Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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Swedish Foreign Ministry prevents Snowden’s invitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how did this come about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anonymous hacks security firm in revenge for identification claims

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

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HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks' Donors

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH GLENN GREENWALD BELOW:

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Snowden’s likely involvement with CryptoParty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

twitter:

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

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Cisco chief urges Obama to curb NSA surveillance activity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Connection Between The Copyright Industry And The NSA

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

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

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

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

This has a direct connection to free speech as such.

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

twitter:

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

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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.

twitter:

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.