Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

quote:

Leaked NSA Memo: Fueling the Perception Snowden Did Not Work Alone & Is No Whistleblower

quote:

A number of media organizations have published stories based on a leaked National Security Agency memo that suggests NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “swiped” the password of a co-worker, a civilian NSA employee, who has been forced to resign for sharing his password. The forced resignation by the civilian NSA employee is being reported as part of disciplining people for allowing breaches of security to happen, not as a part of the NSA’s effort to find people to take the fall for something the agency did not prevent from happening.

The memo, obtained and published by NBC News—and dated February 10, 2014, three days ago—provides an update to members of Congress of the House Judiciary Committee on “steps that the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken to assign accountability related to the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by former contractor Edward Snowden.”

“Three NSA affiliates have been implicated in this matter: an NSA civilian employee, an active duty military member and a contractor. The civilian employee recently resigned from employment at NSA,” the memo reports.

It adds, “On June 18, 2013, the NSA civilian admitted to FBI Special Agents that he allowed Mr. Snowden to use his (the NSA civilian’s) Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate to access classified information on NSANet; access that he knew had been denied to Mr. Snowden. Further, at Mr. Snowden’s request, the civilian entered his PKI password at Mr. Snowden’s computer terminal. Unbeknownst to the civilian, Mr. Snowden was able to capture the password, allowing him even greater access to classified information. The civilian was not aware the Mr. Snowden intended to unlawfully disclose classified information. However, by sharing his PKI certificate, he failed to comply with security obligations.”

Notice what is not included in that description: when this password “swiping” occurred, whether Snowden actually needed to have the PKI to complete a task assigned to him, whether the employee typed the password in himself or actually wrote it down and handed it to him and whether this conduct would have actually been suspicious in the NSA whenever it took place.

NBC News clarifies the content of the memo with the phrase, “while the memo’s account is sketchy.” Yet, despite its “sketchiness,” NBC News published the report and presented it in a way that reinforces the narrative that Snowden did not blow the whistle and had accomplices to commit his dastardly deed.

The memo states the civilian employee was forced to resign on January 10, 2014. An active military member and contractor lost their access to NSA information and spaces in August 2013. However, there is virtually no evidence in this memo that these people being held responsible for the NSA actually had any role in helping Snowden.

Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA employee and whistleblower, suggested, “Such an act would not have been a reason for “firing” an NSA IT [information technology] guy 10 years ago, or even before the Snowden revelations in my opinion.”

“Part of the reason for tolerating such behavior before the Snowden leaks is that NSA does not have enterprise IT support. In other words, standards that make supporting NSA IT infrastructure – including data management – easy.”

The NSA does not really know the extent of what Snowden took and how he really did it. The forced resignation of this civilian employee and the decision to strip three people of their security clearances is reflective of an agency floundering in the aftermath of one of the most massive security breaches in its history.

The contact Snowden had with these employees are data points in the time Snowden worked for the agency. The confirmation bias of NSA leaders has driven them to take those data points and create causal relationships between events that took place. They decided that the civilian employee, wittingly or unwittingly, is a part of a conspiracy by Snowden because being victim of a conspiracy makes them look better than being a victim of an independent whistleblower.

Thomas Drake, a former NSA employee and whistleblower prosecuted by the administration of President Barack Obama for his act of trying to inform the public, recalled, “I had people pressured by NSA into making up stuff (including statements) about me and my character and obtaining information as well as purloining and stealing documents from NSA for the purposes of disclosing them to people”—reporters—”not authorized to receive them.” But, like Snowden, “I acted alone without any ‘help.’”

“NSA is simply choosing to believe that Snowden did not act alone. They are demonstrating something called confirmation bias.” They are looking for and manufacturing evidence to “prove” their allegations.” Or, by the simple act of forcing people out of the agency, they are creating the perception that those people played a role in Snowden’s act.

Even though unidentified FBI agents from the Washington field office, leading the investigation into Snowden, told the New York Times in December they believe Snowden “methodically downloaded the files over several months while working as a government contractor at the Hawaii facility” and “worked alone,” the story that Snowden did not do this by himself has continued to surface in the media without being appropriately questioned. (The Times did note again in January it was still the FBI’s conclusion Snowden acted alone.)

Though NBC News fails to make the connection, this civilian employee may be what House Intelligence Committee chairman was referring to when he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” some of what he had done was “beyond his technical capabilities.” And, “He had some help and he stole things that had nothing to do with privacy.”

“Some help” could be limited to the civilian NSA employee sharing the password that is mentioned in the memo. The phrase “beyond his technical capabilities” may be a way of saying he was not cleared for access in this instance and had to ask for a password to gain access to NSANet. Of course, the innuendo used by Rogers is much more effective in making Americans fear what Snowden did was malicious, especially since Rogers wants people to believe he did this with assistance from Russian foreign intelligence.

quote:

As another whistleblower and former whistleblower William Binney explained to Firedoglake in December, NSA never developed and implemented technology in order to have the capabilities to track activities by employees on the agencys systems. The reason was because of two groups of people: analysts and management.

The analysts realized that what that would be doing is monitoring everything they did and assessing what they were doing. They objected. They didnt want to be monitored and have their privacy violated.

Management resisted because it meant one would be able to assess returns on all the programs around the world. It would be possible to lay out all the programs in the world and map [them] against the spending and the return on investment.

It meant the agency would be exposed to Congress for auditing, Binney added. Management, those leading the NSA, did not want that.

quote:

U.S. intelligence agencies can’t justify why they use so many contractors

quote:

Private contractors play a huge role in the government, particularly in civilian intelligence services like the CIA. Contracting critics say it's an addiction whose overhead costs drive up the federal budget and leads to data breaches like the kind perpetrated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the wake of last year's NSA revelations, many agencies have been reviewing their contracting policies. But few people have a good grasp on just how many contractors the government employs. What's worse, the country's eight civilian intelligence agencies often can't sufficiently explain what they use those contractors for, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

quote:

NSA-Affäre: Regierung plant Einsatz von Spionageabwehr gegen USA

quote:

Spione aus dem Westen sollen es auf deutschem Boden künftig schwerer haben: Die Bundesregierung erwägt, die Tätigkeit westlicher Geheimdienste in Deutschland durch eigene Agenten beobachten zu lassen. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen gibt es neun Monate nach Beginn der NSA-Affäre im Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz bereits Pläne, die Abteilung Spionageabwehr massiv auszubauen und etwa die Botschaften von Partnerländern wie den USA und Großbritannien einer "Sockelbeobachtung" zu unterziehen.

quote:

‘Why Have You Gone to Russia Three Times in Two Months?’—Heathrow Customs Agent Interrogates Snowden Lawyer

quote:

A lawyer who represents National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and has spoken on his behalf numerous times was detained while going through customs at Heathrow airport in London.

Jesselyn Radack told Firedoglake she was directed to a specific Heathrow Border Force agent. He “didn’t seem interested” in her passport. She was then subjected to “very hostile questioning.”

As Radack recalled, she was asked why she was here. “To see friends,” she answered. “Who will you be seeing?” She answered, “A group called Sam Adams Associates.”

quote:

Her interrogation by a Border Force agent comes just after The New York Times reported, based off a document from Snowden, that NSA ally, Australia, has used the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on American lawyers.

quote:

What can unite liberals and tea partyers? The NSA

quote:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Hoyt Sparks says he has no use for liberal Democrats and their "socialistic, Marxist, communist" ways.

Toni Lewis suspects tea party Republicans are "a bunch of people who probably need some mental health treatment."

Politically speaking, the tea-party supporter in rural North Carolina and the Massachusetts liberal live a world apart.

Who or what could get them thinking the same?

Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.

quote:

Why does the NSA unite the right and left ends of the political spectrum?

"More extreme political views lead to more distrust of government," said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who's studied the tea party's focus on the Constitution. People at the far ends of the political spectrum are less likely than middle-of-the-road voters to feel government is responsive to them.

On the flip side, Somin said, moderates generally don't follow politics as closely as people at the extremes, so they may be less aware of the scope of the NSA's activities.

quote:

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters

quote:

Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.

The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous.

One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.

Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs.

A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.

In 2008, not long after WikiLeaks was formed, the U.S. Army prepared a report that identified the organization as an enemy, and plotted how it could be destroyed. The new documents provide a window into how the U.S. and British governments appear to have shared the view that WikiLeaks represented a serious threat, and reveal the controversial measures they were willing to take to combat it.

In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.”

“News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.”

Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name.

The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in surveillance issues, says the revelations shed a disturbing light on the NSA’s willingness to sweep up American citizens in its surveillance net.

“All the reassurances Americans heard that the broad authorities of the FISA Amendments Act could only be used to ‘target’ foreigners seem a bit more hollow,” Sanchez says, “when you realize that the ‘foreign target’ can be an entire Web site or online forum used by thousands if not millions of Americans.”

quote:

'Commissie Stiekem in december geïnformeerd over metadata'

quote:

Oppositiebronnen benadrukken tegenover NRC dat het politieke belang van de informatie in hun ogen op 12 december niet duidelijk was.

quote:

Clapper said that the controversy would not have occurred had the security apparatus been more open before. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11 – which is the genesis of the 215 program – and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards … We wouldn’t have had the problem we had.”

His admission contradicts months of warnings, from his office and from elsewhere in the administration, that disclosure of the bulk data collection jeopardized US national security.

quote:

Snowden elected as rector by students at University of Glasgow

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

'NSA luistert nu Duitse ministers af'

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

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

[..]

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

quote:

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

quote:

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

[..]

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

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