Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kabinet komt na de zomer met update spionagewet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

twitter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hillary Clinton Attacks Edward Snowden

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

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

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US Grants Itself the Right to Demand Online Data Stored Overseas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Germany blocks Edward Snowden from testifying in person in NSA inquiry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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White House Calls for More Privacy Laws

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

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

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

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Duitse hacker kraakt site NSA

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


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

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

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

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Edward Snowden: NSA Spies Most on Americans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But some cybersecurity experts questioned the scenario outlined by Plunkett.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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No Such Agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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