Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Het artikel gaat verder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Eyes Everywhere

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

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

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

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A Response to Michael Kinsley

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

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

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

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The empire strikes back: How Brandeis foreshadowed Snowden and Greenwald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phillips shared the email with her staff the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

NSA releases email in dispute over Snowden 'internal whistleblowing'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

Join us on June 5th to Reset the Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

quote:

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

quote:

TrueCrypt krijgt doorstart

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

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

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

Fork

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

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

Oproep voor hulp

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

quote:

NSA-klokkenluider Snowden vraagt asiel aan in Brazilië

quote:

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quote:

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

Snowden leaks that UK.gov suppressed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

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

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

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

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

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

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Deutsche Telekom to follow Vodafone in revealing surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A letter from Edward Snowden and the ACLU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward J. Snowden, American

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

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

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Veteranen VS moeten maanden op zorg wachten

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

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To defeat encryption, feds deploy the subpoena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hundreds sign up to protest outside GCHQ in Cheltenham

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

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

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

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

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AIVD heeft geen toegang tot providers in Nederland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Universiteit Groningen dwingt onderzoekers tot gebruik van Gmail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Britse veiligheidsdienst tapt Google en Facebook af

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schrems is understood to be in Vienna examining the ruling.

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Hillary Clinton backs overhaul of surveillance powers in NSA criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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