonymous-OS 0.1 : Anonymous Hackers released their own Operating System

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Anonymous Hackers released their own Operating System with name "Anonymous-OS", is Live is an ubuntu-based distribution and created under Ubuntu 11.10 and uses Mate desktop. You can create the LiveUSB with Unetbootin.

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Update: Another Live OS for anonymity available called "Tails". Which is a live CD or live USB that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.It helps you to use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer:all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network or to leave no trace on the computer you're using unless you ask it explicitly, or use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, email and instant messaging. You can Download Tail from Here

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Facebook Fights Back Against the NSA Spy Machine

Mark Zuckerberg was apparently peeved enough to phone the President when he read recent reports that the NSA was using fake Facebook websites to intercept the social network’s traffic and infect private computers with surveillance software. But Joe Sullivan — the ex-federal prosecutor who now serves as Facebook’s chief security officer — says the company has now steeled its online services so that such a ploy is no longer possible.

“That particular attack is not viable,” the 45-year-old Sullivan told a room full of reporters yesterday at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It hasn’t been viable, he explained, since the company rolled out what’s called SSL data encryption for all its web traffic, a process it completed in the summer of last year.

According to outside security researchers, there are still ways of working around Facebook’s encryption. But these methods are much harder to pull off, and Sullivan’s message was clear: The situation around the NSA’s surveillance campaigns isn’t quite as dire as many have painted it. Unlike his counterparts at places like Google and Microsoft, Sullivan says that the ongoing stream of revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden aren’t really that surprising, and he indicated that the leaked information has changed little about how his company approaches security.

Sullivan’s message stands in contrast to the one Zuckerberg unloaded on his Facebook page after his phoning the President. The Facebook founder expressed extreme frustration over the NSA’s practices, calling for sweeping changes to government policies. But the contrast isn’t that surprising. It very clearly shows the awkward situation that has engulfed companies like Facebook in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, which started tumbling out last summer. The giants of the web are certainly concerned over NSA surveillance — despite indications that they may have been complicit in some ways — and they’re actively fighting against it. But they must also reassure users that the situation is well in hand — that it’s safe to use their services today. This can be a difficult line to walk.

Certainly, the web’s largest operations — including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft as well as Facebook — have now taken at least the basic steps needed to guard their online traffic against interlopers. Facebook not only uses SSL, or secure sockets layer, encryption to protect all data moving between its computer servers and virtually all of the than 1.2 billion people who use the social networking service. It has also installed technology that uses similarly hefty encryption techniques to protect information that flows between the massive data centers that underpin its online empire. This is just the sort of thing Snowden himself called for last week while appearing via video feed at a conference in Texas.

In using SSL to encode all data sent and received by its million of users, Facebook can indeed thwart the sort of fake-Facebook-server attack discussed in the press last week. As described, these attacks redirected users to NSA websites that looked exactly like Facebook by surreptitiously slipping certain internet addresses into their browsers. SSL encryption provides what is probably “solid” protection against such methods, says Nicholas Weaver, a staff researcher who specializes in network security at the International Computer Science Institute.

Weaver does acknowledge that attackers could compromise Facebook SSL encryption by somehow obtaining or creating fake encryption certificates, but he believes that such attacks are now unlikely. “That is very risky these days,” he says, pointing out that many companies are now on the lookout for such fake certificates.

It’s equally important that Facebook is now encrypting information as it moves between data centers. Documents released by Snowden have shown that the NSA has ways of tapping lines that connect the massive computing centers operated by the likes of Google and Facebook. Sullivan declined to say when Facebook had secured these lines, but he’s now confident this makes it much more difficult for agencies like the NSA to eavesdrop on Facebook data as it travels through network service providers outside of the company’s control. And Weaver agrees. Assuming the company’s encryption devices aren’t sabotaged, he says, the data is secure as it travels across the wire. “You’d need to break into the data center computers or the encryption devices themselves to access that data,” he says.

But Joe Sullivan’s rather sunny view of Facebook security doesn’t tell the whole story. Much of the rest of the web has yet to adopt similar encryption techniques, and there’s still so much we don’t know about what the NSA is capable of. It’s also worth noting that Facebook’s chief security officer sidestepped questions about future threats to the company’s operation, including the possibility of a quantum computer that could break current encryption techniques. In the Post-Snowden age, the giants of the web have certainly increased their security efforts. But there is always more to do.

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Don't Fall For Misleading Story Being Spread By NSA Suggesting Tech Companies Lied About PRISM

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I'm seeing a bunch of folks passing around a story by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian, claiming that tech companies lied about their "denials" of PRISM. The story is incredibly misleading. Ackerman is one of the best reporters out there on the intelligence community, and I can't recall ever seeing a story that I think he got wrong, but this is one. But the storyline is so juicy, lots of folks, including the usual suspects are quick to pile on without bothering to actually look at the details, insisting that this is somehow evidence of the tech companies lying.

So, let's look at what actually happened.

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Bondsdag gaat activiteiten NSA onderzoeken

De Duitse Bondsdag heeft vandaag besloten tot een parlementair onderzoek naar de activiteiten van de Amerikaanse National Security Agency (NSA) en andere buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten, waaronder het afluisteren van de mobiele telefoon van bondskanselier Angela Merkel.

Zowel de regeringspartijen als de oppositie stemden voor het onderzoek. Daarin wordt gekeken hoe breed en hoe diep de privécommunicatie van Duitsers door de Verenigde Staten en hun bondgenoten in het 'Five Eyes'-netwerk - Groot-Brittannië, Canada, Australië en Nieuw-Zeeland - werd bespioneerd en hoe veel Duitse functionarissen hiervan afwisten.

Het onderzoek begint volgende maand. Oppositielid Hans-Christian Ströbele wil dat ook NSA-klokkenluider Edward Snowden wordt gehoord, ook al zullen de VS daar waarschijnlijk bezwaar tegen makken. Snowden verblijft in Rusland, waar hij tijdelijk asiel heeft gekregen.

Het Duitse openbaar ministerie overweegt nog of het een strafrechtelijk onderzoek zal beginnen tegen de activiteiten van de NSA.

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Hacked emails show what Microsoft charges the FBI for user data

Microsoft often charges the FBI's most secretive division hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to legally view customer information, according to documents allegedly hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.

The SEA, a hacker group loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is best known for hijacking Western media companies' social media accounts. (These companies include the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, and even the Daily Dot.) The SEA agreed to let the Daily Dot analyze the documents with experts before the group published them in full.

The documents consist of what appear to be invoices and emails between Microsoft's Global Criminal Compliance team and the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), and purport to show exactly how much money Microsoft charges DITU, in terms of compliance costs, when DITU provides warrants and court orders for customers' data.

In December 2012, for instance, Microsoft emailed DITU a PDF invoice for $145,100, broken down to $100 per request for information, the documents appear to show. In August 2013, Microsoft allegedly emailed a similar invoice, this time for $352,200, at a rate of $200 per request. The latest invoice provided, from November 2013, is for $281,000.

None of the technologists or lawyers consulted for this story thought that Microsoft would be in the wrong to charge the FBI for compliance, especially considering it's well within the company's legal right to charge "reasonable expenses." Instead, they said, the documents are more of an indication of just how frequently the government wants information on customers. Some of the DITU invoices show hundreds of requests per month.

For ACLU Principal Technologist Christopher Soghoian, the documents reiterated his stance that charging a small fee is a positive, in part because it creates more of a record of government tracking. In 2010, Soghoian actually chided Microsoft for not charging the Drug Enforcement Agency for turning over user records when instructed to by courts, noting that companies like Google and Yahoo did.

Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed, and told the Daily Dot the government should be transparent about how much it pays.

"Taxpayers should absolutely know how much money is going toward this," he said.

Compared with the National Security Agency, which has seen many of its programs exposed by former systems analyst Edward Snowden, DITU has a low profile. But it runs in the same circles. Multiple law enforcement and technology industry representatives described DITU to Foreign Policy as the FBI's liaison to the U.S.'s tech companies, and the agency's equivalent to the NSA.

To that note, DITU is mentioned as a little-noticed detail from Snowden slides that detail the NSA's notorious PRISM program, which allows it to collect users' communications from nine American tech companies, including Microsoft. One slide explicitly mentions DITU's role in getting data from those companies.

PRISM screengrab via freesnowden.is

It's impossible to fully verify the documents' authenticity without confirmation from someone with direct knowledge of Microsoft and DITU compliance practices, and those parties refused to comment. But there are multiple signs that indicate the documents are legitimate.

"I don’t see any indication that they’re not real," Cardozo said. "If I was going to fake something like this, I would try to fake it up a lot more sensational than this."

That the SEA twice attacked Microsoft with a phishing attack before leaking these documents is well documented. On Jan. 11, the day of the second attack, the SEA hijacked the company's blog and Twitter account. One representative told the Verge that day that it was part of a bigger plan: "We are making some distraction for Microsoft employees so we can success in our main mission," the hacker said.

In a blog post nearly two weeks later, Microsoft admitted: "[W]e have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed. It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen."

A source familiar with several of the email addresses of the Microsoft employees in the emails confirmed the addresses were authentic.

When reached for comment, the company reiterated its stance that it complies with government demands as required by law. A spokesperson added that "as pursuant to U.S. law, Microsoft is entitled to seek reimbursement for costs associated with compliance with a valid legal demands. ... To be clear, these reimbursements cover only a portion of the costs we actually incur to comply with legal orders."

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment and deferred questions to Microsoft, "given that SEA claims to have stolen the documents" from there.

Indeed, there's plenty of history for communications companies charging compliance costs for cooperating with intelligence agencies' request for people's information. The CIA pays AT&T more than $10 million annually for access to its phone records, government officials told the New York Times. The Guardian, referencing other documents provided by Snowden, has reported that the NSA paid millions to Microsoft and the other eight companies used in PRISM for compliance costs.

Only the earliest of the Microsoft invoices provided by the SEA, dated May 10, 2012, breaks down requests by type of legal request, and it shows them to all explicitly come legally, though nothing in the documents indicates the later invoices refer to illegal surveillance. User information by a subpoena costs $50, a court order $75, and a search warrant $100. The requests come from FBI offices all around the U.S.



Later invoices to DITU don't break down requests to subpoena and court order, though the format is otherwise similar, and costs begin to rise to $100 and $200 per request.

And though the costs vacillate slightly depending on the invoice, they appear to be roughly in line with industry standards. Ashkan Soltani, who coauthored a Yale study on how much it costs agencies like the FBI to track targets by tapping phone companies for their cellphone locations, said that the range of costs seen in the SEA documents—$50 to $200 per order to Microsoft—"did seem a fair cost."

The invoices don't make explicit the exact type of information Microsoft charges DITU to provide, which may account for the price changes.

The biggest suspicion espoused by the experts we spoke with was just how apparently easy it was for the SEA to acquire this sort of information. If the documents aren't forged, that means Microsoft and the FBI simply email invoices and references to a presumably classified process.

"I’m surprised that they’re doing it by email," Soltani said. "I thought it would be a more secure system."

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NSA hacks system administrators, new leak reveals

In its quest to take down suspected terrorists and criminals abroad, the United States National Security Agency has adopted the practice of hacking the system administrators that oversee private computer networks, new documents reveal.

The Intercept has published a handful of leaked screenshots taken from an internal NSA message board where one spy agency specialist spoke extensively about compromising not the computers of specific targets, but rather the machines of the system administrators who control entire networks.

Journalist Ryan Gallagher reported that Edward Snowden, a former sys admin for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided The Intercept with the internal documents, including one from 2012 that’s bluntly titled “I hunt sys admins.”

According to the posts — some labeled “top secret” — NSA staffers should not shy away from hacking sys admins: a successful offensive mission waged against an IT professional with extensive access to a privileged network could provide the NSA with unfettered capabilities, the analyst acknowledged.

“Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?” one of the posts reads.

“They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet,” Gallagher wrote for the article published late Thursday. “By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.”

Since last June, classified NSA materials taken by Snowden and provided to certain journalists have exposed an increasing number of previously-secret surveillance operations that range from purposely degrading international encryption standards and implanting malware in targeted machines, to tapping into fiber-optic cables that transfer internet traffic and even vacuuming up data as its moved into servers in a decrypted state.

The latest leak suggests that some NSA analysts took a much different approach when tasked with trying to collect signals intelligence that otherwise might not be easily available. According to the posts, the author advocated for a technique that involves identifying the IP address used by the network’s sys admin, then scouring other NSA tools to see what online accounts used those addresses to log-in. Then by using a previously-disclosed NSA tool that tricks targets into installing malware by being misdirected to fake Facebook servers, the intelligence analyst can hope that the sys admin’s computer is sufficiently compromised and exploited.

Once the NSA has access to the same machine a sys admin does, American spies can mine for a trove of possibly invaluable information, including maps of entire networks, log-in credentials, lists of customers and other details about how systems are wired. In turn, the NSA has found yet another way to, in theory, watch over all traffic on a targeted network.

“Up front, sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of,” the NSA employee says in the documents.

When reached for comment by The Intercept, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said that, “A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights.”

Coincidentally, outgoing-NSA Director Keith Alexander said last year that he was working on drastically cutting the number of sys admins at that agency by upwards of 90 percent — but didn’t say it was because they could be exploited by similar tactics waged by adversarial intelligence groups. Gen. Alexander’s decision came just weeks after Snowden — previously one of around 1,000 sys admins working on the NSA’s networks, according to Reuters — walked away from his role managing those networks with a trove of classified information.

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British intelligence watchdog is like Yes Prime Minister, says MP

Spy services' monitor has staff of just two and was bewildered by Snowden affair

Britain's intelligence services had a system of oversight no better than that seen in the TV comedy Yes, Prime Minister, an MP said on Tuesday during a meeting of a Commons committee.

Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat, said the sitcom depicting ineffectual government was an appropriate comparison after it emerged that the intelligence services commissioner appearing before MPs worked only part-time, and operated with only one other staff member.

Huppert said: "Can I come back to this comparison between Britain and the US? I presume you are both familiar with Yes, Prime Minister. There is a line there where it says, 'Good Lord, no. Any hint of suspicion, you hold a full inquiry, have a chap straight out for lunch, ask him straight out if there is anything in it and if he says no, you have got to trust a chap's word'."

Other MPs on the home affairs select committee also questioned Sir Mark Waller, the intelligence services commissioner, as to whether there was adequate political and legal oversight of MI5, MI6 and the surveillance agency GCHQ, and suggested the existing system was not robust enough.

Waller, a former judge, had initially refused to attend the committee but had to relent after being summoned. But he told MPs that he thought he had adequate resources to do his job.

Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, said Waller was clearly a "decent man" but questioned whether there was a need for a full-time commissioner, with a bigger staff with more powers.

Waller disagreed, saying that the prospect of a former judge scrutinising applications for warrants was sufficient to ensure that the intelligences agencies behaved properly. He added that he admired the agencies' "ethos" and that a bigger bureaucracy could have a detrimental effect, interfering with the important work of the intelligence agencies.

The intelligence service commissioner oversees the "lawful use of intrusive powers" – surveillance as it is used by the intelligence agencies. Waller also revealed that 1,700 warrants were issued last year. He estimated he checked about 6% of them to ensure they complied with the law.

The committee is investigating counter-terrorism but its hearings have become increasingly dominated by the revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of mass surveillance and whether there is sufficient political and legal oversight.

Waller had been in the job 18 months when he heard about the Snowden revelations last summer. His response, he said, was: "Crikey."

His initial fear had been that he had been duped by the intelligence agencies. "I wanted to know if I had been spoofed for 18 months," Waller said.

Waller, who looked ill at ease during much of the questioning, said he had gone to see GCHQ to see if there was anything to the allegations. He saw the deputy chief of the GCHQ and was satisfied the allegations were without foundation.

Vaz said: "And how did you satisfy yourself? It seems from your comment that you had a discussion with them."

Waller replied: "Certainly."

Vaz said: "You heard what they had to say."

Waller replied: "Certainly."

Vaz probed further: "And you accepted what they had to say?"

Waller: "Certainly."

"Is that it?" asked Vaz.

"Certainly," replied Waller.

Vaz added: "Just a discussion?"

Waller: "Certainly."

Vaz, in conclusion, said: "And that's the way you were satisfied that there was no circumventing UK law. You went down, you went to see them, you sat round the table, you had a chat?

Waller replied: "You've got to remember that I've done a whole period – a year and a half's inspection. I have got a very good idea as to what the ethos of this agency is. They know perfectly well that they have had to make out their case and the legality of their case, etc, and I have absolutely, clearly, accepted it."

The committee also heard BT has refused to deny it has handed over data on millions of customers in bulk to government agencies, such as GCHQ, a group of MPs has been told.

Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles told the committee BT had provided "no substantive answer" to the question of whether they had handed over masses of customer data to the UK government.

Pickles told MPs he feared BT was providing data under section 94 of the Telecommunications Act, which gives the secretary of state broad powers to demand information from an individual or organisation in the interests of national security.

Waller was followed on the witness list by Conservative MP David Davis, who has long questioned the extent of surveillance and called for increased political oversight. Asked about the role of Waller and Sir Anthony May, the interception of communications commissioner, who also acts as a watchdog and recently gave evidence to the committee, Davis said: "I think the commissioners are good people doing impossible jobs." Davis called for a beefed-up intelligence committee that was chosen by the Commons.

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Op zaterdag 22 maart 2014 14:49 schreef meth1745 het volgende:
Doe zo voort, Papierversnipperaar!

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Op zaterdag 22 maart 2014 17:25 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

[..]

Inderdaad, tof dat iemand de informatie hieromtrent bijhoudt en aanvult.

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'NSA bespioneerde leiding en telecombedrijven China'

De Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA heeft de voormalige Chinese president Hu Jintao en Chinese banken en telecombedrijven bespioneerd. Dat blijkt uit documenten van de voormalige NSA-medewerker Edward Snowden, aldus de Amerikaanse krant The New York Times en het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel.

De NSA had het vooral gemunt op de Chinese telecomgigant Huawei. De Amerikanen vreesden dat Huawei het Chinese leger en door Peking gesteunde hackers zou helpen bij het stelen van geheime informatie van Amerikaanse bedrijven en de Amerikaanse regering. De NSA ondernam daarom in 2009 zelf actie tegen Huawei. Het lukte de spionagedienst om in het computernetwerk van Huawei te infiltreren en documenten te kopiëren.

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Some facts about how NSA stories are reported

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Several members of the august “US Journalists Against Transparency” club are outraged by revelations in yesterday’s New York Times (jointly published by der Spiegel) that the NSA has been hacking the products of the Chinese tech company Huawei as well as Huawei itself at exactly the same time (and in exactly the same way) as the US Government has been claiming the Chinese government hacks. Echoing the script of national security state officials, these journalists argue that these revelations are unjustified, even treasonous, because this is the type of spying the NSA should be doing, and disclosure serves no public interest while harming American national security, etc. etc.

True to form, however, these beacons of courage refuse to malign the parties that actually made the choice to publish these revelations – namely, the reporters and editors of the New York Times – and instead use it to advance their relentless attack on Edward Snowden. To these journalists, there are few worse sins than “stealing” the secrets of the US government and leaking them to the press (just as was true in the WikiLeaks case, one must congratulate the US Government on its outstanding propaganda feat of getting its journalists to lead the war on those who bring transparency to the nation’s most powerful factions). But beyond the abject spectacle of anti-transparency journalists, these claims are often based on factually false assumptions about how these stories are reported, making it worthwhile once again to underscore some of the key facts governing this process:

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Is Revealing Secrets Akin to Drunk Driving? Intelligence Official Says So

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Former NSA Director: 'Shame On Us'

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In a SPIEGEL interview, former NSA director Michael Hayden, 69, discusses revelations of US spying on Germany made public in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, surveillance against German leaders and tensions between Berlin and Washington.

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Rep. Mike Rogers Says Snowden’s To Blame For Russia’s Aggressive Actions Against Ukraine

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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Sunday former National Security Agency contractor and fugitive Edward Snowden is “actually supporting in an odd way this very activity of brazen brutality and expansionism of Russia. He needs to understand that. And I think Americans need to understand that….”

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6 Anti-NSA Technological Innovations That May Just Change the World

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Rather than grovel and beg for the U.S. government to respect our privacy, these innovators have taken matters into their own hands, and their work may change the playing field completely.

People used to assume that the United States government was held in check by the constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and which demands due process in criminal investigations, but such illusions have evaporated in recent years. It turns out that the NSA considers itself above the law in every respect and feels entitled to spy on anyone anywhere in the world without warrants, and without any real oversight. Understandably these revelations shocked the average citizen who had been conditioned to take the government’s word at face value, and the backlash has been considerable. The recent “Today We Fight Back” campaign to protest the NSA’s surveillance practices shows that public sentiment is in the right place. Whether these kinds of petitions and protests will have any real impact on how the U.S. government operates is questionable (to say the least), however some very smart people have decided not to wait around and find out. Instead they’re focusing on making the NSA’s job impossible. In the process they may fundamentally alter the way the internet operates.

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Put all these technologies together and what we see emerging is a new paradigm of communications where decentralized networks replace massive servers, and where social media giants like Facebook and Google may very well go the way of the dinosaur myspace. If you can’t beat them at their game, make their game irrelevant.

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The House's NSA bill could allow more spying than ever. You call this reform?

Congress' serial fabricator has the audacity to call his new law the 'End Bulk Collection Act'. Obama's proposal isn't much better

^{Trevor Timm
theguardian.com, Tuesday 25 March 2014 13.07 GMT}

he White House and the House Intelligence Committee leaked dueling proposals last night that are supposedly aimed at ending the mass collection of all Americans’ phone records. But the devil is in the details, and when it comes to the National Security Agency’s unique ability to twist and distort the English language, the devil tends to wrap his horns around every word.

The House proposal, to be unveiled this morning by Reps Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, is the more worrying of the two. Rogers has been the NSA’s most ardent defender in Congress and has a long history of distorting the truth and practicing in outright fabrication, whether in touting his committee’s alleged “oversight” or by way of his attempts to impugn the motives of the once again vindicated whistleblower who started this whole reform debate, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

As a general rule, whenever Mike Rogers (not to be confused with incoming NSA director Michael Rogers) claims a bill does something particular – like, say, protect your privacy – it's actually a fairly safe assumption that the opposite will end up true. His new bill seems to have the goal of trading government bulk collection for even more NSA power to search Americans’ data while it sits in the hands of the phone companies.

While the full draft of the bill isn’t yet public, the Guardian has seen a copy, and its description does not inspire confidence. Under the Rogers and Ruppersberger proposal, slyly named the “End Bulk Collection Act”, the telephone companies would hold on to phone data. But the government could search data from those companies based on "reasonable articulable suspicion" that someone is an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or "in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power". The NSA’s current phone records program is restricted to a reasonable articulable suspicion of terrorism.

A judge would reportedly not have to approve the collection beforehand, and the language suggests the government could obtain the phone records on citizens at least two “hops” away from the suspect, meaning if you talked to someone who talked to a suspect, your records could be searched by the NSA. Coupled with the expanded “foreign power” language, this kind of law coming out of Congress could, arguably, allow the NSA to analyze more data of innocent Americans than it could before.

President Obama’s reported proposal sounds more promising, though we have even fewer details than the Intelligence Committee proposal. The administration’s plan would supposedly end the collection of phone records by the NSA, without requiring a dangerous new data retention mandate for the phone companies, while restricting analysis to the current rules around terrorism and, importantly, still requiring a judge to sign off on each phone-record search made to the phone companies – under what the New York Times described as "a new kind of court order".

This phone plan, apparently, represents Obama coming full-circle as his self-imposed deadline on NSA reform arrives Friday, when the court order authorizing bulk collection runs out. But there’s no indication that the president's plan would stop other types of bulk collection – such as internet or financial records – and there’s still a big question about what the NSA could do with the data they receive on innocent people two "hops" away from a suspect.

Critically, neither proposal touches the NSA’s under-reported and incredibly dangerous “corporate store”, at least that we know of. For years, the NSA has been allowed to search phone numbers up to three “hops” away from suspect, so long as it had “reasonable articulable suspicion” that the suspect was involved in terrorism. This was recently ratcheted down to two hops, but the hop-scotching method inevitably pulled millions of innocent people into the NSA’s dragnet.

The NSA insisted the database was only used for that sole purpose of monitoring someone within a couple degrees of separation from a suspect. However, it was only revealed recently that the NSA then dumps all of those numbers and connections – even those three hops away – into another database called “the corporate store”, where the NSA can do further analysis of your information and doesn't need “reasonable articulable suspicion” for anything. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has also exempted the corporate store from audit requirements about how often the vast database is searched.

The American Civil Liberties Union puts it like this:

. If, for some reason, your phone number happens to be within three hops of an NSA target, all of your calling records may be in the corporate store, and thus available for any NSA analyst to search at will.


This is bulk collection at its worst, and these new reforms aren't nearly good enough.

Rep James Sensenbrenner’s bill, the USA Freedom Act, would make a much stronger and more comprehensive bill than either new proposal – at least for those interested in real NSA reform. Sensenbrenner, who originally wrote the Patriot Act provision that the NSA re-interpreted in secret, called the House Intelligence proposal "a convoluted bill that accepts the administration's deliberate misinterpretations of the law". Although, even his bill could be strengthened to ensure bulk collection of Americans' records is no longer an option for the NSA, or any other government agency.

In the end, there's a simple way to stop all forms of bulk collection and mass surveillance: write a law expressly prohibiting it.

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Petities VS eisen dat Edward Snowden niet vervolgd wordt

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Aanhangers van de voormalige NSA-medewerker Edward Snowden hebben vandaag twee petities met meer dan 100.000 handtekeningen bij het Amerikaanse ministerie van Justitie afgeleverd. Ze eisen dat de klokkenluider, die het spionageprogramma van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten heeft onthuld, zijn reispas terugkrijgt en in het buitenland niet verder vervolgd wordt.

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'Britse regering wilde The Guardian sluiten'

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De Britse regering heeft vorige zomer gedreigd The Guardian te sluiten als de krant zou doorgaan met onthullingen over de werkwijze van geheime diensten. Dat heeft adjunct-hoofdredacteur Paul Johnson van The Guardian gezegd in Dublin, meldde The Irish Times vandaag.

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Nieuw sociaal netwerk MyApollo moet NSA-proof zijn

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Bij Arroware in het Canadese Burlington werken ze al twee jaar aan een nieuw sociaal netwerk, dat zich van andere onderscheidt omdat het de bescherming van de privacy van zijn gebruikers als hoogste goed beschouwt. De zorgen over het schier eindeloze gegraai van data door de Amerikaanse spionagedienst NSA heeft internetters bewust gemaakt van hoe onbeschermd hun gegevens zijn, denkt oprichter en directeur Harvey Medcalf. MyApollo is deze week van start gegaan en de 27-jarig Medcalf doet een rondje Europa om de nieuwe dienst aan te prijzen.

'We zijn anders omdat we je foto's, documenten en berichten niet op centrale servers opslaan zoals Facebook of Google', legt Medcalf uit. MyApollo is gebaseerd op peer-to-peer-technologie, waarbij datapakketjes versleuteld en in losse brokjes over internet worden verstuurd. Elke computer die zich aansluit op zo'n netwerk levert een deel van de verbindingen en opslag die nodig zijn voor het dataverkeer, maar er is geen groot, centraal en kwetsbaar middelpunt.

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Ruim 120 regeringsleiders spionagedoelwit van NSA

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Meer dan 120 regeringsleiders en staatshoofden waren in ieder geval tot 2009 spionagedoelwit voor de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA. Alleen al over de Duitse bondskanselier Angela Merkel heeft de dienst meer dan 300 documenten bewaard.

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Microsoft will no longer look through your Hotmail to investigate leaks

Company will call in law enforcement when privacy is at stake.

Amid widespread privacy concerns in the wake of a leak investigation, Microsoft has announced a change in the way it handles private customer accounts. Under the new policy, effective immediately, any investigation that suggests that Microsoft's services have been used to traffic stolen Microsoft intellectual property will no longer result in Microsoft accessing private account information. Instead, the investigation will be handed over to law enforcement agencies, and it will be for those agencies to demand access to necessary private information.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith also said that the company's terms of service will be updated to reflect this new policy in coming months.

Court documents last week revealed that Microsoft read private Hotmail e-mails of a blogger who received secret information from a disgruntled employee. Microsoft's terms of service, in common with those of Yahoo, Google, and Apple, give the company the legal right to access private information for such investigations. Nonetheless, the lack of transparency and oversight caused widespread alarm.

In the immediate aftermath of the outcry, Redmond announced that in the future, it would seek input from a former judge to determine whether accessing private data was justified and would include the number of such accesses in its periodic transparency reports.

The newly announced policy goes much further: now, any investigation that reveals the use of Microsoft's own services will be held to exactly the same legal and evidential standard as investigations that reveal the use of non-Microsoft services and the same oversight and transparency as Microsoft and others are demanding to be used in government investigations.

This is a solid response from the company and perhaps reflects the way attitudes have changed since the 2012 investigation. The question of access to personal data stored on cloud services has become a major concern in the wake of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks. The old policy may not have been exceptional, but it took an approach that's no longer palatable to many of today's customers.

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NSA revelations 'changing how businesses store sensitive data'

Survey suggests many firms choosing more secure forms of storage over 'cloud computing' in light of Snowden's disclosures

The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is changing how businesses store commercially sensitive data, with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of the internet, according to a new study.

A survey of 1,000 business leaders from around the world has found that many are questioning their reliance on "cloud computing" in favour of more secure forms of data storage as the whistleblower's revelations continue to reverberate.

The moves by businesses mirror efforts by individual countries, such as Brazil and Germany, which are encouraging regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US, in a move that could have a big impact on US technology companies such as Facebook and Google.

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said the study confirmed "anecdotal evidence that suggests US tech firms are going to be hit hard in the coming years by a global backlash against technology 'made in America'".

"The Snowden revelations have led to a paradigm shift in how IT decision-makers buy technology," he said. "Now companies are not just competing on price and quality, they are also competing on geography. This might be the final nail in the coffin for the vision of a global, borderless internet."

Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute, said the survey revealed a significant level of concern among business leaders: "We'll have to see over the next year how much impact this type of reaction has on the bottom line of US tech companies, but it will give them even more incentive to put pressure on the Obama administration and US Congress for significant surveillance reform."

The survey of 1,000 information and communications technology decision-makers from France, Germany, Hong Kong, the UK and the US was carried out by NTT Communications. It found that, following the Snowden revelations, almost 90% had changed the way they use the cloud – a storage service that allows data to be accessed from anywhere in the world but which is more susceptible to online surveillance.

The study also found that almost a third of those questioned were moving their company's data to locations where they "know it will be safe", and 16% said they had delayed or cancelled their contracts with cloud service providers.

Len Padilla, from NTT Communications in Europe, said: "Our findings show that the NSA allegations have hardened ICT decision-makers' attitudes towards cloud computing, whether it is modifying procurement policies, scrutinising potential suppliers or taking a heightened interest in where their data is stored."

The Guardian, and some of the world's other major media organisations, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of mass surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency, last year.

US technology firms have repeatedly raised concerns about the impact of the NSA revelations on their ability to operate around the world, and earlier this month Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, met President Barack Obama to voice their concerns about the commercial impact of government surveillance programmes.

But Castro warned that it was not just the global firms that are being affected in the US. "This isn't something that just the big players have to worry about, it's the start-ups and mid-size companies too – across the board this backlash is going to hurt their bottom line."

And Brown said that pressure is now likely to be felt by the other governments as more businesses attempt to protect their data.

"As the US limits its own mass surveillance programmes, US firms will no doubt be asking pointed questions about the continuing surveillance activities of European and other governments," he said.

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'NSA verzamelt 6 miljard metadata per dag'

De Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA verzamelt 6 miljard metadata per dag. Daarbij gaat het om gegevens wie wanneer met wie belt, chat of e-mailt. Dat hebben journalisten van het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel gemeld bij de presentatie van hun boek Der NSA-Komplex (Het NSA-complex).

Voor de publicatie hebben zij documenten geanalyseerd van klokkenluider Edward Snowden. De Amerikanen willen in kaart brengen wie contact heeft met wie en leggen daarvoor 'een puzzle met 100.000 delen', aldus een van de auteurs.

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Exclusive: NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought - study

(Reuters) - Security industry pioneer RSA adopted not just one but two encryption tools developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, greatly increasing the spy agency's ability to eavesdrop on some Internet communications, according to a team of academic researchers.

Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs. The system, called Dual Elliptic Curve, was a random number generator, but it had a deliberate flaw - or "back door" - that allowed the NSA to crack the encryption.

A group of professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois and elsewhere now say they have discovered that a second NSA tool exacerbated the RSA software's vulnerability.

The professors found that the tool, known as the "Extended Random" extension for secure websites, could help crack a version of RSA's Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster, according to an advance copy of their research shared with Reuters.

While Extended Random was not widely adopted, the new research sheds light on how the NSA extended the reach of its surveillance under cover of advising companies on protection.

RSA, now owned by EMC Corp, did not dispute the research when contacted by Reuters for comment. The company said it had not intentionally weakened security on any product and noted that Extended Random did not prove popular and had been removed from RSA's protection software in the last six months.

"We could have been more skeptical of NSA's intentions," RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters. "We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure."

Curry declined to say if the government had paid RSA to incorporate Extended Random in its BSafe security kit, which also housed Dual Elliptic Curve.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment on the study or the intelligence agency's motives in developing Extended Random.

The agency has worked for decades with private companies to improve cybersecurity, largely through its Information Assurance Directorate. After the 9/11 attacks, the NSA increased surveillance, including inside the United States, where it had previously faced strict restrictions.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that the agency also aimed to subvert cryptography standards. A presidential advisory group in December said that practice should stop, though experts looking at the case of Dual Elliptic Curve have taken some comfort in concluding that only the NSA could likely break it.

"It's certainly well-designed," said security expert Bruce Schneier, a frequent critic of the NSA. "The random number generator is one of the better ones."

RANDOM NUMBERS

Cryptography experts have long been suspicious of Dual Elliptic Curve, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology and RSA only renounced the technology after Snowden leaked documents about the back door last year.

That was also when the academic team set out to see if they could break Dual Elliptic Curve by replacing two government-issued points on the curve with their own. The professors plan to publish a summary of their study this week and present their findings at a conference this summer.

Random numbers are used to generate cryptographic keys - if you can guess the numbers, you can break the security of the keys. While no random number generator is perfect, some generators were viewed as more predictable than others.

In a Pentagon-funded paper in 2008, the Extended Random protocol was touted as a way to boost the randomness of the numbers generated by the Dual Elliptic Curve.

But members of the academic team said they saw little improvement, while the extra data transmitted by Extended Random before a secure connection begins made predicting the following secure numbers dramatically easier.

"Adding it doesn't seem to provide any security benefits that we can figure out," said one of the authors of the study, Thomas Ristenpart of the University of Wisconsin.

Johns Hopkins Professor Matthew Green said it was hard to take the official explanation for Extended Random at face value, especially since it appeared soon after Dual Elliptic Curve's acceptance as a U.S. standard.

"If using Dual Elliptic Curve is like playing with matches, then adding Extended Random is like dousing yourself with gasoline," Green said.

The NSA played a significant role in the origins of Extended Random. The authors of the 2008 paper on the protocol were Margaret Salter, technical director of the NSA's defensive Information Assurance Directorate, and an outside expert named Eric Rescorla.

Rescorla, who has advocated greater encryption of all Web traffic, works for Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser. He and Mozilla declined to comment. Salter did not respond to requests for comment.

Though few companies appear to have embraced Extended Random, RSA did. The company built in support for the protocol in BSafe toolkit versions for the Java programming language about five years ago, when a preeminent Internet standards group - the Internet Engineering Task Force - was considering whether to adopt Extended Random as an industry standard. The IETF decided in the end not to adopt the protocol.

RSA's Curry said that if Dual Elliptic Curve had been sound, Extended Random would have made it better. "When we realized it was not likely to become a standard, we did not enable it in any other BSafe libraries," he added.

The academic researchers said it took about an hour to crack a free version of BSafe for Java using about $40,000 worth of computer equipment. It would have been 65,000 times faster in versions using Extended Random, dropping the time needed to seconds, according to Stephen Checkoway of Johns Hopkins.

The researchers said it took them less than 3 seconds to crack a free version of BSafe for the C programming language, even without Extended Random, because it already transmitted so many random bits before the secure connection began. And it was so inexpensive it could easily be scaled up for mass surveillance, the researchers said.

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Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies

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SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil.

IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.

And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.

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Brazil and the European Union, which had used American undersea cables for intercontinental communication, last month decided to build their own cables between Brazil and Portugal, and gave the contract to Brazilian and Spanish companies. Brazil also announced plans to abandon Microsoft Outlook for its own email system that uses Brazilian data centers.

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NSA Blows Its Own Top Secret Program in Order to Propagandize

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Over the last 40 years, the U.S. government has relied on extreme fear-mongering to demonize transparency. In sum, every time an unwanted whistleblower steps forward, we are treated to the same messaging: You’re all going to die because of these leakers and the journalists who publish their disclosures! Lest you think that’s hyperbole, consider this headline from last week based on an interview with outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander:

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But whenever it suits the agency to do so–meaning when it wants to propagandize on its own behalf–the NSA casually discloses even its most top secret activities in the very countries where such retaliation is most likely.

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Leave aside how corrupted this rationale is: It would mean that no bad acts of the U.S. government should ever be reported, lest those disclosures make people angry and want to attack government agents. Indeed, that is the rationale that the Obama administration used to protect evidence of Bush-era torture from disclosure (to disclose torture photos, Obama said, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger).

What is so extraordinary is that the NSAat exactly the same time it is telling news organizations that disclosing its collect-it-all activities will endanger its personnelruns to its favorite L.A. Times reporter and does exactly that, for no reason other than to make itself look good and to justify these activities. (Absolutely invaluable, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, said.)

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Inlichtingenbaas geeft voor het eerst spionage Amerikanen toe

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Voor het eerst heeft James Clapper, het hoofd van de gezamenlijke Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten, toegegeven dat analisten van de NSA naar gegevens hebben gezocht die betrekking hebben op Amerikanen. Dat schrijft The Washington Post.

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Germany opens hearings on U.S. spying

BERLIN – A chapter in transatlantic relations that Washington would sooner forget got a new lease on life Thursday as German lawmakers opened their first parliamentary hearings into the Edward Snowden scandal.

Revelations of large-scale U.S. spying on Germans, up to and including Chancellor Angela Merkel, prompted an initial wave of outrage here last year. But now, the lengthy committee investigations could keep the spotlight on leaks by the former NSA contractor for a year or two to come.

The hearings also have the potential to provoke further antipathy. Indeed, a number of lawmakers here are now demanding safe passage to Berlin for Snowden — who is living in self-imposed exile in Moscow — to testify before the eight-person committee. Any such move would likely outrage the United States, which is seeking to take Snowden into custody.

Given the potential for angering Washington, analysts believe Merkel’s government will find a way to sidestep such a move. Nevertheless, the push to give Snowden his day here serves as another reminder that, even as the scandal appears to be dissipating in other parts of Europe, it remains at the top of the agenda in Germany.

“Mass surveillance of citizens will not be accepted,” Clemens Binninger, committee chairman from Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, said at the start of the hearings Thursday.

The committee is set to call dozens of witnesses and review piles of documents. But even its members appear to concede the limits of their effort, which is likely to be hampered by an anticipated lack of full cooperation by U.S. officials. It suggests that the hearings are being called at least in part for national catharsis and as an outlet for German rage.

Parliament’s airing of the evidence began Thursday, even as fresh revelations continue to stoke public anger. In recent days, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine published further details from the Snowden leaks, including evidence of an NSA dossier on Merkel that allegedly included more than 300 intelligence reports. Though U.S. snooping on Merkel is not new, the reports served as a continuing reminder for an already-bitter German public.

In addition, the magazine documented the infiltration of German Internet firms by the British secret service, fueling an ever-expanding plot line here that the Americans were not the only friends eavesdropping on German targets. Indeed, outrage from the Snowden scandal has been far more muted in some parts of Europe, in part because of assumptions by the British, French and other Europeans that their own secret services are not wholly innocent either.

A growing sense of intelligence vulnerabilities here has generated an intensifying debate over whether Germany should begin to beef up its own intelligence operations, targeting allies and non-allies alike. Given Germany’s typical post-World War II knee-jerk reaction against anything that could be seen as provocative or aggressive, however, analysts say any such moves are likely to be long in coming, if at all.

“German foreign policy is focused on one topic — doing things in cooperation,” said Marcel Dickow, an international security expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Obviously, even with the Snowden [revelations], spying on allies is going to be seen as something that undermines cooperation.”

However, the hearings could be just the beginning here.

A top German prosecutor is still weighing whether to open a criminal investigation into the affair, which could further damage ties between Washington and Berlin. And there is no mistaking the lingering anger of German lawmakers, particularly those clamoring to bring Snowden to Berlin to testify.

Such a move is considered a long shot, in part because it would create fresh tensions at a time when Europe and the United States are trying to maintain a common front on the Russian-Ukraine crisis. But some here seem to believe that bringing Snowden to Berlin is exactly the kind of thumb-nosing the Americans deserve.

Snowden is the “key to clarification of the NSA spying scandal,” Hans-Christian Ströbele, a politician from the Green Party who met with Snowden in Russia last October, told reporters in Berlin on Thursday.

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Op donderdag 3 april 2014 20:03 schreef Schunckelstar het volgende:
ik snap niet waarom snowden perse daarheen zou moeten

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The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket

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This week, the Associated Press exposed a secret program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation. Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that “American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes”–specifically, to manipulate those users in order to foment dissent in Cuba and subvert its government. According to top-secret documents published today by The Intercept, this sort of operation is frequently discussed at western intelligence agencies, which have plotted ways to covertly use social media for ”propaganda,” “deception,” “mass messaging,” and “pushing stories.”

These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

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U.S. knocks plans for European communication network

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(Reuters) - The United States on Friday criticized proposals to build a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States, warning that such rules could breach international trade laws.

In its annual review of telecommunications trade barriers, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative said impediments to cross-border data flows were a serious and growing concern.

It was closely watching new laws in Turkey that led to the blocking of websites and restrictions on personal data, as well as calls in Europe for a local communications network following revelations last year about U.S. digital eavesdropping and surveillance.

"Recent proposals from countries within the European Union to create a Europe-only electronic network (dubbed a 'Schengen cloud' by advocates) or to create national-only electronic networks could potentially lead to effective exclusion or discrimination against foreign service suppliers that are directly offering network services, or dependent on them," the USTR said in the report.

Germany and France have been discussing ways to build a European network to keep data secure after the U.S. spying scandal. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone was reportedly monitored by American spies.

The USTR said proposals by Germany's state-backed Deutsche Telekom to bypass the United States were "draconian" and likely aimed at giving European companies an advantage over their U.S. counterparts.

Deutsche Telekom has suggested laws to stop data traveling within continental Europe being routed via Asia or the United States and scrapping the Safe Harbor agreement that allows U.S. companies with European-level privacy standards access to European data. (www.telekom.com/dataprotection)

"Any mandatory intra-EU routing may raise questions with respect to compliance with the EU's trade obligations with respect to Internet-enabled services," the USTR said. "Accordingly, USTR will be carefully monitoring the development of any such proposals."

U.S. tech companies, the leaders in an e-commerce marketplace estimated to be worth up to $8 trillion a year, have urged the White House to undertake reforms to calm privacy concerns and fend off digital protectionism.

In the report, the USTR also criticized restrictions on Internet telephony in India and China, foreign investment limits in countries, including China, and efforts to increase the rates U.S. telecommunications operators must pay in order to connect long-distance calls in Pakistan, Fiji, Tonga and Uganda.

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Snowden en Greenwald waarschuwen voor metadata

NSA-klokkenluider Edward Snowden en verslaggever Glenn Greenwald waarschuwen ervoor dat overheden meer inbreuk op de privacy doen door metadata te verzamelen dan door direct telefoongesprekken en e-mails af te tappen.

Metadata zijn gegevens over telefoongesprekken: welke nummers met elkaar bellen, wanneer en hoe lang. Bij metadata wordt de inhoud van een gesprek niet opgeslagen. 'Ze laten onze verbindingen zien, onze politieke verbintenissen en onze eigenlijke activiteiten', aldus Snowden.

Greenwald en Snowden spraken gisteren via een videoverbinding op een conferentie van Amnesty International in de Amerikaanse stad Chicago. Amnesty International voert campagne om een einde te maken aan de afluisterpraktijken van de Amerikaanse overheid. Vorig jaar bracht Snowden naar buiten dat zijn voormalige werkgever, veiligheidsdienst NSA, massaal telefoongesprekken afluistert en e-mails bekijkt.

Meer onthullingen
Snowden leeft in ballingschap in Rusland, als hij naar de Verenigde Staten komt kan hij gearresteerd worden. Greenwald schreef over de onthullingen en beloofde gisteren dat er binnen twee maanden nog meer komen.

'Ik hoop en geloof dat hoe meer we verslag doen en hoe meer mensen de omvang van het misbruik zien, en niet alleen de omvang van het toezicht, hoe meer mensen erom zullen geven', zei hij vanuit Brazilië.

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CERF: Classified NSA Work Mucked Up Security For Early TCP/IP

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf says that he had access to cutting edge cryptographic technology in the mid 1970s that could have made TCP/IP more secure – too bad the NSA wouldn’t let him!

Did the National Security Agency, way back in the 1970s, allow its own priorities to stand in the way of technology that might have given rise to a more secure Internet? You wouldn’t be crazy to reach that conclusion after hearing an interview with Google Vice President and Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf on Wednesday.

As a graduate student in Stanford in the 1970s, Cerf had a hand in the creation of ARPANet, the world’s first packet-switched network. He later went on to work as a program manager at DARPA, where he funded research into packet network interconnection protocols that led to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol that is the foundation of the modern Internet.

Cerf is a living legend who has received just about every honor a technologist can: including the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he made clear in the Google Hangout with host Leo Laporte that the work he has been decorated for – TCP/IP, the Internet’s lingua franca – was at best intended as a proof of concept, and that only now – with the adoption of IPv6 – is it mature (and secure) enough for what Cerf called “production use.”

Specifically, Cerf said that given the chance to do it over again he would have designed earlier versions of TCP/IP to look and work like IPV6, the latest version of the IP protocol with its integrated network-layer security and massive 128 bit address space. IPv6 is only now beginning to replace the exhausted IPV4 protocol globally.

“If I had in my hands the kinds of cryptographic technology we have today, I would absolutely have used it,” Cerf said. (Check it out here)

Researchers at the time were working on the development of just such a lightweight but powerful cryptosystem. On Stanford’s campus, Cerf noted that Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman had researched and published a paper that described a public key cryptography system. But they didn’t have the algorithms to make it practical. (That task would fall to Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who published the RSA algorithm in 1977).

Curiously enough, however, Cerf revealed that he did have access to some really bleeding edge cryptographic technology back then that might have been used to implement strong, protocol-level security into the earliest specifications of TCP/IP. Why weren’t they used, then? The culprit is one that’s well known now: the National Security Agency.

Cerf told host Leo Laporte that the crypto tools were part of a classified project he was working on at Stanford in the mid 1970s to build a secure, classified Internet for the National Security Agency.

“During the mid 1970s while I was still at Stanford and working on this, I also worked with the NSA on a secure version of the Internet, but one that used classified cryptographic technology. At the time I couldn’t share that with my friends,” Cerf said. “So I was leading this kind of schizoid existence for a while.”

Hindsight is 20:20, as the saying goes. Neither Cerf, nor the NSA nor anyone else could have predicted how much of our economy and that of the globe would come to depend on what was then a government backed experiment in computer networking. Besides, we don’t know exactly what the cryptographic tools Cerf had access to as part of his secure Internet research or how suitable (and scalable) they would have been.

And who knows, maybe too much security early on would have stifled the growth of the Internet in its infancy – keeping it focused on the defense and research community, but acting as an inhibitor to wider commercial adoption?

But the specter of the NSA acting in its own interest without any obvious interest in fostering the larger technology sector is one that has been well documented in recent months, as revelations by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA worked to undermine cryptographic standards promoted by NIST and the firm RSA .

It’s hard to listen to Cerf lamenting the absence of strong authentication and encryption in the foundational protocol of the Internet, or to think about the myriad of online ills in the past two decades that might have been preempted with a stronger and more secure protocol and not wonder what might have been.

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Why Human Rights Groups Attracted the NSA's Attention

Not content with spying on UNICEF or the World Health Organization, it appears that western intelligence agencies are specifically targeting the communications of human rights groups.

While talking via video link to the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe (full video here), Edward Snowden was asked if the NSA or GCHQ were currently spying on groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“Without question, yes, absolutely,” was his response. “The NSA has in fact specifically targeted the communications of either leaders or staff members in a number of purely civil or human rights organisation of the kind described.”

Although it wasn't directly addressed towards a specific organisation, both Amnesty and HRW published press releases condemning the actions.

“If it's true that the NSA spied on groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, it's outrageous, and indicative of the overreach that US laws allows to security agencies,” said Dinah PoKempner from Human Rights Watch. “Such actions would again show why the US needs to overhaul its system of indiscriminate surveillance.”

Unfortunately, this won't be much of a surprise to Amnesty, who last December raised concerns with the UK government that their communications had been unlawfully accessed by intelligence agencies. In a claim to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the group claimed a breach of the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression, referencing the Human Rights Act of 1998.

But why would the NSA, a government body purportedly gathering intelligence for the sake of national security, be concerned in surveilling human rights groups?

One clear reason is to gain access to communications with sources. Global NGOs have contacts in Libya, Russia, China, and pretty much everywhere else in the world, and being able to read the emails of an NGO source in a country or government of interest could save the hassle of building up your own presence in the area.

This is what seems to have worried Michael Bochenek, the legal and policy director for Amnesty International. “This raises the very real possibility that our communications with confidential sources have been intercepted,” he said.

This approach isn't far fetched either. Al Jazeera—which, last time I checked, is a journalistic entity rather than a terrorist organisation—had its computer systems broken into by the NSA during George Bush's second term in office. The already encrypted information was then passed onto other departments for analysis, with the NSA saying that Al Jazeera had “high potential as sources of intelligence.” (The US Justice Department was also caught last year spying on the Associated Press.)

Another reason is that the campaigns carried out by human rights groups do pose a threat to the interests of those in power. Amnesty International UK is currently highlighting cases of damage caused by energy corporations, in particular Shell. The organisation refers to documents that “show, in detail, how the UK intervened to support Shell and Rio Tinto in high-profile US human rights court cases, following requests from companies.”

It appears that the UK government feels responsible for ensuring that these companies can carry on business as usual. According to government documents, government agencies tasked with business development “believe that the prosperity and potentially significant commercial considerations," justifying their support of corporations in the court room.

With environmentalists increasingly being viewed as a security threat, and the close relationship between government and private energy sectors, it's plausible that spying on those opposed to abusive industries would be occurring.

If the NSA are willing to break into a media outlet's internal communications for the purposes of gathering intel, or the British government continue to explicitly support third party interests, it would be naive to think they wouldn't deploy similar tactics in order to undermine the work of human rights organisations.

Assuming that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are some of the groups affected by this snooping, who else could be affected? An obvious example is the American Civil Liberties Union, who are heavily involved with all things anti-surveillance, and who count Snowden's lawyer among their staff. Knowing what their next big scoop might be, who a whistleblower in the waiting is, or even their plans to generate support for initiatives such as The Day We Fight Back would all be valuable to an intelligence agency that just wants to keep on spying.