Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On the meaning of journalistic independence

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

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Labour to overhaul spy agency controls in response to Snowden files

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Overheid waarschuwde voor journalist Brenno de Winter

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

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

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

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Nick Clegg orders review into data gathering by spy agencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims

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

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'Nieuwe spionagewet bij voorbaat achterhaald'

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

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

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

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Snowden: NSA adviseerde landen bij spionagewetten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Information

Trevor Timm
Executive Director
trevor@pressfreedomfoundation.org

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

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NSA 'hijacked' criminal botnets to install spyware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Sarah Harrison}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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