Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

quote:

Angela Merkel denied access to her NSA file

Frustration with US government rises over failure to clear up questions about surveillance of German chancellor's phone

The US government has refused to grant Angela Merkel access to her NSA file, adding to the growing frustration with Washington over its failure to clear up remaining questions about the monitoring of the German chancellor's phone.

The latest information emerged in response to a parliamentary query by Green MP Omid Nouripour, who asked if the German chancellor had requested the release of paperwork relating to US intelligence agents' surveillance of her phone calls.

In its response, a spokesperson for the German interior ministry confirmed that Merkel's government had submitted an official request on 24 October 2013, but that the US government "had not supplied information in this regard".

Nouripour, who is the Green party's spokesperson on foreign affairs, said he intended to make further inquiries with the government and would seek to clarify if Merkel had asked for her NSA file to be destroyed.

Nouripour criticised both the German and the US governments for their response to the NSA revelations. "Last year, their failure to answer questions could have been due to genuine ignorance – now it looks like deliberate obfuscation. The Germans aren't asking the tough questions so they can protect their notion of a transatlantic partnership, and the US is happy that the Germans aren't asking tough questions so they can avoid further diplomatic scandals."

The news comes amid growing German frustration with the US and UK governments' failure to yield basic information about their surveillance activities. Earlier this week, interior minister Thomas de Maizière told Der Spiegel that the US response to the affair remained "inadequate".

"If two-thirds of what Edward Snowden reports, or of what is reported with attribution to him, is correct, then I come to the conclusion: the USA is acting without any restraint", said de Maizière, who emphasised that he was still a "transatlanticist by conviction". "America should be interested in improving the current situation. And words alone won't achieve that."

The US government's refusal to allow Merkel access to her own file contrasts with the relative ease with which German citizens are able to access files relating to the surveillance activities of the East German secret service, the Stasi.

In January 1992, after pressure from human rights activists, the German government took the unprecedented step of opening up the Stasi archive to the public – the federal agency in charge of the Stasi archives still receives around 5,000 applications a month.

In 1992, 13,088 pages worth of files relating to the NSA's surveillance of the West German government, sold to the Stasi by the US spy James W Hall, had been returned to the US, with permission of the German interior ministry.

Angela Merkel has defended the decision to keep access to the Stasi archive open to German citizens, and has reportedly used the opportunity to view her own Stasi file in person. "Many in former socialist countries envy us for this opportunity", she said in 2009.

In Germany, the aftermath of the Snowden revelations continues to be debated with vigour. On Wednesday, the head of a parliamentary inquiry into NSA surveillance resigned over a disagreement as to whether Snowden should be invited as a witness. Green and left politicians insist that the whistleblower should be invited to give testimony in person, but panel chairman Clemens Binninger, of Merkel's Christian Democrats, was more sceptical, arguing that most of the key information was already out in the public realm.

Academics at Rostock University, meanwhile, have voted to award Edward Snowden an honorary doctorate. Members of the philosophy faculty said they wanted to reward Snowden's "civil courage" and his "substantial contribution to a new global discourse about freedom, democracy, cosmopolitanism and the rights of the individual".

quote:

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras Returning To U.S. For First Time Since Snowden Revelations

NEW YORK -- Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two American journalists who have been at the forefront of reporting on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, will return to the United States on Friday for the first time since revelations of worldwide surveillance broke.

Greenwald and Poitras, currently in Berlin, will attend Friday’s Polk Awards ceremony in New York City. The two journalists are sharing the prestigious journalism award with The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill and with Barton Gellman, who has led The Washington Post’s reporting on the NSA documents. Greenwald and Poitras interviewed Snowden last June in Hong Kong as he first revealed himself.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenwald said he’s motivated to return because “certain factions in the U.S. government have deliberately intensified the threatening climate for journalists.”

“It’s just the principle that I shouldn’t allow those tactics to stop me from returning to my own country,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald suggested government officials and members of Congress have used the language of criminalization as a tactic to chill investigative journalism.

In January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that journalists reporting on the NSA documents were acting as Snowden’s “accomplices.” The following month, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that Greenwald was selling stolen goods by reporting stories on the NSA documents with news organizations around the world. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has called for Greenwald to be prosecuted.

Greenwald said the government has not informed his legal counsel whether or not he could face any potential charges, or if he's been named in any grand jury investigation tied to the NSA disclosures.

Journalists have faced increased threats during the Obama years, both in the government's severe crackdown on leaks and the record use of the Espionage Act to prosecute sources who provide classified information to the media. During a March conference on the state of national security reporting, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), author of a federal shield law intended to protect journalists, said the bill was "probably not enough" to protect Greenwald.

Greenwald drew a distinction between his situation and that of Gellman, who has not been been similarly singled out by the government. Gellman, who didn't meet with Snowden in Hong Kong but interviewed him later in Moscow, has continued to live in the U.S. while reporting for The Washington Post. Greenwald and Poitras, however, have lived abroad the entire time and have published these documents with news outlets worldwide.

Greenwald currently lives in Rio de Janeiro with his partner, David Miranda, who was detained in London’s Heathrow airport last year while carrying documents from Berlin. Poitras, a filmmaker who has reported extensively on war and surveillance and has been detained dozens of times at the U.S. border, currently lives in Berlin.

The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced Monday and it is expected that reporting on the NSA, one of the biggest stories of the past year, will be honored in some capacity.

quote:

NSA monitors WiFi on US planes ‘in violation’ of privacy laws

Companies that provide WiFi on US domestic flights are handing over their data to the NSA, adapting their technology to allow security services new powers to spy on passengers. In doing so, they may be in violation of privacy laws.

In a letter leaked to Wired, Gogo, the leading provider of inflight WiFi in the US, admitted to violating the requirements of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The act is part of a wiretapping law passed in 1994 that requires telecoms carriers to provide law enforcement with a backdoor in their systems to monitor telephone and broadband communications.

Gogo states in the letter to the Federal Communications Commission that it added new capabilities to its service that go beyond CALEA, at the behest of law enforcement agencies.

“In designing its existing network, Gogo worked closely with law enforcement to incorporate functionalities and protections that would serve public safety and national security interests,” Gogo attorney Karis Hastings wrote in the leaked letter, which dates from 2012. He did not elaborate as to the nature of the changes, but said Gogo “worked with federal agencies to reach agreement regarding a set of additional capabilities to accommodate law enforcement interests.”

Gogo, which provides WiFi services to the biggest US airlines, are not the only ones to adapt their services to enable spying. Panasonic Avionics also added “additional functionality” to their services as per an agreement with US law enforcement, according to a report published in December.

The deals with security services have civil liberties organizations up in arms. They have condemned the WiFi providers’ deals with authorities as scandalous.

“Having ISPs [now] that say that CALEA isn’t enough, we’re going to be even more intrusive in what we collect on people is, honestly, scandalous,” Peter Eckersley, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Wired.

The powers of the National Security Agency and other US law enforcement agencies have come under harsh criticism since the data leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which they monitor citizens’ communications. In particular, critics have taken issue with the NSA’s mass, indiscriminate gathering of metadata which has been described as “almost Orwellian in nature” and a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has filed a lawsuit against the US agency and is pushing to have the case heard in the US Supreme Court. Last week the Supreme Court said that Leon would have to wait for a ruling from the lower court before his case could be heard.

Since the NSA scandal blew up last year, prompting widespread public anger in the US and internationally at the violation of privacy rights, President Barack Obama’s administration has reluctantly taken some modest steps to curb the powers of the agency.

At the beginning of this year, Obama announced that the NSA would no longer be able to monitor the personal communications of world leaders. In addition, last month Obama formally proposed to end the NSA’s bulk data collection, proposing legislation that would oblige the agency to get a court order to access information through telecoms companies.

quote:

Snowden to NSA: Go ahead, deny I tried to raise the alarm legally

quote:

Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has challenged the National Security Agency to explicitly deny that he tried -- before leaking secret documents to journalists -- to use legal, internal means to raise a red flag about the possibly unconstitutional nature of the outfit's surveillance programs.

"The NSA at this point not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the NSA's lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail. I directly challenge the NSA to deny that I contacted NSA oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law, and I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer [from the NSA] to this question," Snowden told Vanity Fair in a feature that's scheduled for publication later this week.

The challenge came in response to a claim by NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett, who led the agency's investigation of Snowden and who Vanity Fair says told the magazine that Snowden made no formal complaints and that no one at the NSA has reported Snowden mentioning his concerns to them.

quote:

Journalists who broke NSA story in Guardian dedicate award to Snowden

quote:

The journalists who first revealed the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities dedicated a prestigious award on Friday to their source, Edward Snowden.

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras had earlier cleared immigration at John F Kennedy airport in New York without a hitch as they arrived to share a George Polk Award for national security reporting with Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.

quote:

Pulitzerprijs voor onthullingen over NSA

De Amerikaanse Pulitzerprijs voor de journalistiek in de categorie dienstverlening gaat dit jaar naar de Britse krant The Guardian en de Amerikaanse Washington Post. Dat meldde de jury vandaag. De twee winnen de prijs voor met name de publicaties over de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA (National Securitey Agency).

Zij publiceerden vorig jaar de informatie die de Amerikaanse klokkenluider Edward Snowden beschikbaar stelde. Snowden bracht een schat aan informatie over de NSA naar buiten, nadat hij er had gewerkt. De omvang van de spionageactiviteiten van de Amerikaanse dienst schokte de hele wereld.

quote:

Ex-UK defense chief blasts Snowden, Greenwald in op-ed


The former head of the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense is accusing former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and other journalists of helping to empower terrorists by reporting on documents from National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden.

Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for his stories based on Snowden’s documents, and his “malicious associates” share a “virulent anti-Western, and particularly anti-American” point of view, Liam Fox said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Tuesday.

“We have actually seen chatter among specific terrorist groups, at home and abroad, discussing how to avoid what they now perceive to be vulnerable communications methods and, consequently, how to select communications that they perceive not to be exploitable,” he added.

“No doubt these terrorist groups are extremely grateful to Messrs. Snowden and Greenwald and their accomplices for these useful tools in their war against our citizens, our armed forces and our way of life.”

The heated critique against both the former NSA contractor and journalists who published documents he took from the agency comes just a day after the Pulitzer Prize board praised Greenwald and other reporters at the Guardian for helping “to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.”

The award was seen as a show of support for Snowden’s defenders, who have sometimes accused the mainstream press of bias against him.

Snowden said the honor was a “vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government.”

Greenwald recently left the Guardian to start a new outlet, the Intercept, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, who also led reporting on the Snowden stories.

Fox, a conservative member of Parliament who served as secretary of state for defense from 2010 to 2011, retorted that Snowden “thinks of himself as a cyber-age guerrilla warrior, but in reality he is a self-publicizing narcissist.”

His comments echoed concern from many defenders of the NSA who have warned that the leaks have made it easier for terrorists and other bad actors to evade detection.

In the op-ed, he said that the revelations might have “diminished” the ability to keep watch of Russian movements ahead of the country's action in Ukraine.

“If true, this would be the first practical demonstration of how Mr. Snowden and his acolytes had successfully damaged security to the benefit of Vladimir Putin’s regime," he wrote.

The op-ed was adapted from a speech Fox is scheduled to give at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday.

quote:

Kabinet komt na de zomer met update spionagewet

Het kabinet komt voor het einde van het jaar met een voorstel voor een update van de wet op de inlichtingendiensten uit 2002. Dat heeft minister Ronald Plasterk van Binnenlandse Zaken vandaag gezegd in de Tweede Kamer. Hij wilde nog niet zeggen of de inlichtingendiensten AIVD en MIVD straks ook grootscheeps data mogen verzamelen via de kabel.

De diensten mogen nu ongericht (grootscheeps) communicatie door de ether onderscheppen, maar geen 'kabelgebonden' data. Dat beperkt hun activiteiten te sterk, constateerde een speciale adviescommissie onder voorzitterschap van Stan Dessens eind vorig jaar. Veel internetverkeer loopt tegenwoordig immers via de kabel. De diensten moeten al het internet- en telefoonverkeer onafhankelijk van de techniek kunnen 'verkennen en analyseren', aldus Dessens.

Het kabinet heeft nog niet besloten of het dit advies zonder meer overneemt, omdat 'de balans tussen veiligheid en privacy nauw luistert'. Er wordt momenteel nagedacht over nieuwe criteria voor het onderscheppen van data. 'We vragen ons af: wat zou je nou willen kunnen onderscheppen dat nodig is voor de veiligheid, terwijl tegelijk de privacy van mensen wordt beschermd? Van daaruit gaan we de wet inrichten', aldus de bewindsman.

Plasterk wilde er verder nog niks over zeggen, maar beloofde op tijd (maar niet voor de zomer) een brief te sturen zodat de Kamer er voorafgaande aan het wetsvoorstel over kan debatteren.

Commissie-stiekem
Met name SP, D66 en GroenLinks betoogden in het debat dat het toezicht van de Kamer op de diensten verbeterd moet worden. D66-Kamerlid Gerard Schouw liet weten zelf het initiatief te zullen nemen. Hij start een commissie die gaat kijken hoe het parlementaire toezicht op inlichtingendiensten in het buitenland is geregeld. Over vier maanden moet de commissie met een advies komen voor Nederland.

Plasterk en Hennis zien geen reden om iets te veranderen aan de huidige gang van zaken, waarin de CIVD (de commissie-stiekem, waar fractievoorzitters in vertrouwen worden bijgepraat) een belangrijke rol speelt. In de reactie op 'Dessens' schreef Plasterk al dat dit 'ongemak' met zich meebrengt. 'Er blijft altijd een ongemak, hoe we de parlementaire controle ook inrichten', zo herhaalde de minister vandaag.

quote:

Vladimir Putin must be called to account on surveillance just like Obama

quote:

So why all the criticism? I expected that some would object to my participation in an annual forum that is largely comprised of softball questions to a leader unaccustomed to being challenged. But to me, the rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media outweighed that risk. Moreover, I hoped that Putin's answer – whatever it was – would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further.

quote:

Snowden Calls BS On Putin's Answer: Says He Was Playing The Role Of Ron Wyden

quote:

Snowden, however, has said from the beginning, that this story has never been about him, and he accepts that the end result of his starting the process may not be good for himself. He's made it clear that he was willing to effectively sacrifice himself to get this debate going -- and having done it once, he apparently has decided he can do it again in another context. While I was confused by this move 24 hours ago, I'll admit it was because I never thought Snowden would go this far (and so quickly) to criticize Russia while he was there. Already, given what Snowden did in releasing the NSA documents, he's shown that he's much braver (and in many ways, patriotic to the public) than just about anyone. In now questioning --and then calling BS on Putin's answer -- he's shown that bravery was not a one time thing, but a position he intends to live by going forward.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 19-04-2014 om 01:43:35 Remember, Russia still has Snowden. When are we going to bring that piece of human garbage back home to stand trial? He caused great damage! reageer retweet

quote:

The Government is Silencing Twitter and Yahoo, and It Won't Tell Us Why

The government is using shaky legal arguments to silence major Internet companies without giving them – or the public – the opportunity to respond. In three separate recent cases, the government has sent a grand jury subpoena to Yahoo or Twitter and requested a gag order from a magistrate judge, attempting to bar these tech companies from informing the customers in question. To make matters worse, the government won't disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation.

The ACLU filed a motion last night seeking to represent the public's interest in open court proceedings when the government seeks gag orders on Internet companies. We know about the three cases only because the magistrate judge pushed back on the government, inviting Yahoo and Twitter to weigh in and ordering the government to make its legal arguments public. The government appealed those orders to a district court, where the judge ordered the appeals sealed. The ACLU is now moving to intervene in the district court for the purpose of opening these gag order proceedings to public scrutiny. In a democracy, if your government is going to gag someone from speaking, it should publicly explain why.

The federal government has an awesome array of tools and technologies in its investigative arsenal, and it often goes to great lengths to shield its tactics from outside scrutiny. Not only does this secrecy prevent people from challenging surveillance used against them, but it also means that elected officials can't openly debate the underlying policies, and communities can't discuss their government's actions.

Traditionally, gag order applications are considered ex parte – meaning with only the government's argument on the record before the court. However, Magistrate Judge Facciola noted that the government's request in this case raised controversial legal questions, and so invited Twitter and Yahoo to respond. (In one case, the government withdrew its gag order application after Judge Facciola invited Twitter's participation.) He also ordered the government file public copies of its gag order applications with limited redactions.

We are now asking to unseal the documents in these cases, and expressing support for Judge Facciola's invitation for responsive briefing from Twitter and Yahoo. As we say in our filing:

. The ACLU is troubled, as the Court should be, by the government's overuse of gag orders to prevent public and judicial scrutiny of its invasions of citizens' privacy. Transparency concerning judicial documents like the ones at issue ensures fairness, decreases bias, improves public perception of the justice system, and enhances the chances that the resulting orders will be well-justified and narrowly tailored. These interests are particularly acute where, as here, the government relies on a controversial statutory authority affecting the First Amendment rights of private individuals and where at least one court has openly questioned the applicability of that authority.

If the government is going to take extraordinary measures to silence the companies we rely on daily, then it should be prepared to explain itself.

quote:

Glenn Greenwald book to contain 'new stories from the Snowden archive'

Journalist who broke Guardian story about NSA surveillance says new documents 'will help inform the debate even further'

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian, said on Sunday a book he is writing about the case will contain “a lot of new stories from the Snowden archive”.

Speaking to Brian Stelter, the host of CNN's Reliable Sources, at the end of a week in which Guardian US and the Washington Post shared a Pulitzer prize for public service reporting, Greenwald said: “There are stories that I felt from the beginning really needed the length of a book to be able to report and to do justice to, so there’s new documents, [and] there’s new revelations in the book that I think will help inform the debate even further.”

Greenwald left the Guardian in October 2013. In February 2014 he launched a website, The Intercept, which was the first venture from First Look, a media company backed by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. His book on Snowden is due out in May.

Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, recently returned to the US for the first time since stories about the NSA based on documents provided by Snowden were published, in June last year. On Friday 11 April he collected a George Polk Award, with Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and the filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Asked about his return to the US and whether he had expected any government action, Greenwald said: “I had lawyers working for several months, including many who have connections at the highest levels of the Justice Department, trying to get some indication about what the government’s intentions were if I want to try to return. And they were given no information – they were completely stonewalled.

“The government wouldn’t say if there was a grand jury empaneled, if there was an indictment under seal, if they intended to arrest us. They wanted to keep us in this state of uncertainty.”

In August 2013 Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport, under UK terrorism laws.

Greenwald said the release of his book would likely lead to more visits back to the US.

“I think the material in the book which includes a lot of new stories from the Snowden archive has a lot of impact for the United States,” he said, “and I want to come back and talk to the people most affected by that story, which are Americans.”

On Monday, the Republican congressman Peter King used Twitter to say: “Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace.”

Asked about such opinions, which have also been expressed by figures within the Obama administration, Greenwald cited US government attitudes to previous cases involving whistleblowers, such as that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and said: “You know, I look at Peter King’s condemnation as an enormous badge of honour.”

quote:

Putin's 'Clapper' Moment: What He Said Vs. What Russian Intelligence Actually Does

quote:

Snowden's puzzling single-question Q&A with Russian president Vladimir Putin on the topic of domestic surveillance prompted many to believe this was an indication that he was, at the very least, under control of Russian intelligence, if not actually acting in concert with it. Putin took the apparent softball and lined it right down the middle, responding with a series of statements and denials that made Russia appear to be the antithesis of the US government: tightly controlled intelligence built on respect for its citizens' privacy.

As Snowden later clarified, he was pulling a Wyden -- crafting a question about the mass collection and storage of communications that would either result in transparency or an easily-disproven denial. Putin delivered the latter.

. "Mr Snowden you are a former agent, a spy, I used to work for a intelligence service, we are going to talk the same language."

He said Russia did not have a comparable programme, stating: "Our agents are controlled by law. You have to get court permission to put an individual under surveillance. We don't have mass permission, and our law makes it impossible for that kind of mass permission to exist."

Putin's response was laughable. After all, his nation's intelligence services originally put the "surveillance" in Surveillance State. In the USSR, along with the Eastern Bloc, citizens were very closely watched and routinely punished for not toeing the Party line.

Not much has changed, even if Russia is nominally a "free" country. The Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supervision (Roskomnazdor) is continually expanding its internet censorship efforts and Russian intelligence services have made public announcements about their surveillance plans, like the collection of all foreign communications during the Sochi Olympics.

While Roskomnazdor mans the front door, Russian intelligence lets itself in the back, according to information gathered by Privacy International.

quote:

Hennis herhaalt: Nederland werkt niet mee aan illegale drone-aanvallen

Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert van Defensie blijft erbij dat Nederland niet meewerkt aan illegale liquidaties met drones. Volgens haar beschikt het kabinet ook niet over aanwijzingen dat Nederlandse inlichtingen zijn gebruikt voor handelingen die in strijd zijn met het internationale recht.

Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert van Defensie blijft erbij dat Nederland niet meewerkt aan illegale liquidaties met drones. Volgens haar beschikt het kabinet ook niet over aanwijzingen dat Nederlandse inlichtingen zijn gebruikt voor handelingen die in strijd zijn met het internationale recht.

Dat stelde de minister donderdag in een reactie op uitspraken van een Amerikaanse voormalige dronepiloot, Brandon Bryant. Die heeft tegen NRC Handelsblad en het televisieprogramma Zembla gezegd dat het 'ondenkbaar' is dat Nederlandse inlichtingen over Somalië niet door Amerikanen zijn gebruikt bij aanvallen met onbemande vliegtuigjes om terroristen of anderen uit te schakelen. De oppositiepartijen SP, CDA en D66 vroegen direct om opheldering, omdat Hennis woensdagavond in een debat volgens hen nog stellig ontkende dat Nederlandse data voor zogeheten 'targeted killings' worden gebruikt.

Partnerlanden
De militaire inlichtingendienst MIVD kan tijdens militaire operaties gegevens delen met partnerlanden. Ook bij Ocean Shield, de antipiraterijmissie van de NAVO voor de kust van Somalië, heeft de MIVD inlichtingen verzameld. De uitwisseling daarvan gebeurt volgens de minister 'in het kader van de reguliere samenwerking'. Volgens haar is het daarbij niet gebruikelijk dat diensten elkaar melden of informatie ook voor andere doelen wordt gebruikt. Het is ook niet bekend op basis van welke informatie andere landen operaties uitvoeren.

De uitspraken van ex-piloot Bryant zijn geheel voor zijn rekening, aldus Hennis. Er is volgens haar geen aanleiding terug te komen op haar eerdere uitspraken over de kwestie.

'Als zou blijken dat een buitenlandse partner aantoonbaar illegale targeted killings uitvoert, waarvoor ook Nederlandse informatie wordt gebruikt, zal dit leiden tot het opnieuw beoordelen van de vraag of dergelijke inlichtingen met die partner worden gedeeld', zegt Hennis. De Tweede Kamer wil dat het kabinet voor het delen van inlichtingen expliciet als voorwaarde stelt dat deze niet gebruikt mogen worden voor illegale liquidaties.

quote:

Hillary Clinton Mocks Snowden, Displays Her Ignorance When It Comes to Whistleblowers

Hillary Clinton Attacks Edward Snowden

quote:

The University of Connecticut hosted a keynote speaking event with former United States senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on April 23. She was asked a question about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and proceeded to express puzzlement and mock him for disclosing information on top secret surveillance programs.

Much of what Clinton said deserves a rebuttal, particularly if this is going to be the talking points that Democratic Party politicians repeat throughout the next fear years. So, I have decided to go line by line through her remarks.

quote:

US Grants Itself the Right to Demand Online Data Stored Overseas

The United States has given itself some more power over the Internet with the help of a federal judge. According to a recent ruling, Internet service providers are now obliged to turn over customer emails and other digital content demanded by the US government through search warrants even when the information is stored overseas.

Basically, the United States can now bypass individual laws given by the world’s governments and any efforts to safeguard information from the prying eyes of the NSA by storing data outside the United States.

US Magistrate Judge James Frances in New York decided that Internet service providers such Google or Microsoft must turn over any customer information demanded by the government, along with any emails stored in data centers outside the United States.

The reasoning behind this decision is that it would just take too long for US agencies to coordinate efforts with foreign governments to obtain the desired data, which would burden the government substantially. “Law enforcement efforts would be seriously impeded,” the judge said.

Considering the current international debate over privacy following the huge disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s efforts to collect huge amounts of customer data from everywhere in the world.

Companies such as Google and Microsoft have data centers in many countries of the world. So far, this meant that the United States government couldn’t easily gain access to the data stored in these locations and therefore many were content with the added layer of security.

Brazil had in fact considered demanding that tech companies store citizens’ data on specially created data centers so they wouldn’t be easily accessed by the United States government following the NSA revelations.

The decision comes as Microsoft challenged a warrant because the US government shouldn’t be allowed to search the content of email stored overseas.

“A US prosecutor cannot obtain a US warrant to search someone’s home located in another country, just as another country’s prosecutor cannot obtain a court order in her home country to conduct a search in the United States. We think the same rules should apply in the online world, but the government disagrees,” said a Microsoft spokesperson, echoing the frustration felt by many in the world.

The details of the warrant, as well as which agency issued it remain undisclosed, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t even really matter. What does matter, however, is the fact that the United States is trying to use companies with headquarters on its grounds to stretch its access to data it shouldn’t have access to under normal circumstances.

quote:

UK slips down global press freedom list due to Snowden leaks response

British government's draconian response to the Guardian's reporting sees UK drop five places on Freedom House list

Britain has slipped down the global rankings for freedom of the press as a result of the government's crackdown on the Guardian over its reporting of whistleblower Edward Snowden's surveillance disclosures.

The annual index of media freedom, published on Wednesday, attributes the UK's drop to "negative developments", mainly the way the government responded last year to the Guardian with threats of legal action, the destruction of computer hard drives and the nine-hour detention of David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Freedom of Press 2014 is published by the US-based Freedom House, a non-governmental organisation established in 1941 that has been ranking countries worldwide since 1980 in relation to democracy, human rights and press freedom.

The organisation said press freedom had fallen to its lowest level in over a decade. It partly blames regressive steps in countries such as Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Turkey and Ukraine, as well as the actions taken against journalists reporting on national security issues in both the US and UK.

"We see declines in media freedom on a global level, driven by governments' efforts to control the message and punish the messenger," said Karin Karlekar, the report's project director.

Of the 197 countries and territories assessed during 2013, 63 were rated free, 68 partly free and 66 not free.

Britain has dropped from 31st place last year to 36th, ranking it alongside Malta and Slovakia.

"Significant decline took place in Turkey, which fell into the 'not free' category, as well as in Greece, Montenegro and the United Kingdom," Freedom House said.

Snowden, who worked for both the CIA and the NSA, leaked tens of thousands of secret documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post. The revelations about the scope of surveillance sparked a worldwide debate about the balance between national security and privacy.

The British government took a more draconian approach than the US, threatening legal action and sending two members of GCHQ to the Guardian's head office to watch over the destruction of the hard drives which had contained the leaked documents as well as reporters' stories. Miranda was held for nine hours at Heathrow en route from Berlin to his home in Rio de Janeiro.

Countries are ranked from zero to 100 in terms of press freedom, with the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden at the top, each on 10, and North Korea at the bottom, on 97.

Britain remains in the 'free' category but is on 23 points, down from 21. The drop would have been much sharper but was partly balanced by what Freedom House viewed as a positive development in reforming the libel law. Countries drop into the 'partly free' category if they drop to 31 points.

The British intelligence services claim the disclosures in the Guardian have created serious damage to their ability to monitor terrorists. Stephen Phipson, a director at the office for security and counter-terrorism, said at a security conference in London on Tuesday that terrorists had substantially changed their methods of communications as a result of the leaks.

"Our adversaries, the terrorists out there, now have full sight of the sorts of tools and range of techniques that are being used by government," he said. "I can tell you data shows a substantial reduction in the use of those methods of communication as a result of the Snowden leaks."

The US also dropped down the Freedom House rankings, from 18 points to 21. Freedom House cited federal government efforts to curb reporters covering national security issues.

"However, a number of negative developments stemmed from the government's response to the revelations of surveillance by the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ," the report says.

"Authorities used the Terrorism Act to detain the partner of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story; raided the offices of the Guardian newspaper and destroyed hard drives containing potentially sensitive source material; and subsequently threatened the Guardian with further action."

quote:

Germany blocks Edward Snowden from testifying in person in NSA inquiry

Officials say a personal invitation for US whistleblower to attend hearing would put 'grave strain' on US-German relations

The German government has blocked Edward Snowden from giving personal evidence in front of a parliamentary inquiry into NSA surveillance, it has emerged hours before Angela Merkel travels to Washington for a meeting with Barack Obama.

In a letter to members of a parliamentary committee obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung, government officials say a personal invitation for the US whistleblower would "run counter to the political interests of the Federal Republic", and "put a grave and permanent strain" on US-German relations.

Opposition party members in the committee from the Left and Green party had for weeks insisted that the former NSA employee was a key witness and therefore would need to appear in person, not least because of concerns that Russia otherwise could influence his testimony.

However, the ruling Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties, said that a written questionnaire would suffice. The disagreement led to the resignation of the CDU head of the committee this month.

Last June the German foreign ministry rejected Snowden's application for asylum because it was not submitted in person on German soil. If Snowden had been invited as a witness, he could have met these requirements.

Given that only the government could supply Snowden with permits for entering and staying in the country, as well as legal protection from an extradition query, it now looks highly unlikely that the whistleblower will be able to travel to Germany before his asylum in Russia expires at the end of June. Snowden's lawyer Jesselyn Radack said on Wednesday that she expected his Russian visa to be renewed.

Opposition politicians said they would seek ways to challenge the government's veto. The Green party leader, Simone Peter, accused the chancellor of cowardice.

"Merkel is displaying cowardice towards our ally America," she said. "We owe the Americans nothing in this respect. The government must at least make a serious effort to safely bring Snowden to Germany and let him give evidence here. But Merkel doesn't want that."

On Friday Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said that even though Berlin last year pressed for a bilateral "no-spy" pact with Washington, "concrete results" were not expected during Merkel's US visit.

On Tuesday German government officials confirmed that Merkel would raise the issue of NSA surveillance during her scheduled four-hour meeting with Obama, but that the situation in the Ukraine and the transatlantic trade agreement (TTIP) would dominate the agenda.

quote:

White House Calls for More Privacy Laws

quote:

The White House is calling for Congress to pass new privacy laws that would add more safeguards for Americans' data and provide more protections for emails sought in the course of a law enforcement investigation.

The recommendations come in a new White House report about government and private sector use of large amounts of data.

President Barack Obama requested the review in January, when he called for changes to some of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs that amass large amounts of data belonging to Americans and foreigners.

quote:

Duitse hacker kraakt site NSA

quote:

De Duitse hacker Matthias Ungethüm heeft de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA behoorlijk te kijk gezet. Hij hackte de website van de dienst, die flink onder vuur ligt vanwege het afluisteren van bevriende buitenlandse politici, zoals bondskanselier Angela Merkel.


Tegen DPA zei Ungethüm dat hij niet had verwacht gaten in de beveiliging van de site te kunnen vinden. 'Ik was er een nacht mee bezig', zegt de 24-jarige Duitser. Eenmaal binnen veranderde hij de slogan op de site. Van 'Codebreakers and Codemakers' maakte hij 'Durchleuchten Sie Ihre Homepage'. Dat betekent zoiets als lichten jullie eens je website door.

Nadat de Duitse zender MDR over de hack had bericht, heeft de NSA het gat gedicht, maar daarmee is de kous nog niet af. Ungethüm ontdekte ook dat het een koud kunstje was om bij een databank van de geheime dienst te komen. 'Ik kon informatie krijgen die helemaal niet voor de buitenwereld is bestemd', zegt hij. Ungethüm zegt dat hij niets uit de databanken heeft gehaald. 'Maar zulke sites zijn natuurlijk heel aantrekkelijk voor kwaadwillenden.'

De Duitser heeft de NSA via een mailtje van zijn bevindingen op de hoogte gesteld. Hij heeft er nog geen antwoord op gekregen. Bang dat de NSA hem op de korrel meent, is hij niet. 'Daar maak ik me echt geen zorgen over.'

quote:

Edward Snowden: NSA Spies Most on Americans

"We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans Wednesday that the U.S. government's surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.

"Do you think it's right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?" Snowden said. "Because that''s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

"U.S. government policy directed by the NSA ... is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications," Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.

The former NSA contractor was awarded the Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling along with Laura Poitras, one of his chief confidants. The 30-year-old fugitive remains in Russia, where he fled and earned temporary asylum following his disclosures of classified information about the NSA's bulk data-collection practices.

Poitras also beamed into the ceremony from Berlin. The documentary filmmaker is believed to be one of only two people—along with journalist Glenn Greenwald—to possess the entire cache of Snowden files.

The two collectively lambasted both the Senate and House Intelligence committees for what they said was a failure of sufficient oversight of the intelligence community. Snowden also said he believed the Judiciary committees were more likely to enact substantive surveillance reform, and noted his support of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would end much of the government's bulk collection of phone "metadata."

Snowden, who has also been nominated this year for the Nobel Peace Prize, was a natural choice for the Ridenhour award, which has honored in recent years journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas and Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who also exposed secrets kept by the spy agency. The left-leaning group is named named after Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who helped expose the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai in 1968.

quote:

Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden

People's privacy is violated without any suspicion of wrongdoing, former National Security Agency contractor claims

The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance.

“It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” he said. “It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”

Snowden made his comments in a short video that was played before a debate on the proposition that surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance, in Toronto, Canada. The former US National Security Agency contractor is living in Russia, having been granted temporary asylum there in June 2013.

The video was shown as two of the debaters – the former US National Security Administration director, General Michael Hayden, and the well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz – argued in favour of the debate statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.”

Opposing the motion were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work based on Snowden’s leaks won a Pulitzer Prize for the Guardian last month, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit.

The Snowden documents, first leaked to the Guardian last June, revealed that the US government has programs in place to spy on hundreds of millions of people’s emails, social networking posts, online chat histories, browsing histories, telephone records, telephone calls and texts – “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, in the words of one leaked document.

Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA’s own slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: “Collect it all.”

“What is state surveillance?” Greenwald asked. “If it were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there would be no debate.

“The actual system of state surveillance has almost nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by the NSA's actual words, that phrase they use over and over again: 'Collect it all.’ ”

Dershowitz and Hayden spent the rest of the 90 minutes of the debate denying that the pervasive surveillance systems described by Snowden and Greenwald even exist and that surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorism.

“Collect it all doesn't mean collect it all!” Hayden said, drawing laughter.

Greenwald sparred with Dershowitz and Hayden about whether or not the present method of metadata collection would have prevented the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2011.

While Hayden argued that intelligence analysts would have noticed the number of telephone calls from San Diego to the Middle East and caught the terrorists who were living illegally in the US, Greenwald argued that one of the primary reasons the US authorities failed to prevent the attacks was because they were taking in too much information to accurately sort through it all.

Before the debates began, 33% of the audience voted in favour of the debate statement and 46% voted against. It closed with 59% of the audience siding with Greenwald and Ohanian.

quote:

Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”

“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.

Alexander, Schmidt and other industry executives met earlier in the month, according to the email. But Alexander wanted another meeting with Schmidt and “a small group of CEOs” later that summer because the government needed Silicon Valley’s help.

“About six months ago, we began focusing on the security of mobility devices,” Alexander wrote. “A group (primarily Google, Apple and Microsoft) recently came to agreement on a set of core security principles. When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEOs of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead … Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.”

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said she believes information sharing between industry and the government is “absolutely essential” but “at the same time, there is some risk to user privacy and to user security from the way the vulnerability disclosure is done.”

The challenge facing government and industry was to enhance security without compromising privacy, Granick said. The emails between Alexander and Google executives, she said, show “how informal information sharing has been happening within this vacuum where there hasn’t been a known, transparent, concrete, established methodology for getting security information into the right hands.”

The classified briefing cited by Alexander was part of a secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), and his email provides some rare information about what the ESF entails, the identities of some participant tech firms and the threats they discussed.

Alexander explained that the deputy secretaries of the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and “18 US CEOs” launched the ESF in 2009 to “coordinate government/industry actions on important (generally classified) security issues that couldn’t be solved by individual actors alone.”

“For example, over the last 18 months, we (primarily Intel, AMD [Advanced Micro Devices], HP [Hewlett-Packard], Dell and Microsoft on the industry side) completed an effort to secure the BIOS of enterprise platforms to address a threat in that area.”

“BIOS” is an acronym for “basic input/output system,” the system software that initializes the hardware in a personal computer before the operating system starts up. NSA cyberdefense chief Debora Plunkett in December disclosed that the agency had thwarted a “BIOS plot” by a “nation-state,” identified as China, to brick U.S. computers. That plot, she said, could have destroyed the U.S. economy. “60 Minutes,” which broke the story, reported that the NSA worked with unnamed “computer manufacturers” to address the BIOS software vulnerability.

But some cybersecurity experts questioned the scenario outlined by Plunkett.

“There is probably some real event behind this, but it’s hard to tell, because we don’t have any details,” wrote Robert Graham, CEO of the penetration-testing firm Errata Security in Atlanta, on his blog in December. “It”s completely false in the message it is trying to convey. What comes out is gibberish, as any technical person can confirm.”

And by enlisting the NSA to shore up their defenses, those companies may have made themselves more vulnerable to the agency’s efforts to breach them for surveillance purposes.

“I think the public should be concerned about whether the NSA was really making its best efforts, as the emails claim, to help secure enterprise BIOS and mobile devices and not holding the best vulnerabilities close to their chest,” said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team.

He doesn’t doubt that the NSA was trying to secure enterprise BIOS, but he suggested that the agency, for its own purposes, was “looking for weaknesses in the exact same products they’re trying to secure.”

The NSA “has no business helping Google secure its facilities from the Chinese and at the same time hacking in through the back doors and tapping the fiber connections between Google base centers,” Cardozo said. “The fact that it’s the same agency doing both of those things is in obvious contradiction and ridiculous.” He recommended dividing offensive and defensive functions between two agencies.

Two weeks after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents obtained by Snowden, reported that the NSA inserted back doors into BIOS, doing exactly what Plunkett accused a nation-state of doing during her interview.

Google’s Schmidt was unable to attend to the mobility security meeting in San Jose in August 2012.

“General Keith.. so great to see you.. !” Schmidt wrote. “I’m unlikely to be in California that week so I’m sorry I can’t attend (will be on the east coast). Would love to see you another time. Thank you !” Since the Snowden disclosures, Schmidt has been critical of the NSA and said its surveillance programs may be illegal.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did attend that briefing. Foreign Policy reported a month later that Dempsey and other government officials — no mention of Alexander — were in Silicon Valley “picking the brains of leaders throughout the valley and discussing the need to quickly share information on cyber threats.” Foreign Policy noted that the Silicon Valley executives in attendance belonged to the ESF. The story did not say mobility threats and security was the top agenda item along with a classified threat briefing.

A week after the gathering, Dempsey said during a Pentagon press briefing, “I was in Silicon Valley recently, for about a week, to discuss vulnerabilities and opportunities in cyber with industry leaders … They agreed — we all agreed on the need to share threat information at network speed.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin attended previous meetings of the ESF group but because of a scheduling conflict, according to Alexander’s email, he also could not attend the Aug. 8 briefing in San Jose, and it’s unknown if someone else from Google was sent.

A few months earlier, Alexander had emailed Brin to thank him for Google’s participation in the ESF.

“I see ESF’s work as critical to the nation’s progress against the threat in cyberspace and really appreciate Vint Cerf [Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist], Eric Grosse [vice president of security engineering] and Adrian Ludwig’s [lead engineer for Android security] contributions to these efforts during the past year,” Alexander wrote in a Jan. 13, 2012, email.

“You recently received an invitation to the ESF Executive Steering Group meeting, which will be held on January 19, 2012. The meeting is an opportunity to recognize our 2012 accomplishments and set direction for the year to come. We will be discussing ESF’s goals and specific targets for 2012. We will also discuss some of the threats we see and what we are doing to mitigate those threats … Your insights, as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base, are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”

A Google representative declined to answer specific questions about Brin’s and Schmidt’s relationship with Alexander or about Google’s work with the government.

“We work really hard to protect our users from cyberattacks, and we always talk to experts — including in the U.S. government — so we stay ahead of the game,” the representative said in a statement to Al Jazeera. “It’s why Sergey attended this NSA conference.”

Brin responded to Alexander the following day even though the head of the NSA didn’t use the appropriate email address when contacting the co-chairman.

“Hi Keith, looking forward to seeing you next week. FYI, my best email address to use is [redacted],” Brin wrote. “The one your email went to — sergey.brin@google.com — I don’t really check.”

quote:

MPs: Snowden files are 'embarrassing indictment' of British spying oversight

All-party committee demands reforms to make security and intelligence services accountable in wake of disclosures

Edward Snowden's disclosures of the scale of mass surveillance are "an embarrassing indictment" of the weak nature of the oversight and legal accountability of Britain's security and intelligence agencies, MPs have concluded.

A highly critical report by the Commons home affairs select committee published on Friday calls for a radical reform of the current system of oversight of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, arguing that the current system is so ineffective it is undermining the credibility of the intelligence agencies and parliament itself.

The MPs say the current system was designed in a pre-internet age when a person's word was accepted without question. "It is designed to scrutinise the work of George Smiley, not the 21st-century reality of the security and intelligence services," said committee chairman, Keith Vaz. "The agencies are at the cutting edge of sophistication and are owed an equally refined system of democratic scrutiny. It is an embarrassing indictment of our system that some in the media felt compelled to publish leaked information to ensure that matters were heard in parliament."

The cross-party report is the first British parliamentary acknowledgement that Snowden's disclosures of the mass harvesting of personal phone and internet data need to lead to serious improvements in the oversight and accountability of the security services.

The MPs call for radical reform of the system of oversight including the election of the membership of the intelligence and security committee, including its chairman, and an end to their exclusive oversight role. Its chairman should also be a member of the largest opposition party, the MPs say, in direct criticism of its current head, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is a former Conservative foreign secretary.

Rifkind, however, said he had read the report, and had concluded: "The recommendations regarding the ISC are old hat. For several years, Mr Vaz has been trying to expand the powers of his committee so that they can take evidence from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. This is what this bit of his report is all about."

Rifkind attempted to head off some of the MPs' conclusions by announcing that the ISC would conduct its own inquiry into personal privacy and state surveillance. He also attacked Snowden and his supporters for their "insidious use of language such as mass surveillance and Orwellian" – which, he argued, "blurs, unforgivably, the distinction between a system that uses the state to protect the people, and one that uses the state to protect itself against the people".

However, a complete overhaul of the "part-time" and under-resourced system of oversight commissioners is recommended by the MPs, as is an end to some of the secrecy surrounding the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the only body that is able to investigate individual complaints against the security agencies.

A parliamentary inquiry into the principal legal framework that legitimises state communications surveillance, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, should be launched, they say, to bring it up to date with modern technology and improve its oversight safeguards.

The committee also voices strong concerns that a data protection ruling by the European court of justice last month has left the legality of the bulk collection of communications data by the phone and internet companies in serious doubt. "It is essential that the legal position be resolved clearly and promptly," say the MPs, who reveal that the home secretary, Theresa May, has ordered urgent work into the ruling's full implications for the police and security services.

The MPs say they decided to look at the oversight of the intelligence agencies following the theft of a number of National Security Agency documents by Snowden in order to publicise the mass surveillance programmes run by a number of national intelligence agencies.

Their report says Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, responded to criticism of newspapers that decided to publish Snowden's disclosures, including the head of MI6's claim that it was "a gift to terrorists", by saying that the alternative would be that the next Snowden would just "dump the stuff on the internet".

The MPs say: "One of the reasons that Edward Snowden has cited for releasing the documents is that he believes the oversight of security and intelligence agencies is not effective. It is important to note that when we asked British civil servants – the national security adviser and the head of MI5 – to give evidence to us they refused. In contrast, Mr Rusbridger came before us and provided open and transparent evidence."

The report makes clear the intelligence chiefs should drop their boycott of wider parliamentary scrutiny. "Engagement with elected representatives is not, in itself, a danger to national security and to continue to insist so is hyperbole," it says.

But a move by Labour and Lib Dem MPs to congratulate the Guardian and other media outlets for "responsibly reporting" the disclosures – saying they had opened a "wide and international public debate" – was voted down by four Tory MPs.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the report showed there was a cross-party consensus behind Labour's proposals, including reform of the commissioners system and an opposition chair of the ISC. "The government should now set out plans for oversight reforms," she said.

Nick Clegg has also outlined proposals for reforming the oversight system.

Cooper added that the select committee had added their voice to the growing number of MPs, who were calling for reform. She said that the police and security services needed to keep up with the challenges of the digital age but stronger safeguards and limits to protect personal privacy and sustain confidence in their vital were also needed: "The oversight and legal frameworks are now out of date," said the shadow home secretary.Emma Carr, of Big Brother Watch, the privacy campaign group, said: "When a senior committee of parliament says that the current oversight of our intelligence agencies is not fit for purpose, ineffective and undermines the credibility of parliament, the government cannot and must not continue to bury its head in the sand."

Last night, a statement by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) Board – consisting of assistant commissioner Cressida Dick, chief constable Sara Thornton, chief constable Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable Chris Sims, chief constable Mark Gilmore and chief constable Matt Baggott – said they were "concerned" the committee had recommended that responsibility for counter-terrorism policing should be moved to the National Crime Agency.

The statement described it as "a decision that does not appear to supported by the evidence and is based on an apparent misunderstanding of the role played by the Metropolitan Police Service."Counter-terrorism policing is not directed through a single lead force but rather has responsibility vested in nine chief constables across the UK in areas where the threat is considered to be the greatest. These chief constables act collaboratively and effectively on behalf of all forces, while at the same time maintaining close and critical links into local policing."

The statement added: "The Home Secretary has previously confirmed that she will conduct a review of counter-terrorism structures. We welcome any such review and look forward to participating fully and constructively in it. "

The Home Office said: "Our security agencies and law enforcement agencies operate within a strict legal and policy framework and under the tightest of controls and oversight mechanisms. This represents one of the strongest systems of checks and balances and democratic accountability for secret intelligence anywhere in the world."

quote:

NSA Still Has No Idea How Many Documents Snowden Took... But Insists We Can Trust Them Because They Audit Everything

quote:

In the ongoing saga over the NSA's snooping on just about everyone, the one message the NSA and its defenders keep going back to is this idea that we need to "trust" them. And they insist that the trust is fine because everything they do is carefully monitored and audited. In John Oliver's recent interview with former NSA boss, General Keith Alexander, Alexander insisted that this kind of tracking and auditing was fool-proof, claiming that it had caught the twelve people who had abused their authority to spy on specific individuals. Except that Alexander was flat out lying there. First of all, internal investigations have shown thousands of abuses, not just twelve. As for the twelve that Alexander is talking about, when we looked through the details, it became clear that only three of the twelve were caught because of audits. And many were only caught because the guilty party later confessed -- sometimes many years later.

quote:

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – "Orwellian" is the word that people generally reach for.

But "Kafkaesque" seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality", but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. "What's Kafkaesque," he once told the New York Times, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world."

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.

Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.

First – and most obviously – she determined that there would be absolutely no mention of her new state on social media. She phoned or wrote individually to friends and family members to give them the good news, and asked them not to mention it on Facebook. But an uncle in Australia sent her a congratulatory message via Facebook. "I then did," she said, "what any rational person would do. I deleted the thread of all our conversations and unfriended him." He replied plaintively: "But I didn't put it on your wall", apparently unaware that chats and other messages aren't private in the sense that he assumed.

In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.

The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.

At this point, some sobering thoughts begin to surface. The first is Melvin Kranzberg's observation that "technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral". Our technologies have values built into them, which is why Vertesi in her talk cites someone's observation that "the iPod is a tool to make us moral" (because it encourages people to buy music rather than download it illicitly) and philosophers argue about whether surveillance encourages moral – ie socially approved – behaviour (think speed cameras).

Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.

But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.

This is why the industry response to protests about tracking is so inadequate. The market will fix the problem, the companies say, because if people don't like being tracked then they can opt not to be. But the Vertesi experiment shows that if you take measures to avoid being tracked, then you increase the probability that you will be. Which is truly Kafkaesque.

quote:

Why Are You So Fearful, O Ye of Little Faith?

quote:

Greenwald’s pugilistic skills are on full display in his new book, No Place to Hide. My copy came with CONFIDENTIAL stamped on every page and a nondisclosure agreement that expires today. The prepublication insistence on secrecy seemed a little self-conscious given the topic. And in the end, it wasn’t newsy revelations that kept me reading.

quote:

Many writers would stop there, short of naming names. After all, if you want to be welcome in the home of the establishment (and most journalists wouldn’t mind being invited for the weekend at least), it’s better to attack a faceless Washington columnist than a cadre of real ones. But Greenwald skewers the media outlets and individual journalists who he believes proved his point about how “subservient to the government’s interests” the press can be. He thinks the New York Times has become a “mouthpiece for those in power.” And he singles out Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, and Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker for wrong-footedly denouncing Snowden, Greenwald, or both as narcissists, plotters, or traitors. Some (genius) members of the press justified the idea of prosecuting Greenwald along with Snowden by insisting that he wasn’t a journalist at all. Beginning with the Times, in a profile that appeared soon after the first Snowden-driven stories, reporters and columnists labeled Greenwald a “blogger,” a “polemicist,” or an “activist” to more easily dismiss him. Never mind that Greenwald was publishing article after investigative article in the Guardian based on the biggest scoop in half a century. (He’s now working on a Pierre Omidyar-funded investigative journalism startup, and he promises in GQ this month that the biggest Snowden shoe is yet to drop.)

quote:

No Such Agency

quote:

Amidst the year's surreal procession of revelations about government spying, it can be easy to lose sight of the significance of these leaks. But the NSA is an entity so obsessed with secrecy that in Washington, its initials at one time were said to stand for “No Such Agency,” and so formidable that prior to 2013, prominent elected critics spoke publicly of its excess only in cryptic warnings. The amount of transparency and criticism in the wake of the Snowden Files was previously unthinkable; it poses an existential threat to the status quo.

So when government officials label Snowden or Greenwald a terrorist or criminal, it's not idle bullshit—it's representatives of one of the planet’s most powerful forces identifying an enemy. After Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was released after almost nine hours of detention in Heathrow Airport under a terrorism statute, he said, “There's really nothing scarier than being told by these two governments that you're a terrorist. … You realize they can do anything to you. … They kidnap people, imprison them without charges or a lawyer, disappear them, put them in Guantanamo, they kill them.” Greenwald surmises offhandedly at one point that the security state is more powerful than the president, and there is no real reason to believe he's wrong.

No Place to Hide is a deeply satisfying punctuation mark on what has surely been a singularly uncomfortable year for the defense establishment. It is a damning picture of a government that operates outside of accountability, and of the war waged in the press against the people associated with the Snowden Files, against journalism, and against dissent. But ultimately, No Place to Hide will be shocking in proportion to the depth of your illusions as to the goodness of the mainstream media and the powerful interests it defends. It leaves little room for argument: What's normal in Washington is very dangerous indeed.

quote:

New Snowden Document Implies NSA May Be Putting Israel’s Security Ahead of America’s

quote:

quote:

That is a stunning statement. It implies that the signals intelligence exchange between the American and Israeli governments has been driven almost entirely by the NSA giving information to the Israelis, instead of Israel giving information to the U.S. … even though we were the ones attacked on 9/11.

Remember, the raw data in American citizens collected by the NSA is shared with Israel. As the Guardian reported in September:

. The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

***

. According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

***

. A much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government“. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

This not only raises major privacy concerns for American citizens, but it might mean that Israel is spying on the American Congress and other high-level politicians.

We have nothing against Israel, but – as American citizens – we want our intelligence agencies to put the American people and American security first.

quote:

Swedish Foreign Ministry prevents Snowden’s invitation

The next European meeting of internet activists will be held in Sweden at the end of May. The “Stockholm Internet Forum” focusses on global development as well as surveillance. However, the world’s most important digital rights activist is not welcome: Edward Snowden

Sarah Harrison showed her anger at the USA. She explained how the US secret service surveyed the world, how it collected and analyzed data. The journalist that accompanied Snowden during his journey from Hong Kong to Moscow was a speaker at Berlin’s internet conference re:publica in the beginning of May. The hall was crowded, it was Europe’s largest gathering on these topics. But Harrison did not want to dismiss her audience without a warning: “You have two months to sort your government out, folks!” Snowden’s asylum in Russia ends in August. Up to that point a new shelter for the world’s most important whistleblower has to be found.

The Federal government has repeatedly resisted accepting Snowden. The opposition in the NSA parliamentary committee demand just that: The ex NSA employee should testify in Germany, and give him an opportunity here. The governing coalition prefers leaving Snowden in Moscow – and instead questioning him via video.

Harrison, aware of this political controversy, demanded EU neighboring states to jump in: “Other countries have to support and put pressure on Germany.”

But they seem to show little interest in the fate of Edward Snowden. For example Sweden: According to information by Cicero Online, the Swedish Foreign Ministry has disinvited Snowden and some of his closest confidants to an internet conference in its own country.

When third “Stockholm Internet Forum” opens on May 26, the activists will not descend on an old postal industrial area as they did for Berlin’s re:publica in 2014. Sweden’s largest digital convention will take place in the town hall, under the red brick tower with three golden crowns. It’s there in the ballroom where the Nobel prizes are awarded each year.

The event will not be hosted by a group of bloggers, but rather by the Swedish government. The minister of development will hold the opening address, adding meaning to the conference’s motto “Internet Freedom for Global Development”.

Sweden, which is regularly awarded top rankings for freedom, human rights and social welfare, wants to prove its democratic virtue again during this event. In an online podcast, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has already sketched out the scope of topics: The Forum will not only discuss the opportunities in the digital world, but also the question as to how state control and censorship can be countered. The first point on the agenda the following morning is “the debate regarding surveillance and the right to privacy in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden”.

There’s a flipside: Neither the former NSA employee Edward Snowden nor any of his confidantes will be at the conference in Stockholm. The Swedish government has taken care of that.

In addition to the ministries of foreign affairs and development, a third partner has helped organize and finance the forum: the internet organization .SE. They administer Sweden’s top level domains and were responsible for selecting suitable experts worldwide for the Stockholm Internet Forum. The SIF only accepts hand-picked speakers and guests. This year about 500 participants are expected.

So how did this come about?

.SE – the only non-governmental organization among the hosts – made a list of possible candidates. The most important name on it: Edward Snowden. Further names included journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists that informed the world about the NSA’s activities, Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger as well as hacker Jacob Appelbaum, who found the mobile phone number of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Snowden’s database. The list of candidates was sent to the Swedish Foreign Ministry for approval.

According to information from Cicero Online, that’s where Snowden’s name was marked in red. In official use, this apparently means: “do not invite”. The ministry had no comment on this when asked. Instead, it stated that the focus of the conference was to “represent a wide array of backgrounds, cultures and opinions”. The main ambition was to invite equal numbers of women and men and that at least half of the participants came from developing countries. “We would also like to point out that those who haven’t been invited are able to follow the entire conference online and give opinions and raise questions during the discussions”, the ministry added.

Indeed, Edward Snowden would not have been able to escape his Russian asylum in order to go to Stockholm. However, his invitation would have been a symbol. With a little imagination the hosts could have included him anyway. The German NSA parliamentary committee is currently discussing a video interrogation. Snowden has already answered questions posed by the European Council via a live broadcast; that was also the way he chose to spoke to participants of a tech festival in Texas.

Sweden could also have allowed Snowden’s confidantes to speak for him. That’s what other hosts of large computer and internet conferences have recently done. The Net Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil, chose a live broadcast with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, hacker Jacop Appelbaum was there personally. The Chaos Communication Congress had Glenn Greenwald speaking via video. Appelbaum and Harrison spoke there too, as well as at Berlin’s re:publica.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry only authorized one name among the Snowden confidantes: Laura Poitras. The documentary filmmaker has recently refrained from loud political demands. She eventually turned down the invitation. “Of course I would boycott any conference with a blacklist”, she said to Cicero Online.

The objection against Appelbaum was supposedly recorded as follows: “Has been discussed, and has to be discussed further.”

Appelbaum himself is outraged. “It is unacceptable that I am the target of retribution for attempting to discuss the issues of mass surveillance and the chilling effect it has on society.”

The Swedish Foreign Ministry replied to Cicero’s inquiries saying it had wanted to select participants that they believed would benefit from coming to the convention and who hadn’t been there before. “Only a fraction of the participants have been invited to all three SIFs [Stockholm Internet Forums, the editor]. Mr. Appelbaum was invited to both previous SIFs.”

Apparently the Swedish government’s selection of participants also upset the non-governmental host. The organization .SE, which had helped with the first two conferences, has reduced its involvement this year. The development ministry confirmed this. A .SE spokeswoman attested that “this year we are offering our support as a sponsor but we are not involved in the SIF program”.

Stockholm’s Internet Freedom convention will send out a contradictory message to the world: On the one hand, it wants to talk about surveillance and data protection issues. On the other hand, it locks out those people who could best speak about these topics. “Is this what they mean by internet freedom?” Jacob Appelbaum wonders. “Or by freedom in general?

Perhaps Sweden does not want to spoil its chances with the powerful American ally. After all, the EU state shares its destiny with the USA. Just as the fox lurks in front of the rabbit cave, both countries await the extradition of their whistleblower: Assange here, Snowden there. This could explain why Sweden refrains from inviting Snowden.

quote:

"Collect It All": Glenn Greenwald on NSA Bugging Tech Hardware, Economic Espionage & Spying on U.N.

quote:

Anonymous hacks security firm in revenge for identification claims

quote:

The head of a security company who boasted that he could identify the leaders of hacktivist collective Anonymous has found his Twitter account, emails and company website hacked by members of the group.

quote:

HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks' Donors

quote:

Last week the loose hacker group Anonymous released a set of more than 40,000 emails from HBGary Federal, the security firm whose servers it hacked earlier this month. One of the files in those emails was a PowerPoint presentation that described “the WikiLeaks Threat,” created by a group of three security firms that suggested Nixonesque tactics for sabotaging the site on behalf of Bank of America, including spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against the site, and pressuring journalists.

quote:

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

quote:

Glenn Greenwald On Dean Baquet: A 'Disturbing History' Of Journalism 'Subservient' To National Security State

quote:

Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Friday to discuss Edward Snowden, the latest news on NSA spying and his recent book "No Place to Hide." The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist weighed in on the turmoil at the New York Times this week and had some choice words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet, who with the LA Times in 2006, was accused of killing a story about collaboration between AT&T and the NSA.

HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski asked Greenwald what kind of leader Baquet will be for the New York Times. "I think of all the executive editors of the New York Times," Greenwald began, "at least in recent history, or I'll say in the last 10 years since I’ve paying extremely close attention to how the New York Times functions, Jill Abramson was probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media. I don’t know if she’s always been that way but in her stewardship of the paper as editor in chief I think that was definitely the case."

Greenwald did not have kind words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet. He said, "By contrast, her successor Dean Baquet does have a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American National security state, and if his past record and his past actions and statements are anything to go by, I think it signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it's supposed to exercise oversight over."

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH GLENN GREENWALD BELOW:

quote:

Snowden’s likely involvement with CryptoParty

quote:

It appears likely that Edward Snowden was involved with CryptoParty. Cryptome has uncovered a public key for cincinnatus@lavabit.com, which is the same alias he used to contact Glenn Greenwald — and it’s associated with the organizing of an event in Honolulu, Hawaii in December 2012, where the now-famous NSA whistleblower was then living. Here’s the original page via Wayback Machine. Although I’m awaiting official confirmation from his lawyers, the odds are very high that it was him. CryptoParty is a global movement that was spawned nearly two years ago from an idea by Asher Wolf, an Australian activist.

quote:

There’s also the video that Snowden created which I discovered in July last year, and has since been confirmed by Greenwald; a tutorial on GPG encryption for journalists, which was credited to “Anonymous 2013″ and posted by the Vimeo user anon108. Although setting up PGP proved too difficult for Greenwald, behind the voice-changing effect is someone who sounds extremely knowledgable about the mechanisms of digital security. Combined with the EFF and Tor Project stickers pictured on his laptop, the Anonymous and CryptoParty connections show a man attuned to the struggle for our rights on the internet; one with his eye on those communities.

quote:

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as "about" surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance." In other words, the NSA doesn't just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone's international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

The Snowden leaks also pushed the Justice Department to admit – contrary to what it told the court – that the government hadn't been notifying any defendants they were being charged based on NSA surveillance, making it actually impossible for anyone to prove they had standing to challenge the Fisa Amendments Act as unconstitutional.

It's unclear how much Solicitor General Donald Verrilli knew when he told the government's lies – twice – to the justices of the supreme court. Reports suggest that he was livid when he found out that his national security staff at the Justice Department misled him about whether they were notifying defendants in criminal trials of surveillance. And we don't know if he knew about the "about" surveillance that might well have given the ACLU standing in the case. But we do know other Justice Department officials knew about both things, and they have let both lies stand without correcting the record.

Lawyers before the supreme court are under an ethical obligation to correct the record if they make false statements to the Court – even if they are unintentional – yet the Justice Department has so far refused. As ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer explained, the Justice Department has corrected the record in other cases where it was much less clear-cut whether it had misled the court.

The government's response, instead, has been to explain why it doesn't think these statements are lies. In a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall that only surfaced this week, the government made the incredible argument that the "about" surveillance was classified at the time of the case, so it was under no obligation to tell the supreme court about it. And the Justice Department completely sidestepped the question of whether it lied about notifying defendants, basically by saying that it started to do so after the case, and so this was somehow no longer an issue.

But there's another reason the government wanted any challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act dismissed without being forced to argue that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment: it has an extremely controversial view about your (lack of) privacy rights, and probably doesn't want anyone to know. As Jaffer wrote here at the Guardian earlier this week, the government has since been forced to defend the Fisa Amendments Act, and it's pretty shocking how they've done it. Here's what the government said in a recent legal brief:

. The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated, when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States.

This is an incredibly radical view of the right to privacy. We already know the government does not think you have any right to privacy when it comes who you talk to, or when, or for how long, or where you are while you're talking. Now the government has said, in court, that you don't have any right to the content of private conversations with anyone who is located outside the United States – or to any domestic communication remaining private if it is, at some point, transmitted overseas, which happens often. Jaffer explained the consequences of this view:

. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

Intelligence director James Clapper's infamous lie to Congress – in which he claimed just months before Snowden's leaks that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans – will certainly follow him for the rest of his career even if it never leads to his prosecution. But while Clapper almost certainly broke the law, the senate committee members in front of whom he spoke knew the truth regardless.

The Justice Department, on the other hand, convinced the supreme court to dismiss a case that could have dramatically curtailed the NSA's most egregious abuses of power based on false statements. And now all of us are forced to live with the consequences of that.

twitter:

ggreenwald twitterde op zondag 18-05-2014 om 14:29:36 I'll be in Amsterdam on Tuesday night, 8 pm, at the John Adams Institute discussing "No Place to Hide" - tickets: http://t.co/tgO2BYZHE9 reageer retweet

quote:

Cisco chief urges Obama to curb NSA surveillance activity

(Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc's chief executive officer has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to curtail government surveillance after evidence circulated showing the National Security Agency had intercepted Cisco equipment, a company spokesman said on Sunday.

In a letter dated May 15, John Chambers, chief executive officer and chairman of the networking equipment giant, warned of an erosion of confidence in the U.S. technology industry and called for new "standards of conduct" in how the NSA conducts its surveillance.

"We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security," Chambers said in the letter.

The letter follows the circulation of pictures on the Internet showing NSA staff opening boxes of Cisco gear, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. "There have been allegations that the NSA has intercepted IT equipment in transit from manufacturers to customers to help monitor and gain information on surveillance targets," the paper wrote.

The allegations stem from early reporting from Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has written about a number of NSA documents that were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the letter, Chambers states that "if these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to deliver products globally."

In a separate blog post on Cisco's site dated May 13, the company's general counsel, Mark Chandler, wrote that "...we ought to be able to count on the government to ... not interfere with the lawful delivery of our products in the form in which we have manufactured them."

quote:

Op maandag 19 mei 2014 05:05 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Goed dat je blijft doorposten papierversnipperaar!

quote:

The Connection Between The Copyright Industry And The NSA

quote:

As I described in a previous column, the copyright monopoly cannot be enforced without mass surveillance. There is no way to tell a private conversation in a digital environment from a monopolized audio file being transferred, not without actually looking at what’s being transferred. At that point, the secrecy of correspondence has been broken and mass surveillance introduced.

The copyright industry has been continuously and relentlessly pushing for more mass surveillance, including surveillance of citizens who aren’t under any suspicion (“mass surveillance”) for this reason. They defended the now-illegal Data Retention Directive, which logs everybody’s communications and location all the time (specifically including yours), as well as similar initiatives.

Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.

This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.

This has a direct connection to free speech as such.

In Germany, the effect of this logging and violation of people’s privacy has been studied extensively. According to a study conducted by polling institute Forsa before the data retention was in place, over half of German citizens would refrain from placing communications that could be used against them in the future – drug helplines, psychologists, even marriage counseling. A significant portion of Germans had already refrained from taking such contacts for that reason.

twitter:

ForumNetwork twitterde op maandag 19-05-2014 om 15:41:49 The conversation btwn @ggreenwald and Noam Chomsky on Edward Snowden & the NSA is up: http://t.co/Fo397erv0t reageer retweet

quote:

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas

quote:

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.

The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.

“The Bahamas is a stable democracy that shares democratic principles, personal freedoms, and rule of law with the United States,” the State Department concluded in a crime and safety report published last year. “There is little to no threat facing Americans from domestic (Bahamian) terrorism, war, or civil unrest.”

quote:

The NSA documents dont specify who is providing access in the Bahamas. But they do describe SOMALGET as an umbrella term for systems provided by a private firm, which is described elsewhere in the documents as a MYSTIC access provider. (The documents dont name the firm, but rather refer to a cover name that The Intercept has agreed not to publish in response to a specific, credible concern that doing so could lead to violence.)

quote:

Op maandag 19 mei 2014 19:55 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

[..]

[..]

Het artikel gaat verder.

twitter:

wikileaks twitterde op dinsdag 20-05-2014 om 00:35:47 @GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours. reageer retweet

quote:

Secrets, lies and Snowden's email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit

For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don't have the right to much privacy in the first place

My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network.

My company, Lavabit, provided email services to 410,000 people – including Edward Snowden, according to news reports – and thrived by offering features specifically designed to protect the privacy and security of its customers. I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the US government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet.

But that wasn't enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company's private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company's encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my "noncompliance".)

Bothered by what the agents were saying, I informed them that I would first need to read the order they had just delivered – and then consult with an attorney. The feds seemed surprised by my hesitation.

What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy.

In the first two weeks, I was served legal papers a total of seven times and was in contact with the FBI every other day. (This was the period a prosecutor would later characterize as my "period of silence".) It took a week for me to identify an attorney who could adequately represent me, given the complex technological and legal issues involved – and we were in contact for less than a day when agents served me with a summons ordering me to appear in a Virginia courtroom, over 1,000 miles from my home. Two days later, I was served the first subpoena for the encryption keys.

With such short notice, my first attorney was unable to appear alongside me in court. Because the whole case was under seal, I couldn't even admit to anyone who wasn't an attorney that I needed a lawyer, let alone why. In the days before my appearance, I would spend hours repeating the facts of the case to a dozen attorneys, as I sought someone else that was qualified to represent me. I also discovered that as a third party in a federal criminal indictment, I had no right to counsel. After all, only my property was in jeopardy – not my liberty. Finally, I was forced to choose between appearing alone or facing a bench warrant for my arrest.

In Virginia, the government replaced its encryption key subpoena with a search warrant and a new court date. I retained a small, local law firm before I went back to my home state, which was then forced to assemble a legal strategy and file briefs in just a few short days. The court barred them from consulting outside experts about either the statutes or the technology involved in the case. The court didn't even deliver transcripts of my first appearance to my own lawyers for two months, and forced them to proceed without access to the information they needed.

Then, a federal judge entered an order of contempt against me – without even so much as a hearing.

But the judge created a loophole: without a hearing, I was never given the opportunity to object, let alone make any any substantive defense, to the contempt change. Without any objection (because I wasn't allowed a hearing), the appellate court waived consideration of the substantive questions my case raised – and upheld the contempt charge, on the grounds that I hadn't disputed it in court. Since the US supreme court traditionally declines to review decided on wholly procedural grounds, I will be permanently denied justice.

In the meantime, I had a hard decision to make. I had not devoted 10 years of my life to building Lavabit, only to become complicit in a plan which I felt would have involved the wholesale violation of my customers' right to privacy. Thus with no alternative, the decision was obvious: I had to shut down my company.

The largest technological question we raised in our appeal (which the courts refused to consider) was what constitutes a "search", i.e., whether law enforcement can demand the encryption keys of a business and use those keys to inspect the private communications of every customer, even when the court has only authorized them to access information belonging to specific targets.

The problem here is technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The government argued that, since the "inspection" of the data was to be carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.

More importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided – encryption – is designed for users' privacy.

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people's defense against an abuse of the state's power.

quote:

Restrictions placed on NSA's data store after intense talks over surveillance bill

USA Freedom Act heads to the House with government required to 'promptly' purge phone records that do not contain 'foreign intelligence information'

Last-minute negotiations over the details of a congressional surveillance bill have resulted in restrictions around the National Security Agency’s massive repository of analysed call data.

Intense closed-door talks between lawmakers and Obama administration and intelligence officials that wrapped up Tuesday afternoon have finalised the language of the USA Freedom Act. The bill is expected to receive a vote on the House floor on Thursday.

The latest twist for the bill is an expanded provision that would require the government to “promptly” purge phone records that do not contain “foreign intelligence information,” effectively pruning irrelevant records from the NSA’s trees of analyzed phone data.

But several other changes to the bill, which civil libertarians already considered watered down after a series of legislative compromises, have cost it critical support from privacy groups ahead of Thursday’s vote.

Under the new provision, the government would have to “adopt minimisation procedures that require the prompt destruction of all call detail records” turned over by the telecoms firms “that the government determines are not foreign intelligence information.”

The government would ultimately have to “destroy all call detail records produced under the order as prescribed by such procedures”.

A previous version of that language tasked the government merely with destroying call records “not later than five years after the production of such records, except for records that are relevant to an authorised investigation.”

While several privacy protections within the USA Freedom Act have been diluted in recent weeks, several people familiar with the negotiations said they thought the new provision better protects privacy than the old one, as it represents the first known restriction on the NSA’s “corporate store” of analysed data.

The “corporate store” is the digital warehouse where the NSA stores all the US call records it has amassed when searching for connections to the target phone numbers it believes may be tied to specific terrorist groups. Until this year, data up to three “hops” from such a phone number was fit for inclusion in the store.

Once data is placed in the store, NSA analysts face virtually no restrictions on their ability to search through it.

“NSA may apply the full range of Sigint [signals intelligence] analytic tradecraft” to phone records placed in the store, according to a footnote in a Fisa court order declassified by the government last year. Searches through data placed in the corporate store can occur “without the requirement” that reasonable articulable suspicion of connection to wrongdoing exist; nor is the NSA required to keep an “auditable record” of searches performed within the corporate store.

The amount of data contained within the corporate store is voluminous. A January report from the US government’s civil liberties watchdog estimated that the 300 searches of Americans’ phone data the NSA said it performed in 2012 would yield “records involving over 120m phone numbers” in that year alone.

The watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, recommended that the NSA have to possess the same “reasonable articulable suspicion” to search data in the corporate store as it must to analyse phone records once collected.

Until now, the USA Freedom Act, increasingly the consensus bill for surveillance reforms, left the “corporate store” alone.

Under the bill, the government would no longer collect call records in bulk. But it would be permitted to acquire Americans’ phone data when a judge certifies that there is reasonable articulable suspicion of a connection to terrorism or foreign espionage, and it can collect phone records from the contacts of the contacts – two “hops” – of the original person or phone account the government targets.

The new language would apparently restrict the NSA from retaining data on the contacts of the targets not believed to have a connection to foreign intelligence information – what surveillance observers sometimes refer to as the “pizza guy” problem, where the NSA amasses data on random and irrelevant people or accounts connected to targets.

But the language does not define key terms, such as how long a record can be withheld before its “prompt” destruction. Nor does it specify how the government will “determine” a call record is unrelated to foreign intelligence information if, as can occur with the corporate store today, NSA’s automated programs sift through the data.

"Placing meaningful limits on the NSA's use of this vast pool of data is crucial to protecting Americans' privacy – and to any reform effort. Congress should not leave the NSA with a wide open backdoor to many of Americans' call records via the corporate store,” said Patrick Toomey, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has focused on the corporate store.

A deal on the corporate store restriction was easier to reach than over a different critical definition contained within the USA Freedom Act – one that defines the source of the records the government will be able to collect.

That category is a “specific selection term.” That is the root data from which the government must suspect of connection to terrorism or espionage to launch the collection of call records. Without possessing that term, the government cannot collect obtain the call records at issue.

The version of the USA Freedom Act that cleared House committees earlier this month defined it simply as a term that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account.”

But the version that will head to the floor, at the Obama administration’s insistence, has broadened the definition, opening the door to broader data collection than the bill’s architect’s initially envisioned.

The bill now defines a “specific selection term” as “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, or device, used by the government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought.”

Sources familiar with the process said the government had pushed for an even broader definition.

Privacy groups had already watched with dismay as their favored bill gradually grew less restrictive on the NSA and its transparency requirements about what recipients of surveillance orders can disclose to their customers became weaker.

But after the finalized bill was released on Tuesday, the USA Freedom Act lost the support of the Open Technology Institute, which had strenuously advocated in its favor since its October introduction in the House.

“We cannot in good conscience support this weakened version of the bill, where key reforms – especially those intended to end bulk collection and increase transparency – have been substantially watered down,” policy director Kevin Bankston said in a statement.

“We're gravely disappointed that rather than respecting the wishes of the unanimous Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the House leadership and the Obama Administration have chosen to disrupt the hard-fought compromise that so many of us were willing to support just two weeks ago.”

Amie Stepanovich, a lawyer with the digital-rights group Access, which also revoked its support for the bill, said: "It’s greatly disappointing to witness House leaders succumb to the pressure applied by the Obama administration and others, turning its back on the compromise version of USA Freedom that so many supported just two weeks ago."

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute tweeted: "So, seems like nobody’s happy with New Coke USA FREEDOM, but resigned to the alternative being [the House intelligence committee's] (even worse) bill."

quote:

What does GCHQ know about our devices that we don't?

quote:

While the initial disclosures by Edward Snowden revealed how US authorities are conducting mass surveillance on the world's communications, further reporting by the Guardian newspaper uncovered that UK intelligence services were just as involved in this global spying apparatus. Faced with the prospect of further public scrutiny and accountability, the UK Government gave the Guardian newspaper an ultimatum: hand over the classified documents or destroy them.

The Guardian decided that having the documents destroyed was the best option. By getting rid of only the documents stored on computers in the UK, it would allow Guardian journalists to continue their work from other locations while acquiescing to the Government's demand. However, rather than trust that the Guardian would destroy the information on their computers to the Government's satisfaction, GCHQ sent two representatives to supervise the operation. Typically, reliable destruction of such hardware in the circumstances would be to shred or melt all electronic components using a much larger version of the common paper shredder and leaving only the dust of the original devices. Indeed, some devices such as external USB sticks were turned to dust.

Alternatively, it might have been expected that GCHQ would solely target the hard drives of the devices in question. The hard drives, after all, are one of the few components of a computer where user data is supposed to be retained after the power to the device is removed.

Surprisingly, however, GCHQ were not just interested in hard drives nor did they destroy whole devices. An examination of the targeted hardware by Privacy International, with cooperation from the Guardian, has found the whole episode to be more troubling and puzzling than previously believed. 1

During our invesitgation, we were surprised to learn that a few very specific components on devices, such as the keyboard, trackpad and monitor, were targeted along with apparently trivial chips on the main boards of laptops and desktops. Initial consultation with members of the technology community supported our identification of the components and that the actions of GCHQ were worth analyzing further.

In light of GCHQ's actions, we have asked hardware manufacturers to explain what these elements actually do: what information can be stored on a device, how much information it can retain, and for how long.

quote:

Eyes Everywhere

quote:

Greenwald was the go-between for Edward Snowden and some of the newspapers that reported on Snowdens collection of classified documents exposing huge eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, among other scandals. His story is full of journalistic derring-do, mostly set in exotic Hong Kong. Its a great yarn, which might be more entertaining if Greenwald himself didnt come across as so unpleasant. Maybe hes charming and generous in real life. But in No Place to Hide, Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is straightforward, and if you dont agree with him, youre part of something he calls the authorities, who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.

quote:

The trouble is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people. Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly but are you? And even if you do trust Greenwalds judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making whatever it turns out to be should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you cant square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

quote:

A Response to Michael Kinsley

quote:

Kinsley has actually done the book a great favor by providing a vivid example of so many of its central claims. For instance, I describe in the book the process whereby the government and its media defenders reflexively demonize the personality of anyone who brings unwanted disclosure so as to distract from and discredit the substance revelations; Kinsley dutifully tells Times readers that I “come across as so unpleasant” and that I’m a “self-righteous sourpuss” (yes, he actually wrote that). I also describe in the book how jingoistic media courtiers attack anyone who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture; Kinsley spends much of his review deriding the notion that there could possibly be anything anti-democratic or oppressive about the United States of America.

quote:

So lets recap: The New York Times chose someone to review my book about the Snowden leaks who has a record of suggesting that journalists may be committing crimes when publishing information against the governments wishes. That journalist then proceeded to strongly suggest that my prosecution could be warranted. Other prominent journalists including the one who hosts Meet the Pressthen heralded that review without noting the slightest objection to Kinsleys argument.

Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifiully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me? What better evidence can that argument find than multiple influential American journalists standing up and cheering while a fellow journalist is given space in The New York Times to argue that those who publish information against the governments wishes are not only acting immorally but criminally?

quote:

The empire strikes back: How Brandeis foreshadowed Snowden and Greenwald

So-called liberals attack the whistle-blower duo -- and a brilliant Supreme Court justice saw it all coming

quote:

In the famous wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote one of the most influential dissenting opinions in the history of American jurisprudence. Those who are currently engaged in what might be called the Establishment counterattack against Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, including the eminent liberal journalists Michael Kinsley and George Packer, might benefit from giving it a close reading and a good, long think.

Brandeis’ understanding of the problems posed by a government that could spy on its own citizens without any practical limits was so far-sighted as to seem uncanny. (We’ll get to that.) But it was his conclusion that produced a flight of memorable rhetoric from one of the most eloquent stylists ever to sit on the federal bench. Government and its officers, Brandeis argued, must be held to the same rules and laws that command individual citizens. Once you start making special rules for the rulers and their police – for instance, the near-total impunity and thick scrim of secrecy behind which government espionage has operated for more than 60 years – you undermine the rule of law and the principles of democracy.

“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Brandeis concluded. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”

quote:

Any systematic opposition to the deeds of the state, and any attempt to interrogate its mysteries beyond the boundaries of the official narrative, is likely to be depicted as treasonous, as tinfoil-hat material or even as terrorism. Doing a series of network news interviews after McVeighs execution, Vidal describes how the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. First, he is asked whether he is claiming there was a conspiracy. A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer.

It would be obscene to suggest any parallel between Timothy McVeigh and Edward Snowden, but I dont have to. Defenders of the official narrative have already drawn the comparison, explicitly or otherwise. Both are loners with no history, manifestations of a libertarian loony-tunes personality disorder that of course cannot be explained and has no roots in anything the United States government ever did. (Packer devotes a lot of virtual ink to convincing his presumed liberal readership that Snowden is a fringe right-winger.) No doubt McVeigh is understood as more extreme, but he is also less dangerous because he is more easily dismissed as a child-killing lunatic, and in any case is not available for interviews with Brian Williams.

quote:

Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren't Hacked

quote:

In early January, Micah Lee worried journalist Glenn Greenwald's computer would get hacked, perhaps by the NSA, perhaps by foreign spies.

Greenwald was a target, and he was vulnerable. He was among the first to receive millions of top secret NSA documents from former contractor Edward Snowden, a scoop that eventually helped win the most recent Pulitzer prize.

Though Greenwald took precautions to handle the NSA documents securely, his computer could still be hacked.

"Glenn isn't a security person and he's not a huge computer nerd,"

"Glenn isn't a security person and he's not a huge computer nerd," Lee tells Mashable. "He is basically a normal computer user, and overall, normal computer users are vulnerable."

Lee, 28, is the technologist hired in November to make sure Greenwald and fellow First Look Media employees use state-of-the-art security measures when handling the NSA documents, or when exchanging emails and online chats with sensitive information. First Look was born in October 2013, after eBay founder Pierre Omydiar pledged to bankroll a new media website led by Greenwald, with documentary journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

Essentially, Lee is First Look's digital bodyguard, or as Greenwald puts it, "the mastermind" behind its security operations.

Lee’s position is rare in the media world. But in the age of secret-spilling and the government clampdown on reporters' sources, news organizations are aiming to strengthen their digital savvy with hires like him — that is, if they want to resist this new media reality.

"Every news organization should have a Micah Lee on their staff," Trevor Timm, executive director and cofounder of Freedom of the Press Foundation, tells Mashable.

quote:

Snowden: ik ben meer dan een simpele hacker, ik was een getrainde spion

quote:

Edward Snowden is 'meer dan alleen een hacker of systeembeheerder', zoals de Amerikaanse regering en de media hem hebben afgeschilderd. Hij werkte undercover voor de CIA en de National Security Agency (NSA). Dat zei Snowden zelf in een interview met NBC Nightly News, dat gisteravond werd uitgezonden.

quote:

Snowden ging verder: 'Ik ben een technisch specialist. Ik ben een technisch expert. Ik ontwikkelde systemen voor de Verenigde Staten. Dat heb ik op alle niveaus gedaan: vanaf het begin tot het einde.'

De klokkenluider zei dat hij buiten de VS voor zowel de CIA als de NSA lesgaf bij de 'Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy', 'waar ik bronnen en methoden ontwikkelde voor de veiligheid van onze informatie en mensen in de meest vijandige en gevaarlijke gebieden over de hele wereld', aldus Snowden. 'Dus als critici zeggen dat ik een simpele systeembeheerder ben en dat ik niet weet waar ik het over heb, zou ik zeggen dat dat een beetje misleidend is.'

quote:

Glenn Greenwald came in and trashed the place. And it's not his place ...

quote:

Many of these members of the press aren't thinking, certainly not in the way Hannah Arendt spoke of it. Their hostility is aimed at the people who "misbehave" by breaking the social rules rather than the government that carried on a clandestine spy operation that is clearly running amock and is working overtime to restrict the very work they are supposedly charged with doing. And appallingly, in many cases, it's simply because of what they see as a threat to their social hierarchy and their own clubby little rules of behavior.

quote:

Top NSA officials struggled over surge in Foia requests, emails reveal

• Snowden leaks prompted thousands of open record requests
• Top agency officials discussed how to fend off Foia inquiries

National Security Agency officials wrestled for weeks with how to respond to an unprecedented surge in open records requests from members of the public in the wake of the first mass surveillance revelations from Edward Snowden almost a year ago.

Newly released NSA emails, obtained by the Guardian under a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request filed last November, reveal that top officials discussed how to fend off journalists, advocacy groups and individuals who flooded the agency with more than 1,000 requests between 5 June and 25 June last year for classified data related to the former contractor’s disclosures.

The Guardian published the first Snowden story, revealing a secret court order that allowed the NSA the phone records of millions of US citizens, on 5 June. The following day, details of the Prism program were revealed by the Guardian and the Washington Post.

The NSA is one of the few US government agencies virtually exempt from open records laws because its activities are considered properly classified under a presidential executive order and many Foia exemptions.

But since details about the NSA’s vast surveillance activities were no longer a secret thanks to Snowden's disclosures, the agency didn’t know how to respond to requesters.

Internal discussions took place between a newly formed media leaks taskforce, NSA’s public affairs office, the office of general counsel, the policy and records division and the Foia office.

Pamela Phillips, the NSA’s Foia chief, suggested in one email that the agency could “buy more time for processing” if “a paper or sheet of unclassified facts” about the metadata and the data mining program, Prism, was released to requesters.

“Having a paper or sheet of unclassified facts that could be provided to the public may make it easier to respond, because we could provide that with initial responses, and then either indicate that all other details are still classified (or have to be reviewed),” Phillips wrote on 11 June 2013. “It may buy more time for processing if requesters get something up front.”

The NSA emails specifically deal with the agency’s response to post-Snowden document requests. There are some discussions between NSA officials about transparency, particularly president Barack Obama’s “direction regarding transparency in government”.

But, ironically, the internal communications the agency turned over to the Guardian are heavily redacted and are marked “top secret”or “secret”. Phillips said in a letter included with the documents that it would “cause exceptionally grave damage to national security” if the information were disclosed.

Still, the emails leave no doubt that Snowden prompted thousands to use open records laws to push the NSA to shine even more light on the controversial surveillance programs he exposed, an achievement that the agency continues to confront to this day.

“We have received over 5,200 requests since 6 June 2013," Phillips said in a recent interview. "We received just over 800 requests for the same period last year. For the one-year period from June 2012 through May 2013, we received an average of 83 requests per month. Since June 2013, we’ve received an average of 521 requests per month.”

In a 25 June 2013 email, David Sherman, the associate director for policy and records, advised the media leaks task force and nearly a dozen NSA officials whose names are redacted that the “the overwhelming majority” of records requests the NSA had received were “from individuals seeking records the NSA allegedly holds on them”.

He said there was “at least one website facilitating individual requests accounting for half the total. By way of example [redacted].”

The NSA refused to entertain requests from private citizens about whether the agency stored their metadata. The emails provide a rare look inside the development of a “neither confirm nor deny” policy, known as a “Glomar response”, and the back and forth discussions that took place at the highest levels of the agency.

“[Redacted] has pieced together some language on the recent press coverage that would allow us to make a reasonable response to individuals who are seeking information on themselves (either broadly stated as ‘all records on me,’ or more narrowly focused to information regarding their phone number, metadata, or phone calls,” Phillips wrote on 14 June to Sherman and other NSA officials.

“It still ends up being a Glomar response, but more focused on the programs at hand. It is consistent with how we’ve always treated requests from US persons for NSA information (other than Privacy Act information).”

On 17 June, Phillips sent an email asking: “What do we need to do to have this officially blessed so that I can provide this to my folks to start responding to the requests?”

Two days later, the NSA sent out about 300 of the Glomar letters to requesters that highlighted the legality of the surveillance programs at issue.

“Thanks for your reviews and assistance so that we can begin to work down the volume of requests we’ve received over the past week and a half,” Phillips wrote in an email sent to a dozen NSA officials, a majority of whose names are redacted.

Sherman sent an email to Phillips and several other officials congratulating her office and the office of general counsel for “doing an absolutely super job under difficult and rapidly changing conditions”.

“It’s confirming every day why NSA’s Foia program is called out as best-in-class,” Sherman added in the email with the subject line, 'Media Leaks: Strategic Guidance Needed on Engaging Foia Requesters.' “I’m the new guy and the amateur at all this, but for what it is worth I am extraordinarily proud and glad that I was offered the opportunity to be here with you at this time and see what is exceptional public service, in the true sense of the words, in action.”

Phillips shared the email with her staff the next day.

“Thought you’d like to see Dave’s vote of confidence for the entire Foia/PA staff! Dave and I and OGC met with [head of media leaks task force] Rick Ledgett yesterday afternoon to go over the Glomar process, and he was totally comfortable with it after the meeting, as well as everything else the Foia Office is doing,” she wrote.

Sherman advised the Foia office staff as well as the media leaks task force that journalists were a different breed, however, and the agency would need to come up with an alternative strategy to deal with media requests that, according to the NSA, were so “broad as to be impossible to respond to”.

“In the current context, the alternative of being portrayed in the media as unresponsive seems to carry too much risk,” he said.

He suggested that NSA Foia officials attempt to “negotiate” with the media and help them “focus” their requests so the NSA could meet “their needs … consistent with [the NSA’s] obligation to protect classified information”.

The “negotiations” included personal phone calls to the journalists, according to the emails.

Patrice McDermott of transparency organization OpenTheGovernment, who is due to testify in Congress on Thursday about the continued withholding of material despite Obama's transparency order, said a line in one of the NSA emails was concerning. In Phillips advises other NSA officials that the agency "can deny all classified and all FOUO [for official use only]" Foia requests on the Prism and metadata programs and "the rest we have to process."

McDermott told the Guardian that Obama's order “was clearly intended to stop the use of markings such as FOUO and to end the use of even accepted [controlled unclassified information] markings as automatic grounds for withholding information sought through Foia” hasn't yet been implemented. Agencies such as the NSA “are using the delay to inappropriately withhold information”.

"There is no Foia exemption for FOUO or other such made-up 'agency policies,' but that has not stopped them from invoking it as a reason to deny records," McDermott said.

Nate Jones, the Foia coordinator for George Washington University's National Security Archive, said the public should not be fooled by the NSA's attempts to portray the agency as being genuinely concerned with transparency.

“For those who believe the public has the right to know what information the NSA is allowed to collect the conclusion drawn in this case is that the Snowden leaks worked and the Freedom of Information Act did not,” he said.

quote:

NSA releases email in dispute over Snowden 'internal whistleblowing'

• Leaker says he raised surveillance concerns internally
• Agency: email 'did not raise allegations or concerns'

The National Security Agency has disputed Edward Snowden's insistence that he made efforts to raise his concerns about its surveillance practices internally before he decided to go public.

Releasing an email exchange it claimed to be the only record it could find of such an effort by Snowden, the agency said on Thursday he was merely “asking for an explanation of some material that was in a training course he had just completed”.

Six months ago, the agency issued a statement saying it had “not found any evidence to support Mr Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention”.

The email exchange with the NSA's Office of General Counsel, dated April 2013, emerged after Snowden repeated his claim to have attempted an internal whistleblowing during an interview with NBC that aired on Wednesday night.

Snowden told interviewer Brian Williams: “I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.

“The response, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was: ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

Snowden's description appears to match parts, if not all, of the newly emerged email, which was made public on Thursday via the Senate intelligence chair, Dianne Feinstein.

“Hello, I have a question regarding the mandatory USSID 18 training,” writes Snowden to a redacted address that appears to be in the Office of General Counsel.

He goes on to cite a list provided in the training that ranks presidential executive orders alongside federal statutes in the hierarchy of orders governing NSA behaviour.

“I'm not entirely certain, but this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law,” adds Snowden.

“My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EO's may not override statute. Am I incorrect in this?”

In a reply which was cc'd to a number of redacted email addresses, Snowden is told by an unnamed individual that he is “correct that EO's cannot override a statute” but that they have the “force and effect of law”.

The issue is an important one in the context of whether NSA surveillance activities were permissible, as it addresses possible conflict between laws passed by Congress and orders given by the White House.

Senate intelligence committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long argued the administration may have been in breach of surveillance statutes in its activities. They were prevented from raising many of their concerns in public due to confidentiality requirements.

The NSA, however, disputes that this latest email exchange is proof of Snowden raising concerns about “interpretations of its legal authorities”.

“The email did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed,” said the agency in a statement released on Thursday.

It added: “There are numerous avenues that Mr Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations.

“We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

The denial was repeated by the White House, which went further than it normally does when asked by an NBC reporter about the possibility of Snowden's return to the US and stated: “Clemency is not on the table.”

“There are avenues available to somebody like Mr Snowden to raise those kind of concerns,” added Obama spokesman Jay Carney.

Senator Feinstein said the email had been provided to her committee on 10 April, in response to a request, and added: “It does not register concerns about NSA’s intelligence activities, as was suggested by Snowden in an NBC interview this week.”

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal adviser, said of the email: “This whole issue is a red herring. The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed – and deemed legal – without the knowledge or consent of the public. Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange after previously claiming that no evidence existed.”

During the interview, Snowden also repeated his calls for full disclosure of the communication trail.

“I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these communications with a legal office,” he told NBC.

“And in fact, I’m so sure that these communications exist that I’ve called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to verify that they do.”

Six months ago, responding to questions on the subject from Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, the NSA issued a statement claiming there was no evidence of a paper trail at all.

“After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention," said the agency.

quote:

EFF to Court: There's No Doubt the Government Destroyed NSA Spying Evidence

EFF Urges Judge to Rule Destroyed Evidence Would Show Clients Were Surveilled

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that there was no doubt that the government has destroyed years of evidence of NSA spying – the government itself has admitted to it in recent court filings. In a brief filed today in response to this illegal destruction, EFF is asking that the court make an "adverse inference" that the destroyed evidence would show that plaintiffs communications and records were in fact swept up in the mass NSA spying programs.

EFF filed its first lawsuit challenging illegal government spying in 2006. The current dispute arises from Jewel v. NSA, EFF's 2008 case that challenges the government's mass seizure of three kinds of information: Internet and telephone content, telephone records, and Internet records, all going back to 2001. EFF's brief notes that the government's own declarations make clear that the government has destroyed five years of the content it collected between 2007 and 2012, three years worth of the telephone records it seized between 2006 and 2009, and seven years of the Internet records it seized between 2004 and 2011, when it claims to have ended the Internet records seizures.

"The court has issued a number of preservation orders over the years, but the government decided – without consent from the judge or even informing EFF – that those orders simply don't apply," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Regular civil litigants would face severe sanctions if they so obviously destroyed relevant evidence. But we are asking for a modest remedy: a ruling that we can assume the destroyed records would show that our plaintiffs were in fact surveilled by the government."

The government's reinterpretation of EFF's lawsuits and the preservation orders came to light in March, when government lawyers revealed secret court filings from 2007. In these filings, the government unilaterally claimed that EFF's lawsuits only concerned the original Bush-era spying program, which was done purely on claims of executive power. Without court approval, much less telling EFF, the government then decided that it did not need even to preserve evidence of the same mass spying done pursuant to FISA court orders, which were obtained in 2004 for Internet records, 2006 for telephone records, and 2007 for mass content collection from fiber optic cables.

"EFF and our clients have always had the same simple claim: the government's mass, warrantless surveillance violates the rights of all Americans and must be stopped. The surveillance was warrantless under the executive's authority and it is still warrantless under the FISA court, as those orders are plainly not warrants." said Cohn. "The government's attempt to limit our claims based upon their secret, shifting rationales is nothing short of outrageous, and their clandestine decision to destroy evidence under this flimsy argument is rightly sanctionable. Nevertheless, we are simply asking the court to ensure that we are not harmed by the government's now-admitted destruction of this evidence."

For the full brief on the government's non-compliance:
https://www.eff.org/docum(...)-preservation-orders

For more on Jewel v. NSA:
https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel

quote:

Join us on June 5th to Reset the Net

The NSA has corrupted the Internet. On June 5, we will Reset the Net. We hope you’ll join us.

June 5 is the one-year anniversary of the first documents leaked by Edward Snowden. While EFF has been fighting NSA surveillance for years, 2013 marked a new chapter in our battle against mass spying. The documents made it clear to everyone why we care so much, and why they should too.

Surveillance affects everyone, in the United States and internationally. Millions of innocent people have had their communications swept up by the NSA’s dragnet surveillance. Thomas Drake, former NSA official and whistleblower described recently retired NSA chief General Keith Alexander’s surveillance philosophy: “He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible.” This philosophy clearly underpinned his nearly nine year tenure at the NSA. In addition to this collect-it-all strategy, the NSA has used tactics such as deploying malware, trying to weaken encryption, and other sophisticated techniques that make the Internet less secure.

Mass surveillance is toxic for the Internet. The Internet is a powerful force that can promote democracy, innovation, and creativity, but it’s being subverted as a tool for government spying.

That’s why EFF has joined with dozens of other organizations in calling for a day of action to Reset the Net. On June 5th, Reset the Net is asking everyone to help by installing free software tools that are designed to protect your privacy on a computer or a mobile device. Reset the Net is also calling on websites and developers to add surveillance resistant features, like HTTPS and forward secrecy.

Don’t wait for your privacy and freedom. Start taking it back.

quote:

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”

State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.

Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.”

That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.

It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.

The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.

In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.

The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.

quote:

Bombshell TrueCrypt advisory: Backdoor? Hack? Hoax? None of the above?

A sampling of theories behind Wednesday's notice that TrueCrypt is unsafe to use.

quote:

Wednesday's bombshell advisory declaring TrueCrypt unsafe to use touched off a tsunami of comments on Ars, Twitter, and elsewhere. At times, the armchair pundits sounded like characters in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, as they speculated wildly—and contradictorily—about what was behind a notice that left so many more questions than answers. Here are some of the more common theories, along with facts that either support or challenge their accuracy.

quote:

TrueCrypt krijgt doorstart

Enkele Zwitserse activisten van de Piratenpartij werken aan een doorstart van de bekende encryptiesoftware TrueCrypt, die deze week offline ging.

De mysterieuze ontwikkelaars van TrueCrypt trokken eerder deze week de stekker uit het project. Ook waarschuwden ze dat het programma onveilig zou zijn. Ze raadden gebruikers aan te migreren naar Bitlocker. Op de originele TrueCrypt-site staat nog slechts TrueCrypt 7.2, waarmee het alleen mogelijk is om versleutelde TrueCrypt-bestanden te decrypten.

Zwitsers Thomas Bruderer en Joseph Doekbrijder, ex-president en ex-vicepresident van de Zwitserse Piratenpartij, zijn nu TrueCrypt.ch gestart als een soort doorstart. De laatste werkende versie, TrueCrypt 7.1a, is door de Zwitsers weer online gebracht, hoewel zij ook waarschuwen voor mogelijke beveiligingsproblemen.

Fork

De Zwitsers willen met hun project meewerken aan een 'fork', een afsplitsing van het originele TrueCrypt. Die zou waarschijnlijk wel een andere naam krijgen. De huidige ontwikkelaars van TrueCrypt zijn onbekend. Dat zou volgens de Zwitsers voor hun fork juist niet moeten gelden.

De Zwitsers wachten voor de fork op de uitkomst van het
Crypto Open Audit-project. Het onderzoek is nog maar gedeeltelijk afgerond.

Oproep voor hulp

De Zwitsers doen ook een oproep voor mensen die willen helpen om beveiligingsrisico's in kaart te brengen. Ook wordt gezocht naar experts die kunnen helpen om juridische problemen op te lossen. Met de hosting in Zwitserland zou de juridische dreiging al minder zijn.

quote:

NSA-klokkenluider Snowden vraagt asiel aan in Brazilië

quote:

Reddit, Imgur and Boing Boing launch anti-NSA-surveillance campaign

The Reset the Net campaign aims to encourage direct action, urging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools



Some of the world's largest websites are planning a coordinated day of action on Thursday to oppose mass surveillance online.

The sites, which include Reddit, Imgur and BoingBoing, will be taking part in the campaign, called "Reset the Net", in a number of ways.

Some will showing a splash screen to all users, reminiscent of the one used in the successful protests against SOPA, the US copyright bill which many feared would damage the backbone of the internet. But rather than telling users to write to their electoral representatives, this protest will push more direct action, encouraging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools.

Other sites have committed to improving their own privacy as part of the campaign, by enabling standards such as HTTPS, which prevents attackers from eavesdropping on visitors. Such security standards are common in the world of ecommerce, but rarer for sites which don't think of themselves as holding sensitive information.

"We can take back control of our personal and private data one website, one device, one internet user at a time," said Reddit's General Manager Erik Martin. "We’re proud to stand up for our users’ rights and help Reset the Net."

The campaign is being co-ordinated by Fight for the Future, whose co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng said "Now that we know how mass surveillance works, we know how to stop it. That’s why people all over the world are going to work together to use encryption everywhere and make it too hard for any government to conduct mass surveillance.

"There are moments in history where people and organisations must choose whether to stand on the side of freedom or tyranny. On June 5th, the internet will show which side it’s on.”

quote:

'Politie wilde niet dat journalist De Winter over de nucleaire top schreef'

De Nationale Politie heeft begin dit jaar geprobeerd te voorkomen dat onderzoeksjournalist Brenno de Winter zou schrijven over de beveiliging van de internationale nucleaire top (NSS) in Den Haag. Dat schrijft De Winter vandaag in zijn column voor The Post Online.

Een en ander zou blijken uit documenten die De Winter heeft opgevraagd. 'Men wilde koste wat het kost voorkomen dat ik mijn vak zou uitoefenen tijdens de NSS-top', schrijft de Winter. 'Want een andere mening over digitale spionage en criminaliteit is de Firma Opstelten niet welgevallig.'

De Winter haalt een passage aan waarin staat: 'Deze aandachtsvestiging is in de landelijke dia-bak geplaatst. Dit met het oog op de NSS en de mogelijkheden die de betrokkene zou kunnen aangrijpen om zijn vak uit te oefenen.' De Winter: 'Hoe ik het ook lees, hier staat toch echt dat ik gesignaleerd heb gestaan uit angst dat ik artikelen of columns zou gaan typen. Als de overheid haar macht inzet om kritische journalisten het werk te beletten dan is daar maar één woord voor dat nu waarschijnlijk ook door uw hoofd spookt, maar ik niet zal noemen. Hoe diep kun je zinken als land?'

De Winter zegt verder dat hem werd geadviseerd om geen accreditatie voor de NSS-top aan te vragen. 'Ik moet mijn bronnen beschermen, maar ik kan wel vertellen dat de waarschuwing uit politiekringen kwam.'

Privégegevens
Enkele maanden geleden gaf de Landelijke Politie in een brief toe dat er privégegevens van De Winter, waaronder zijn adres, zijn verzameld en intern zijn verspreid. Ten onrechte zouden medewerkers van politie en het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken voor de journalist zijn gewaarschuwd.

'De politie heeft zelf niet toegegeven dat dit ten onrechte is gebeurd,' licht De Winter telefonisch toe. 'Ik heb nog steeds geen fatsoenlijk gesprek met de Nationale Politie gehad. Ik krijg totaal geen informatie. Ik weet niet of ik nog steeds word gevolgd en of er een rechtszaak tegen mij komt. Ik weet helemaal niets.'

Gesignaleerd
Uit de documenten die De Winter heeft opgevraagd en ingezien blijkt verder dat hij werd gesignaleerd terwijl hij in Den Haag achter een laptop op een bankje zat. Een beveiliger van de dienst Bewaken en Beveiliging herkende hem en deed een melding. 'De beveiliger keek De Winter aan en zag dat De Winter geschrokken naar beneden naar zijn laptop keek,' staat in het verslag te lezen.

'Knullig', meent De Winter. 'Hoe eng dat er voor bewakers ook uitziet, het was niets meer dan het afmaken van een column voor ThePostOnline.' Hij vindt de inmenging onacceptabel. 'Een ieder heeft het recht zijn mening te uiten zonder de inmenging van enig openbaar gezag. Dat geldt voor iedereen dus ook voor mij.'

De Nationale Politie wil niet inhoudelijk op de beweringen van De Winter reageren. 'We hebben het met onze jurist overlegd, maar in het kader van de Wet Politiegegevens mogen wij niet ingaan op vragen over gegevens die over een specifiek persoon gaan', laat een woordvoerder desgevraagd weten.

quote:

REVEALED: GCHQ's BEYOND TOP SECRET Middle Eastern INTERNET SPY BASE

Snowden leaks that UK.gov suppressed

Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.

The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.

British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.

The actual locations of such codenamed “access points” into the worldwide cable backbone are classified 3 levels above Top Secret and labelled “Strap 3”. The true identities of the companies hidden behind codenames such as “REMEDY”, “GERONTIC”, “STREETCAR” or “PINNAGE” are classified one level below this, at “Strap 2”.

After these details were withheld, the government opted not to move against the Guardian newspaper last year for publishing above-top-secret information at the lower level designated “Strap 1”. This included details of the billion-pound interception storage system, Project TEMPORA, which were revealed in 2013 and which have triggered Parliamentary enquiries in Britain and Europe, and cases at the European Court of Human Rights. The Guardian was forced to destroy hard drives of leaked information to prevent political embarrassment over extensive commercial arrangements with these and other telecommunications companies who have secretly agreed to tap their own and their customers’ or partners’ overseas cables for the intelligence agency GCHQ. Intelligence chiefs also wished to conceal the identities of countries helping GCHQ and its US partner the NSA by sharing information or providing facilities.

According to documents revealed by Edward Snowden to journalists including Glenn Greenwald among others, the intelligence agency annually pays selected companies tens of millions of pounds to run secret teams which install hidden connections which copy customers' data and messages to the spooks’ processing centres. The GCHQ-contracted companies also install optical fibre taps or “probes” into equipment belonging to other companies without their knowledge or consent. Within GCHQ, each company has a special section called a “Sensitive Relationship Team” or SRT.

BT and Vodafone/C&W also operate extensive long distance optical fibre communications networks throughout the UK, installed and paid for by GCHQ, NSA, or by a third and little known UK intelligence support organization called the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).

Snowden’s leaks reveal that every time GCHQ wanted to tap a new international optical fibre cable, engineers from “REMEDY” (BT) would usually be called in to plan where the taps or “probe” would physically be connected to incoming optical fibre cables, and to agree how much BT should be paid. The spooks' secret UK access network feeds Internet data from more than 18 submarine cables coming into different parts of Britain either direct to GCHQ in Cheltenham or to its remote processing station at Bude in Cornwall.

Among the cables specifically identified in one document as currently being intercepted or “on cover” are an Irish connection, Hibernia Atlantic, landing in Southport, and three European connections landing at Yarmouth, Dover, and Brighton.

The majority of large cables come ashore in Cornwall, and have been connected directly to Bude. These include major connections such as FLAG (Fibre optic Link Around the Globe), two of whose cables have been intercepted. Because the FLAG interceptions had to be kept secret from the cables’ owners, one report states, the tapping connections were installed in an undisclosed UK location and “backhauled” to Bude, in the technical language of the communications industry.

Although GCHQ interception of overseas communications can be authorised by a general “external” tapping warrant, the wording of the law does not permit storage of every communication for examination, as GCHQ wished to do. In 2009, the spooks persuaded then Foreign Secretary David Miliband to sign a new warrant legalising what they wished to do. The terms of such warrants have never been published.

The special “external” warrants, issued under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), authorise the interception of all communications on specified international links. Miliband’s first 2009 warrant for TEMPORA authorised GCHQ to collect information about the “political intentions of foreign powers”, terrorism, proliferation, mercenaries and private military companies, and serious financial fraud.

Certificates attached to external interception warrants are re-issued every six months, and can be changed by ministers at will. GCHQ officials are then free to target anyone who is overseas or communicating from overseas without further checks or controls, if they think they fall within the terms of a current certificate.

The secret overseas internet monitoring centre, codenamed CIRCUIT, is at Seeb in the state of Oman. It is the latest of a series of secret collaborations with the autocratic Middle Eastern state, which has been ruled for 44 years by Sultan Qaboos bin Said, installed as head of state in a British-led and SAS-supported coup against his father. The Seeb centre was originally built in collaboration with the Omani government to monitor civil communications satellites orbiting above the Middle East. It has six large satellite dishes, forming part of the well-known and long running “ECHELON” intercept system run by the “Five Eyes” English-speaking (US/UK/Australia/Canada/New Zealand) intelligence agencies.

When GCHQ obtained government approval in 2009 to go ahead with its “Mastering the Internet” project, the Seeb base became the first of its global network of Internet tapping locations. Another centre, OPC-2, has been planned, according to documents leaked by Snowden.

The CIRCUIT installation at Seeb is regarded as particularly valuable by the British and Americans because it has direct access to nine submarine cables passing through the Gulf and entering the Red Sea. All of the messages and data passed back and forth on the cables is copied into giant computer storage “buffers”, and then sifted for data of special interest.

Information about Project TEMPORA and the Seeb facility was contained in 58,000 GCHQ documents which Snowden downloaded during 2012. Many of them came from an internal Wikipedia style information site called GC-Wiki. GCHQ feared the political consequences of revelations about its spying partners other than the United States and English speaking nations, according to knowledgeable sources.

Although information about the monitoring station at Seeb in its older ECHELON role has been available on the public Internet for several years, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood was determined to prevent its new importance and cost becoming known.

It was this which lay behind the British government’s successful-until-today efforts to silence the Guardian and the rest of the media on the ultra-classified, beyond Top Secret specifics of Project TEMPORA - the places and names behind the codewords CIRCUIT, TIMPANI, CLARINET, REMEDY and GERONTIC. ®

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

quote:

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

quote:

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

quote:

Deutsche Telekom to follow Vodafone in revealing surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

A letter from Edward Snowden and the ACLU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward J. Snowden, American

quote:

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

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

quote:

Veteranen VS moeten maanden op zorg wachten

quote:

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

quote:

To defeat encryption, feds deploy the subpoena

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

quote:

Hundreds sign up to protest outside GCHQ in Cheltenham

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

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

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

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

quote:

AIVD heeft geen toegang tot providers in Nederland

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

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

quote:

Universiteit Groningen dwingt onderzoekers tot gebruik van Gmail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

Britse veiligheidsdienst tapt Google en Facebook af

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schrems is understood to be in Vienna examining the ruling.

quote:

Hillary Clinton backs overhaul of surveillance powers in NSA criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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