Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 9

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Do NSA's Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?

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On June 5, 2013, the Guardian broke the first story in what would become a flood of revelations regarding the extent and nature of the NSA’s surveillance programs. Facing an uproar over the threat such programs posed to privacy, the Obama administration scrambled to defend them as legal and essential to U.S. national security and counterterrorism. Two weeks after the first leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published, President Obama defended the NSA surveillance programs during a visit to Berlin, saying: “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved.” Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, testified before Congress that: “the information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on the House floor in July that “54 times [the NSA programs] stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe – saving real lives.”

However, our review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even misleading. An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as well as the time and date of those calls but not their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8 percent of these cases. NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined, and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority played a role in 1.3 percent of the cases we examined.

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NSA Turned Germany Into Its Largest Listening Post in Europe

The National Security Agency has turned Germany into its most important base of operations in Europe, according to a story published by Der Spiegel this week.

The German magazine reports that documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “paint a picture of an all-powerful American intelligence agency that has developed an increasingly intimate relationship with Germany over the past 13 years while massively expanding its presence.” The magazine adds, “No other country in Europe plays host to a secret NSA surveillance architecture like the one in Germany…In 2007, the NSA claimed to have at least a dozen active collection sites in Germany.”

The story reveals that the NSA’s key facilities in Germany include Building 4009 at the “Storage Station” on Ludwig Wolker Street in Wiesbaden, which is in the southwest of the country. Officially known as the European Technical Center, the facility is the NSA’s “primary communications hub” in Europe, intercepting huge amounts of data and forwarding it to “NSAers, warfighters and foreign partners in Europe, Africa and the Middle East,” according to the documents.

Spiegel also reports that an even larger NSA facility is under construction three miles away, in the Clay Kaserne, which is a U.S. military complex. Called the Consolidated Intelligence Center, the facility will cost $124 million once it is completed, and will house data-monitoring specialists from the Storage Station.

The agency’s operations in Germany came under intense scrutiny earlier this year when Spiegel revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone calls. In its latest issue, the magazine reports on a legal controversy over the NSA’s still-close relationship with its German partner, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The Snowden documents show that “the exchange of data, spying tools and know-how is much more intense than previously thought,” according to Spiegel—and this raises the question of whether the BND is violating constitutional protections on privacy for Germans abroad and foreigners in Germany.

The scope of the NSA’s activities in Germany is considerable. Another key NSA facility, Spiegel reports, is the “Dagger Complex” in Griesheim, a town about 25 miles from Wiesbaden. It is “the NSA’s most important listening station in Europe,” with around 240 intelligence analysts working there in 2011. The facility’s official name is the European Center for Cryptology. “NSA staff in Griesheim use the most modern equipment available for the analysis of the data streams, using programs like XKeyscore, which allows for the deep penetration of Internet traffic,” according to Spiegel.

The story also delves into the growth of facilities that house the NSA’s Special Collection Service, which is a joint operation with the CIA to collect targeted communications. There are more than 80 SCS stations around the world, and the Snowden documents indicate two sites are located in Germany—in the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, and the U.S. embassy in Berlin, which is where the SCS is believed to have recorded Chancellor Merkel’s phone calls.

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Snowdens Deutschland-Akte: Die Dokumente im PDF-Format

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How Secret Partners Expand NSA’s Surveillance Dragnet

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Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The Intercept, shed light on how the NSA’s surveillance of global communications has expanded under a clandestine program, known as RAMPART-A, that depends on the participation of a growing network of intelligence agencies.

It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as “third-party partners,” are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables.

The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.

The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community’s classified “Black Budget” for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables – the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute.

In an emailed statement, the NSA declined to comment on the RAMPART-A program. “The fact that the U.S. government works with other nations, under specific and regulated conditions, mutually strengthens the security of all,” said NSA spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines. “NSA’s efforts are focused on ensuring the protection of the national security of the United States, its citizens, and our allies through the pursuit of valid foreign intelligence targets only.”

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For any foreign government, allowing the NSA to secretly tap private communications is politically explosive, hence the extreme secrecy shrouding the names of those involved. But governments that participate in RAMPART-A get something in return: access to the NSAs sophisticated surveillance equipment, so they too can spy on the mass of data that flows in and out of their territory.

The partnership deals operate on the condition that the host country will not use the NSAs spy technology to collect any data on U.S. citizens. The NSA also agrees that it will not use the access it has been granted to collect data on the host countries citizens. One NSA document notes that there ARE exceptions to this rule though does not state what those exceptions may be.

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House Passes Landmark Amendment To Stop Warrantless NSA Searches

The House overwhelmingly approved an amendment Thursday meant to block the National Security Agency from performing warrantless searches on Americans' communications, rejecting one of the most controversial forms of NSA surveillance revealed by the leaks of Edward Snowden.

The 293-123 vote on an amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill was a victory for civil libertarians on the heels of a gutted NSA reform measure the House approved in May. The amendment still faces an uncertain journey through Congress before it can become law.

"I think people are waking up to what's been going on," said the amendment's sponsor, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "Whether you're Republican or Democrat -- because, if you noticed, a majority of Republicans voted for this, as well as a majority of Democrats."

The NSA performs so-called back door searches on the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they have been in contact with targeted foreigners. Given the vastness of the NSA's target database, and the irrelevance of international boundaries in the Internet age, privacy advocates say they worry an expanding number of Americans' emails and phone calls are being swept up. The House amendment specifically prohibits the NSA from using information identifying U.S. citizens to search communications data it collects under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

NSA critics had warned about such searches for years. But the leaks of former NSA contractor Snowden, as reported in The Guardian, definitively revealed the spy agency's tactics. The NSA claims legal authority to perform the searches.

The amendment was sponsored by Massie, along with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and a host of co-sponsors of the earlier attempt at NSA reform, called the USA Freedom Act. The original co-sponsors of that bill included Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.).

Supporters of that measure had surrendered to the Obama administration in dropping the prohibition on back door searches. But the defense appropriations bill gave them another chance.

"After the passage of the USA Freedom Act, this amendment is the logical next step to prevent improper surveillance," Nadler said in a statement before Thursday's vote. "I will continue to work to improve our nation’s privacy laws and to ensure that this Administration, and all those that follow it, respect the constitutional rights of all Americans."

The amendment also aims to block the NSA and CIA from forcing software and hardware providers to insert back doors into their products to allow the government agencies easy access to customer communications. The measure's backers include the American Civil Liberties Union and Google.

Massie pronounced himself "pleasantly surprised" with his amendment's passage. But he acknowledged it still faces a long road to passage.

"That's going to be the trick," Massie said. "It would take somebody to support it on the Senate side as well, and in conference," where the House and Senate reconcile companion bills.

Massie said he faced hurdles from House leaders -- particularly those in charge of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees -- in winning approval for the amendment. "The leadership was not in favor of it," he said. "The whip's description of the bill, which you could pick up in the cloakroom, was very unflattering and misleading in my opinion.

"It was an amazing struggle to get it ruled in order," he said, referring to parliamentary rules around appropriations bills. He noted that a similar provision was stripped out of the "watered down" USA Freedom Act that passed last month.

But in the end, Massie said, co-sponsors from both parties were critical in getting the amendment approved.

The House passage of the amendment may create momentum for similar reform efforts in the Senate, where Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden has been fighting for years to expose and end the practice of back door searches.

Wyden warned in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece with Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that "intelligence agencies are using a loophole in the law to read some Americans' emails without ever getting a warrant."

The senators wrote that the debate over NSA reforms "is likely to continue for at least the next few years as Americans continue to learn about the scale of ongoing government surveillance activities."

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Fisa court grants extension of licence for bulk collection of US phone records

Reauthorisation is fifth since the Guardian revealed existence of Section 215 telephony metadata program in June last year

US intelligence agencies have made a fifth attempt to extend their bulk collection of American telephone records – more than a year after the controversial practice was first revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Despite repeated calls from Congress and President Obama for the mass gathering of private US phone records to be banned, a court has approved the request in secret, allowing the NSA to continue collecting metadata until 12 September 2014.

In a joint statement released late on Friday afternoon, the justice department and director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said it was necessary to continue seeking such legal extensions because the Congressional reform process supported by Obama was not yet complete.

"Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program," said the joint statement.

The 90-day blanket licence granted by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or Fisa court, is the fifth such extension that has been requested, and granted, since the Guardian first revealed the existence of the Section 215 program on 5 June 2013.

Similar 90-day reauthorisations were subsequently declassified by the administration on 19 July 2013, 11 October 2013, 3 January 2014 and 11 April 2014.Yet in March, Obama reacted to growing criticism of the NSA's domestic surveillance acitivities by calling for an end to bulk collection under Section 215 and suggesting that records be retained instead by telephone companies, and only be available for specific searches following court requests.

In May, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act, which sought to enshrine this ban in law, although civil liberties campaigners claimed it was significantly watered down after pressure on legislators by government regulators.

In a statement explaining the latest renewal request on Friday, the justice department and office of the director of national intelligence said that they still support the legislation and would work with Congress to try to clarify the language before it is voted on by the Senate.

"Overall, the bill's significant reforms would provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system, while ensuring our intelligence and law enforcement professionals have the authorities they need to protect the Nation," the statement said.

"The administration strongly supports the USA Freedom Act. We urge the Senate to swiftly consider it, and remain ready to work with Congress to clarify that the bill prohibits bulk collection as noted above, as necessary."

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Home secretary denies security services engaged in mass surveillance

May uses Mansion House speech to make case for reviving 'snooper's charter' legislation, calling it matter of 'life and death'

The home secretary has denied that the security services are engaged in a programme of mass surveillance as she made her most detailed case yet for a revival of a "snooper's charter" bill to give them extra powers to track everyone's internet and mobile phone use.

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Theresa May said on Tuesday evening that new legislation was now a matter of "life and death", as well as national security, and was needed to maintain the ability of the police and security services to monitor communications – which was being undermined by rapidly changing technology. "We must keep on making the case until we get the changes we need," she said in her Mansion House speech on privacy and security.

May also made a sweeping attack on the claims of privacy campaigners in the wake of the Snowden disclosures of mass harvesting of personal communications data or metadata by Britain's GCHQ and America's NSA, denying that they amount to a programme of mass surveillance. "There is no surveillance state," she said

She insisted the security agencies had not acted illegally, including an explicit denial of a technical loophole being exploited to intercept overseas communications and claimed that the current system of oversight in Britain was unsurpassed in the world.

Although she did not repeat the Home Office claim made two years ago that they had already lost the capability to track 25% of communications data, the home secretary instead said the National Crime Agency had to drop at least 20 cases during a six-month period as a result of missing communications data: "Thirteen of these were threat-to-life cases in which a child was assessed to be at risk of immediate harm," she said without giving further details of why they were dropped.

May's speech follows evidence last week from Charles Farr, the head of the Home Office's security and counter-terrorism unit, that confirmed they could monitor the mass use of social media including Google searches and Facebook use without an individual warrant. Cressida Dick, the most senior police counter-terrorism officer, also warned that the daily loss of capability meant the authorities were "staring into the abyss" on the matter.

But a senior Liberal Democrat source confirmed the position had not changed and there would be no "snooper's charter" this side of the general election, fuelling speculation that the home secretary's campaign is being conducted with an eye on what happens after May 2015.

May said she would go on making the case, telling her Mansion House audience: "The real problem is not that we have built an over-mighty state but that the state is finding it harder to fulfil its most basic duty, which is to protect the public. That is why I have said before and go on saying that we need to make changes to the law to maintain the capabilities we need."

She drew a contrast between the global power of the internet companies, which harvest and trade in personal data from their online services and intrude daily on the privacy of our lives without any warrant, with the disadvantaged position of the state. May said that while such firms can "drive a car up your road and put an image of your home online for the world to observe" it was far harder for governments.

"Far from having some fictitious mastery over all this technology we, in democratic states, face a significant risk of being caught out by it. Governments have always reserved the power to monitor communications and to collect data about communications when it is necessary and proportionate to do so," she said.

"It is much harder now – there is more data, we do not own it and we can no longer always obtain it. I know some people will say 'hurrah for that' – but the result is that we are in danger of making the internet an ungoverned, ungovernable space, a safe haven for terrorism and criminality."

She added that the greatest danger now being faced was not mass surveillance nor illegal and unaccountable behaviour but the loss of capability.

May justified the mass harvesting of personal communications data, saying it relied on automated and remote access to data on the internet and other communications systems: "Computers search for only the communications relating to a small number of suspects under investigation. Once the content of these communications has been identified, and only then, is it examined by trained analysts. And every step of the way it is governed by strict rules, checked against Human Rights Act requirements."

But Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, said it was clear from the Snowden revelations and other sources that "what we have in this country is not done proportionately and with effective oversight. What is needed is a complete review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the Telecommunications Act, and everything that goes into the legislative framework of surveillance."

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US to extend privacy protection rights to EU citizens

EU and human rights and privacy groups welcome pledge, which follows pressure in wake of Snowden revelations

The Obama administration has caved in to pressure from the European Union in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations on surveillance by promising to pass legislation granting European citizens many of the privacy protection rights enjoyed by US citizens.

The proposed law would apply to data on European citizens being transferred to the US for what Washington says is law enforcement purposes.

After the first Snowden revelations appeared in June last year, the Obama administration irritated many by insisting that while US citizens were protected by law from snooping by US spy agencies, this did not apply to non-Americans.

On Wednesday the US attorney general, Eric Holder, promised at a US-EU meeting of home affairs and justice ministers in Athens that legislation would be sent to Congress to extend the US Privacy Act to EU citizens.

The EU, as well as human rights and privacy groups, welcomed Holder's announcement but coupled it with expressions of scepticism, describing it as a vague promise.

Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, said it was an important step in the right direction but added: "Words only matter if put into law. We are waiting for the legislative step."

Human rights groups said the US Privacy Act, in spite of being touted as a beacon for the rest of the world, had a relatively weak regulatory framework. They said Holder's pledge did not address many of the other issues raised by mass surveillance worldwide by the NSA and its partners, including Britain's GCHQ.

Speaking after the Athens meeting, the EU home affairs commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, said: "EU-US relations have been strained lately in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations but we have worked very hard to restore trust."

Holder said: "The Obama administration is committed to seeking legislation that would ensure that … EU citizens would have the same right to seek judicial redress for intentional or wilful disclosures of protected information and for refusal to grant access or to rectify any errors in that information, as would a US citizen under the Privacy Act.

"This commitment, which has long been sought by the EU, reflects our resolve to move forward not only on the data protection and privacy agreement but on strengthening transatlantic ties."

The US and the EU have been negotiating for three years over personal data protection, but the discussions took on a new immediacy with the Snowden revelations.

Emotions have been strongest in Germany, given the history of mass surveillance by the Stasi, and this was compounded when it was revealed that the US had been snooping on Angela Merkel. The German government has pressed Obama, Holder and other members of the US administration to set out how they would curb spying on non-Americans.

Over the last year Obama has made repeated overtures to Merkel and other EU leaders only to be rebuffed. European governments, as well as the European parliament, has called for concrete action rather than just soft words. Even a speech in January in which Obama said he had asked Holder and the intelligence community to develop safeguards for foreign citizens met with scepticism.

Holder said the data protection agreement under discussion related to personal data shared with the US by European countries for law enforcement purposes. He framed it in the context of transnational crime and terrorism, in particular fighters travelling to and from Syria.

"One consistent theme ran through all our discussions: in a world of globalised crime and terrorism, we can protect our citizens only if we work together," Holder said. "At the same time, we must ensure that we continue our long tradition of protecting privacy in the law enforcement context."

Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, said: "It is a good step forward. Nonetheless, there are three massive impediments to achieving equivalent protection under law. First, Congress needs to act on this and we haven't seen many positive steps on protecting non-Americans' rights."

Secondly, Hosein described the US Privacy Act as "an unfortunately weak legal regime" and, thirdly, he wanted worldwide privacy protections against what he said was the accumulation of massive amounts of data by US intelligence against non-Americans.

Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: "It may be a small step in the right direction but much more needs to be done to address data protection in the US and to rein in the sheer scale of what the NSA is collecting."

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NSA fears prompt Germany to end Verizon contract

BERLIN -- The German government is ending a contract with Verizon over fears the company could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on sensitive communications, officials said Thursday.

The New York-based company has for years provided Internet services to a number of government departments, although not to German security agencies, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate.

While Germany had been reconsidering those contracts for some time, they faced additional scrutiny after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of electronic eavesdropping by the U.S. intelligence agency and Britain's GCHQ.

German authorities were particularly irked by reports that the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlin has also proposed building more secure networks in Europe to avoid having to rely on American Internet companies that manage much of the electronic traffic circulating the globe.

"There are indications that Verizon is legally required to provide certain things to the NSA, and that's one of the reasons the cooperation with Verizon won't continue," said Plate.

The current contract with Verizon will expire in 2015, he said.

The announcement follows reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt also provide Internet services to the German Parliament and to other official entities.

Verizon didn't immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Germany's decision.

Airship Over the NSA Data Center

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'Illegal Spying Below': blimp flies over NSA data centre in surveillance protest

Stunt used to draw attention to new website rating members of Congress on their approach to data collection



Activists flew a blimp emblazoned with the words "Illegal Spying Below" over the National Security Agency's data centre in Utah on Friday in protest against the US government's mass surveillance programmes.

The one-hour flight was carried out by the environmental group Greenpeace, digital rights activists the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a conservative political organisation, the Tenth Amendment Centre.

The 41 metre (135ft) blimp, owned by Greenpeace, was adorned with a sign that read "NSA Illegal Spying Below".

In an email to Reuters the agency declined to comment. But a spokesman did note there was no restricted airspace over the data centre, housed on the grounds of the Utah National Guard's Camp Williams in Bluffdale, 23 miles (37km) south of Salt Lake City.

The NSA says the facility provides the government with intelligence and warnings about cyber security threats. It is thought to be the agency's largest data storage centre.

The blimp protest coincided with the launch of an online campaign that rates members of Congress on actions the activists say either further or stop data collection efforts by the NSA.

Greenpeace said the report cards on the site standagainstspying.org were created by analysing NSA reform bills in Congress and weighting proposals on the degree to which they would end mass data collection.

"Our right to privacy is not a partisan issue. It's a human rights issue," said Michael Boldin, founder of Tenth Amendment Centre, which advocates for decentralised government.

"This coalition gives great hope for the future because it shows that people across the political spectrum can set aside differences to work together."

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Meet Onionshare, the File Sharing App the Next Snowden Will Use

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A small software app called Onionshare offers the most secure file sharing available. So why hasn't anyone heard of it? Well, mostly because it was released with just a tweet from its creator, and you have to go to Github to download it. But don't let its underground status fool you—this is a very important app.

Technologist Micah Lee debuted his peer-to-peer file sharing service with little fanfare, but what it does is big: Onionshare lets users share files securely and anonymously, without middlemen. Lee created it after reading about the trouble journalist Glenn Greenwald had accepting the NSA files from Edward Snowden. Now Lee works at The Interceptwith Greenwald, where the staff is already putting Onionshare to good use.

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'NSA mag vrijwel iedereen bespioneren'

De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA heeft een veel groter mandaat om informatie over buitenlandse regeringen en internationale instellingen te verzamelen dan tot nu toe bekend was. Dat blijkt uit een lijst die klokkenluider Edward Snowden heeft gelekt en die The Washington Post in handen heeft.

Daaruit blijkt dat de NSA informatie mag verzamelen over 193 landen, waaronder Nederland. Datzelfde geldt voor een reeks internationale instellingen en organisaties als de Wereldbank, de Europese Unie en het Internationaal Agentschap voor Atoomenergie IAEA. Het in 1978 opgerichte hof dat toezicht op de NSA houdt, heeft met de ruime bevoegdheden voor de NSA ingestemd.

Volgens The Washington Post betekent dit niet noodzakelijkerwijze dat de NSA de blik op al die landen en organisaties heeft gericht, maar wel dat hij de bevoegdheid heeft om dat te doen.

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Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show

Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information from individuals concerning all but four countries on Earth, according to top-secret documents.

The United States has long had broad no-spying arrangements with those four countries Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in a group known collectively with the United States as the Five Eyes. But a classified 2010 legal certification and other documents indicate the NSA has been given a far more elastic authority than previously known, one that allows it to intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets, but any communications about its targets as well.

The certification approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and included among a set of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. The certification also permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others.

The NSA is not necessarily targeting all the countries or organizations identified in the certification, affidavits and an accompanying exhibit; it has only been given authority to do so. Still, the privacy implications are far-reaching, civil liberties advocates say, because of the wide spectrum of people who might be engaged in communication about foreign governments and entities and whose communications might be of interest to the United States.

These documents show both the potential scope of the governments surveillance activities and the exceedingly modest role the court plays in overseeing them, said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had the documents described to him.

NSA officials, who declined to comment on the certification or acknowledge its authenticity, stressed the constraints placed on foreign intelligence-gathering. The collection must relate to a foreign intelligence requirement there are thousands set for the intelligence agencies by the president, director of national intelligence and various departments through the so-called National Intelligence Priorities Framework.

Furthermore, former government officials said, it is prudent for the certification to list every country even those whose affairs do not seem to immediately bear on U.S. national security interests or foreign policy.

Its not impossible to imagine a humanitarian crisis in a country thats friendly to the United States, where the military might be expected on a moments notice to go in and evacuate all Americans, said a former senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

If that certification did not list the country, the NSA could not gather intelligence under the law, the former official said.

The documents shed light on a little-understood process that is central to one of the NSAs most significant surveillance programs: collection of the e-mails and phone calls of foreign targets under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act.

The foreign government certification, signed by the attorney general and director of national intelligence, is one of three approved annually by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, pursuant to the law. The other two relate to counterterrorism and counterproliferation, according to the documents and former officials.

Under the Section 702 program, the surveillance court also approves rules for surveillance targeting and for protecting Americans privacy. The certifications, together with the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, serve as the basis for targeting a person or an entity.

The documents underscore the remarkable breadth of potential foreign intelligence collection. Though the FISA Amendments Act grew out of an effort to place under statute a surveillance program devoted to countering terrorism, the result was a program far broader in scope.

An affidavit in support of the 2010 foreign government certification stated that the NSA believes foreigners who will be targeted for collection possess, are expected to receive and/or are likely to communicate foreign intelligence information concerning these foreign powers.

That language could allow for surveillance of academics, journalists and human-rights researchers. A Swiss academic who has information on the German governments position in the run-up to an international trade negotiation, for instance, could be targeted if the government has determined there is a foreign intelligence need for that information. If a U.S. college professor e-mails the Swiss professors e-mail address or phone number to a colleague, the Americans e-mail could be collected as well, under the programs court-approved rules.

Even the no-spy agreements with the Five Eye countries have exceptions. The agencys principal targeting system automatically filters out phone calls from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But it does not do so for their 28 sovereign territories, such as the British Virgin Islands. An NSA policy bulletin distributed in April 2013 said filtering out those country codes would slow the system down.

Intelligence requirements, whether satisfied through human sources or electronic surveillance, involve information that may touch on almost every foreign country, said Timothy Edgar, former privacy officer at the Office of Director of National Intelligence and now a visiting fellow at Brown Universitys Watson Institute for International Affairs.

Those efforts could include surveillance of all manner of foreign intelligence targets anything from learning about Russian anti-submarine warfare to Chinese efforts to hack into American companies, he said. Its unlikely the NSA would target academics, journalists or human-rights researchers if there was any other way of getting information, Edgar said.

A spokeswoman for the NSA, Vanee Vines, said the agency may only target foreigners reasonably believed to be outside the United States.

Vines noted that in January, President Obama issued a policy directive that stated that U.S. surveillance shall be as tailored as feasible. He also directed that the United States no longer spy on dozens of foreign heads of state and that sensitive targeting decisions be subject to high-level review.

In short, there must be a particular intelligence need, policy approval and legal authorization for U.S. signals intelligence activities, including activities conducted pursuant to Section 702, Vines said.

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PayPal freezes account of email encryption startup ProtonMail

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ProtonMail was supposed to be an easy email encryption tool that would finally give us an answer to Internet surveillance around the world.

Instead, PayPal has frozen over $275,000 in donations to the project because, a PayPal representative told the company, the American payment service is not sure if ProtonMail is legal.

Of course, it is absolutely legal to encrypt email. The freeze remains in place.

Most incredible of all, the PayPal representative was unsure if ProtonMail has the necessary government approval to encrypt emails, as though anyone who encrypts needs a license to do so.

ProtonMail doesn’t need government approval, by the way, but it has it anyway. The encryption used by ProtonMail has been unquestionably legal since the 1990s. If that’s not enough, the Constitution’s First Amendment protects encryption code and its Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches, exactly what encryption protects against.

“At this time, it is not possible for ProtonMail to receive or send funds through PayPal,” ProtonMail co-founder Andy Yen announced this morning. “No attempt was made by PayPal to contact us before freezing our account, and no notice was given.”

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Top-secret court to weigh ban on MI5 and GCHQ spying on MPs in public

Investigatory Powers Tribunal will hold public hearing brought by Greens on Wilson Doctrine, which bans spying on parliament

Britain's most secretive court is to hold a rare public hearing to decide whether there is any legal force behind the long-standing political doctrine that the country's intelligence agencies cannot bug the phones or spy on the emails of members of parliament.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal agreed to the hearing after two Green party parliamentarians – Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion, and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb – complained that disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden made it clear that GCHQ was capturing their communications in breach of the so-called Wilson Doctrine.

Kate Grange, counsel for GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, told the IPT on Tuesday that her clients wanted to reserve the right to make submissions on the issue in "closed" – or secret – session, with the public and the media excluded. "It may well be that we would want to say something in closed about the past policy or practice in relation to the Wilson Doctrine," she said.

The convention is named after former prime minister Harold Wilson, who pledged in 1966 that MPs' and peers' phones would not be tapped. In December 1997, then prime minister Tony Blair said the doctrine extended to electronic communication, including emails.

Prime ministers have the power to reverse the policy. While they must inform MPs of the change, they can choose when to announce it. Lucas and Jones argue that the Wilson Doctrine must have legal force, and complain that GCHQ's bulk interception of electronic communications must be unlawful.

The president of the tribunal, Mr Justice Burton, said he wished first to give a judgment on whether or not the doctrine had legal force. At that point, he said, if it did have legal force "we will make our usual inquiries" of the agencies to establish whether the parliamentarians' communications had been intercepted.

Burton raised objections to the agencies' suggestion that the issue may need to be considered partly in closed session, on the grounds that it would fuel criticisms that the IPT operated in a Kafkaesque fashion, which he said it did not.

But he declined to provide lawyers for Lucas and Jones with a copy of an order that the tribunal had issued to the agencies after the parliamentarians' complaint had been lodged. The government's lawyers say they will neither confirm nor deny the existence of the interception programmes that were disclosed by Snowden.

The hearing was adjourned until October.

The IPT investigates complaints about the intelligence agencies and other bodies that have powers of surveillance. Almost all of its work is conducted behind closed doors, with complainants usually unaware that hearings are taking place.

This year the Guardian disclosed [http://www.theguardian.co(...)-clegg-miliband]that although the IPT claims to be independent of government, it had been secretly operating from within the Home Office since it was established 14 years earlier.

The IPT is also about to hear a challenge to the legality of the government's bulk interception practices, in a case brought by almost a dozen British and international rights groups.

It is also considering a complaint by a Libyan dissident who was kidnapped in 2004 and delivered to Muammar Gaddafi, along with his heavily pregnant wife, with the help of MI6. He alleged that the bulk interception operations had collected his legally privileged communications with lawyers who are bringing his damages claim against the British government and the former foreign secretary Jack Straw.

The IPT has dealt with about 1,500 complaints since it was established. It has not upheld any complaints about any of the UK's intelligence agencies.

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NSA Whistleblowers Testify on ‘Totalitarian Mentality’ of NSA at German Parliamentary Committee Hearing

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National Security Agency whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake testified before a German parliamentary committee as part of an inquiry into NSA surveillance in Germany.

According to Deutsche Welle, Binney argued that the NSA had abandoned nearly all rule of law principles. It now has a “totalitarian mentality” and wants “total information control.”

He called NSA the “greatest threat” to America since the Civil War.

The committee asked him about a story that broke that day from Panorama on how NSA targets individuals who merely search for “privacy-enhancing software tools.” The agency tracks the IP address of the person and especially spies on the Tor network, which democracy activists are known to use to bypass authoritarian internet controls.

The NSA uses XKeyscore, a program that was first revealed when disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden began in June 2013. It is a “collection and analysis tool” used to exploit computer networks. It can be used to gather data on “nearly everything a user does on the internet.”

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What do we want? CAT VIDEOS! How do we get them? TOR!

Anonymity outfit responds to NSA targeting allegations

The Onion Router project has fired back at the National Security Agency, after it emerged that those who use the network – and read Linux magazines – are considered worthy of surveillance.

Tor's blogged riposte points out that “Just learning that somebody visited the Tor or Tails website doesn't tell you whether that person is a journalist source, someone concerned that her Internet Service Provider will learn about her health conditions, or just someone irked that cat videos are blocked in her location.”

Cat videos are blocked in some places? Now that sounds like the kind of thing the NSA should be fighting!

The post we've linked to comes from an author named “Phobos”, a handle generally assumed to be a pen name for Tor executive director Andrew Lewman.

Whatever the author's true identity, he or she is clearly quite upset by NSA's alleged activities.

“... it's worth emphasizing that we designed bridges for users in countries like China and Iran, and here we are finding out about attacks by our own country,” Phobos writes. “Now I understand how the Google engineers felt when they learned about the attacks on their infrastructure.” ®

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28160767?ocid=socialflow_twitter

An employee of Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, reports say.

The man is said to have been trying to gather details about a German parliamentary committee that is investigating claims of US espionage.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) was last year accused of bugging the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel as part of a huge surveillance programme.

The NSA revelations put a strain on ties between Germany and the US.

US officials at the embassy in Berlin have declined to comment on the latest development.


'Serious matter'

German media say the man arrested this week is a 31-year-old employee of the federal intelligence agency, known as the BND.

The German federal prosecutor's office confirmed the man's arrest, but gave no other details.

A spokesman for Ms Merkel said she had been informed of the arrest, as had the members of the nine-strong parliamentary committee investigating the activities of foreign intelligence agencies in Germany.

"The matter is serious, it is clear," spokesman Steffen Seibert told the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper,

Der Spiegel news magazine said the man was believed to have passed secret documents to a US contact in exchange for money.

However, one unnamed politician told Reuters news agency the suspect had offered his services to the US voluntarily.

"This was a man who had no direct contact with the investigative committee... He was not a top agent," the source said.

Germany is particularly sensitive to reports of espionage on its territory because many of its citizens from the formerly communist east of the country were spied upon by the Stasi secret police.

The scale of the NSA's global spy programme was revealed in documents leaked last year by a former intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden.

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Snowden unlikely to 'man up' in face of Espionage Act, legal adviser says

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An adviser to Edward Snowden said on Wednesday that an unfair legal landscape made it unlikely that the NSA whistleblower would take US secretary of state John Kerry up on his invitation to “man up” and return to the United States.

In a television appearance on Wednesday morning, Kerry said that if Snowden were a “patriot”, he would return to the United States from Russia to face criminal charges. Snowden was charged last June with three felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act.

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CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career’

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At a time of renewed debate over the proper balance between secrecy and accountability for U.S. spy agencies, Scudder’s case reveals the extent to which there can be intense disagreement even inside agencies over how much information they should be allowed to withhold from the public and for how long.

Scudder’s case also highlights the risks to workers who take on their powerful spy-agency employers. Senior U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly argued that Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, should have done more to raise his concerns internally rather than exposing America’s espionage secrets to the world. Others who tried to do that have said they were punished.

Scudder’s actions appear to have posed no perceptible risk to national security, but he found himself in the cross hairs of the CIA and FBI.

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The NSA Revelations All in One Chart

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This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted, and whether the targets of surveillance are foreign or domestic. Most of the programs fall squarely into the agency’s stated mission of foreign surveillance, but some – particularly those that are both domestic and broad-sweeping – are more controversial.

Just as with the New York Magazine approval matrix that served as our inspiration, the placement of each program is based on judgments and is approximate.

For more details, read our FAQ or listen to our podcast. Also, take our quiz to test your NSA knowledge.

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NSA intercepts: ordinary internet users 'far outnumbered' legal targets

Washington Post report says half surveillance files collected between 2009 and 2012 belonged to US citizens or residents

When the US National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.

Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website on Saturday night. While the federal agency tried to protect their privacy by masking more than 65,000 such references to individuals, the newspaper said it found nearly 900 additional email addresses that could be strongly linked to US citizens or residents.

The intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks.

As an example, the newspaper said the files showed that months of tracking communications across dozens of alias accounts led directly to the capture in 2011 of a Pakistan-based bomb builder suspected in a 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali. The Post said it was withholding other examples, at the request of the CIA, that would compromise ongoing investigations.

The material reviewed by the Post included roughly 160,000 intercepted email and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. It spanned president Barack Obama's first term, 2009 to 2012, and was provided to the Post by the former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.

The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted were catalogued and recorded, the Post reported. The newspaper described that material as telling "stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes".

The material collected included more than 5,000 private photos, the paper said.

The cache Snowden provided to the newspaper came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to the Post.

By law, the NSA may "target" only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court, the Post said. "Incidental collection" of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, according to the newspaper.

In the case of the material Snowden provided, those in an online chat room visited by a target or merely reading the discussion were included in the data sweep, as were hundreds of people using a computer server whose internet protocol was targeted.

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If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance

The NSA says it only banks the communications of "targeted" individuals. Guess what? If you follow a search-engine link to Boing Boing's articles about Tor and Tails, you've been targeted. Cory Doctorow digs into Xkeyscore and the NSA's deep packet inspection rules.

In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a "target" for surveillance.

Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while it may intercept nearly every Internet user's communications, it only "targets" a small fraction of those, whose traffic patterns reveal some basis for suspicion. Targets of NSA surveillance don't have their data flushed from the NSA's databases on a rolling 48-hour or 30-day basis, but are instead retained indefinitely.

The authors of the Tagesschau story have seen the "deep packet inspection" rules used to determine who is considered to be a legitimate target for deep surveillance, and the results are bizarre.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails -- like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May -- or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion of online security, surveillance and privacy for years. It's nothing short of bizarre to place people under suspicion for searching for these terms.

But it's not the first time the NSA has deployed specialized, highly counterintuitive wordsmithing to play games with the public, the law and its oversight. From James Clapper's insistence that he didn't lie to Congress about spying on Americans because he was only intercepting all their data, but not looking at it all; to the internal wordgames on evidence in the original Prism leak in which the NSA claimed to have "direct access" to servers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, etc, even though this "direct access" was a process by which the FBI would use secret warrants to request information from Internet giants without revealing that the data was destined for the NSA.

I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.

Update: Bruce Schneier also believes there is a second leaker.

Update 2: Appelbaum and others have posted an excellent English language article expanding on this in Der Erste. -Cory Doctorow
More importantly, this shows that the NSA uses "targeted surveillance" in a way that beggars common sense. It's a dead certainty that people who heard the NSA's reassurances about "targeting" its surveillance on people who were doing something suspicious didn't understand that the NSA meant people who'd looked up technical details about systems that are routinely discussed on the front page of every newspaper in the world.

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The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders

The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.

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Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.

But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

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I never thought I'd see this day: The founder of Lawfare has finally declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there's been a serious abuse.

The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler, and every other anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they insist that Snowden is a narcissistic criminal and possible traitor, they have no choice but to admit that the NSA collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and chats belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them so poorly that a ne'er-do-well could copy them onto thumb drives.

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical.

Here's the reality.

The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect and store it.

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Duitsland opent jacht op tweede Amerikaanse mol

Het spionageschandaal in Duitsland lijkt zich verder uit te breiden. Volgens Duitse media verdenken de autoriteiten een tweede medewerker van de inlichtingendienst BND ervan voor de Amerikanen te hebben gespioneerd. De spionage zou 'nog ernstiger' zijn dan het eerste spionagegeval. De woning en het kantoor van de verdachte werden vanochtend doorzocht. De verwachting is dat hij vandaag nog in hechtenis zal worden genomen.

De onthulling volgt een week na de arrestatie van een andere BND-medewerker die voor de Verenigde Staten zou hebben gespioneerd. Het jongste spionagegeval is volgens ingewijden 'ernstiger' dan het eerste. De verdachte zou op de militaire afdeling van de dienst hebben gewerkt.

De vorige week gearresteerde 31-jarige Duitser bespioneerde, voor de VS, de commissie die onderzoek deed naar de omstreden activiteiten op Duitse bodem van de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA. Vorig jaar werd na onthullingen van klokkenluider Edward Snowden bekend dat de NSA de afgelopen jaren miljarden Duitse gegevens heeft verzameld. Ook de smartphone van bondskanselier Angela Merkel was doelwit van de Amerikanen.

De gearresteerde mol is volgens Duitse media meermalen door de Amerikaanse geheime dienst ondervraagd. Hij zou minstens één keer in de VS zijn geweest om verslag uit te brengen en zou 25.000 euro hebben gekregen voor in totaal 218 documenten. Inmiddels heeft hij bekend.

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Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On

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The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americansincluding a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyersunder secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called FISA recapshort for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also are or may be engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

The spreadsheet shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008. Many of the email addresses on the list appear to belong to foreigners whom the government believes are linked to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Among the Americans on the list are individuals long accused of terrorist activity, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

But a three-month investigation by The Interceptincluding interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA processreveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

I just dont know why, says Gill, whose AOL and Yahoo! email accounts were monitored while he was a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. Ive done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my communityIve done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do.

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Files on UK role in CIA rendition accidentally destroyed, says minister

Rights groups say FCO claim records of flights in and out of Diego Garcia missing due to water damage 'smacks of cover-up'

The government's problems with missing files deepened dramatically when the Foreign Office claimed documents on the UK's role in the CIA's global abduction operation had been destroyed accidentally when they became soaked with water.

In a statement that human rights groups said "smacked of a cover-up", the department maintained that records of post-9/11 flights in and out of Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Indian Ocean, were "incomplete due to water damage".

The claim comes amid media reports in the US that a Senate report due to be published later this year identifies Diego Garcia as a location where the CIA established a secret prison as part of its extraordinary rendition programme. According to one report, classified CIA documents state that the prison was established with the "full cooperation" of the UK government.

It also comes at a time when MPs are demanding the Home Office urgently provide more information about 114 "missing" files that could have contained information about an alleged child abuse network in the 1980s.

Ministers of successive governments have repeatedly given misleading or incomplete information about the CIA's use of Diego Garcia. In February 2008, the then foreign secretary, David Miliband, was forced to apologise to MPs and explain that Tony Blair's "earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights" had not been correct. Miliband said at this point that two rendition flights had landed, but that the detainees on board had not disembarked.

Miliband's admission was made after human rights groups produces irrefutable evidence that aircraft linked to the rendition programme had landed on Diego Garcia. Since then, far more aircraft have been shown to have been involved in the operation.

The "water damage" claim was given in response to a parliamentary question by the Tory MP an chair of Treasury select committee, Andrew Tyrie, who has been investigating the UK's involvement in the rendition programme for several years.

When Tyrie asked the Foreign Office (FCO) to explain which government department keeps a list of flights which passed through Diego Garcia from January 2002 to January 2009, FCO minister Mark Simmonds replied: "Records on flight departures and arrivals on Diego Garcia are held by the British Indian Ocean Territory immigration authorities. Daily occurrence logs, which record the flights landing and taking off, cover the period since 2003. Though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage."

There was no immediate FCO response to the Guardian's questions about where the records were held, the way in which the damage was said to have occurred, or whether any copies survived.

Cori Crider of the legal charity Reprieve said: "It's looking worse and worse for the UK government on Diego Garcia. First we learn the Senate's upcoming torture report says detainees were held on the island, and now – conveniently – a pile of key documents turn up missing with 'water damage'? The government might as well have said the dog ate their homework. This smacks of a cover-up. They now need to come clean about how, when, and where this evidence was lost."

Crider added that the claim that documents had been destroyed accidentally was "especially disturbing" given that Scotland Yard is investigating the role played by MI6 in the abduction of a Libyan dissident, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was flown to one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons along with his pregnant wife in 2004.

The police investigation, Operation Lydd, is thought to have examined whether the couple were flown via Diego Garcia. A report is due to be handed shortly to the director of public prosecutions.

The White House and the CIA are working on final redactions to a 481-page executive summary of a classified report by the US Senate committee on intelligence on the rendition programme prior to its publication, possibly in September. The full 6,300-page report is said to be scathing of the way in which the CIA resorted rapidly to the abduction and torture of al-Qaida suspects after the attacks of 2001.

There have been a number of reports suggesting that allies of the US, including the UK and Poland, and been lobbying to ensure that all reference to their own involvement is removed from the summary before it is published. The Foreign Office refused to comment on these reports.

The British government is particularly sensitive about the allegations that Diego Garcia hosted one of the CIA's prisons, at times claiming that it knows only that which it is told by Washington. Although the island has operated as a US military base since the islanders were evicted in the 1960s, it remains a British territory, and its use during the rendition programme would have placed the UK in breach of a raft of international and domestic laws.

Belhaj and his wife are suing MI6, the agency's former head of counter-terrorism Sir Mark Allen and Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time that the couple were abducted.

Last month, the Commons cross-party defence committee suggested that information about the extent to which the CIA used the island as a "black site" to transfer detainees was still being withheld. "Recent developments have once again brought into question the validity of assurances by the US about its use of Diego Garcia," it said.

The committee warned that it will assess the implications for Britain and for "public confidence" in its previous statements on US use of Diego Garcia, and said the US should not in future be permitted to use the island, to transfer terror suspects, for combat operations, "or any other politically sensitive activity", without the explicit authorisation from the UK government.

Although Miliband told MPs that detainees had not been held on Diego Garcia, others have contradicted this assertion.

Manfred Nowak, as United Nations special rapporteur on torture, said he had received "credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island" that CIA detainees had been held there between 2002 and 2003.

General Barry McCaffrey, a former head of Southcom, the US military's southern command, has twice stated publicly that Diego Garcia has been used by the US to hold prisoners, saying in one radio interview in May 2004: "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq."

In 2003, Time magazine quoted "a regional intelligence official" as saying that a man accused of plotting the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing was being interrogated on Diego Garcia. Five years later the magazine reported that a CIA counter-terrorism official said a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island.

In August 2008, the Observer reported that former US intelligence officers "unofficially told senior Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón that Mustafa Setmarian, a Spanish-based Syrian accused of running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, was taken to Diego Garcia in late 2005 and held there for months".

As a consequence of the repeated allegations, the foreign affairs select committee said in 2009 that it was "unacceptable" that the government had not taken steps to obtain the full details of the two individuals whom it had admitted to have been rendered through Diego Garcia.

The committee added: "We conclude that the use of Diego Garcia for US rendition flights without the knowledge or consent of the British government raises disquieting questions about the effectiveness of the government's exercise of its responsibilities in relation to this territory."

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NSA chief knew of Snowden file destruction by Guardian in UK

Revelation contrasts markedly with White House efforts to distance itself from UK government pressure to destroy disks

General Keith Alexander, the then director of the NSA, was briefed that the Guardian was prepared to make a largely symbolic act of destroying documents from Edward Snowden last July, new documents reveal.

The revelation that Alexander and Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, were advised on the Guardian's destruction of several hard disks and laptops contrasts markedly with public White House statements that distanced the US from the decision.

White House and NSA emails obtained by Associated Press under freedom of information legislation demonstrate how pleased Alexander and his colleagues were with the developments. At times the correspondence takes a celebratory tone, with one official describing the anticipated destruction as "good news".

On 20 July 2013, three Guardian editors destroyed all copies of the its Snowden material held in London (video), under the supervision of two GCHQ staff following a period of intense political pressure in the UK.

The decision to destroy the UK copies of the material was taken in a climate of advancing legal threats from Cabinet Office and intelligence officials. The Guardian and its publishing partners, which included the New York Times and the not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica, held other copies of the material in the US, and continued reporting revelations from the documents.

When the Guardian revealed it had destroyed several computers a month later in August, the White House spokesman Josh Earnest initially remarked it was hard to "evaluate the propriety of what they did based on incomplete knowledge of what happened" but said it would be hard to imagine the same events occurring in the US.

"That's very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate," he concluded.

However, heavily redacted email correspondence obtained by AP reporter Jack Gillum shows senior NSA officials celebrating the destruction of the material, even before it had occurred.

An email to Alexander from Rick Ledgett, now deputy director of the NSA, has the subject line "Guardian data being destroyed", and is dated 19 July, a day before the destruction of the files. Most is heavily redacted, but Ledgett remarks: "Good news, at least on this front."

A day later, hours after the material was destroyed, Alexander follows up with Ledgett, asking: "Can you confirm this actually occurred?"

Later that day, Clapper emails Alexander under the same subject line, saying: "Thanks Keith … appreciate the conversation today".

The remainder of the emails are redacted, including the subject lines in many cases, meaning it is unclear who from the British government briefed the senior NSA and White House staff on the destruction, or whether US officials had any input to the decision to encourage destruction of journalistic material.

A spokeswoman for the Guardian said the revelation of the US-UK correspondence on the destruction was disappointing.

"We're disappointed to learn that cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian's basement last July," she said. "What's perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House's comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the UK government's intervention."

The NSA and GCHQ declined to respond to AP's requests for comment on the email exchange.

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Inhoud e-mails grondwettelijk beschermd

Ook de inhoud van e-mails moet straks grondwettelijk worden beschermd. Het kabinet heeft vandaag besloten een wetsvoorstel naar de Tweede Kamer te sturen waarin dat wordt geregeld.

Het huidige brief-, telefoon- en telegraafgeheim wordt vervangen door het 'brief- en telecommunicatiegeheim' in artikel 13 van de Grondwet. Niet alleen e-mails, maar ook telefoonverkeer via internet en besloten communicatie via sociale media vallen dan ook onder die bescherming.

Dat betekent dat de overheid niet mag bekijken wat er wordt gecommuniceerd, ongeacht het middel waarmee dat is gebeurd. Daarop zijn wel uitzonderingen mogelijk. Politie en inlichtingendiensten mogen de communicatie in bepaalde gevallen wel inzien, maar alleen na toestemming van hogerhand.

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How 160,000 intercepted communications led to our latest NSA story

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NSA surveillance is a complex subject — legally, technically and operationally. We drafted the story carefully and stand by all of it. I want to unpack some of the main points and controversies, sprinkling in new material for context. In this format, I can offer more technical detail about the data set that Snowden provided and the methods we used to analyze it. I will also address some ethical and national security issues we faced. Along the way, I will explain why our story actually understated its findings, clear up speculation about spying on President Obama and fact-check a recent CIA tweet about lost passwords.

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We did not have an official NSA list of targets. We had to find them in the pile ourselves. Soltani, an independent researcher, did most of the heavy lifting on that. Because the information was not laid out in rows and columns, the way it might be in a spreadsheet, Soltani wrote computer code to extract what we were looking for from something like a quarter-million pages of unstructured text.

Some of our questions could not be answered with the data we had. For that reason, our story did not say what some commentators have imputed to it.

These are fine distinctions, but they are important because we reported only what we could count. We did not say that the NSA intercepted a larger number of conversations or a higher volume of content belonging to bystanders than targets. We said there were more participants (unique online accounts) in those conversations who were not targets than participants who were.

We also did not say that there are more Americans than foreign targets in the pile. We suspect that proposition may be true, but we could not establish it reliably.

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Juncker: spionage VS en gas Rusland zorgelijk

De aanstaande voorzitter van de Europese Commissie, de Luxemburger Jean-Claude Juncker, denkt dat de Amerikaanse spionagepraktijken in Europa voor een vertrouwensbreuk kunnen zorgen. Ook vindt hij dat Europa te afhankelijk is van Russisch gas en dat meer Europese samenwerking nodig is om die afhankelijkheid te verminderen.

Juncker zei dat in een interview met de Duitse krant Bild. Hij stelt dat 'men de Amerikanen moet uitleggen dat vrienden naar elkaar luisteren en niet elkaar afluisteren'. De Luxemburgse oud-premier vreest niet alleen een breuk van 'het trans-Atlantische vertrouwen, maar ook van het vertrouwen tussen burgers en de staat'.

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Edward Snowden condemns Britain's emergency surveillance bill

Exclusive: NSA whistleblower says it 'defies belief' that bill must be rushed through after government ignored issue for a year

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has condemned the new surveillance bill being pushed through the UK's parliament this week, expressing concern about the speed at which it is being done, lack of public debate, fear-mongering and what he described as increased powers of intrusion.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. "I mean we don't have bombs falling. We don't have U-boats in the harbour."

Suddenly it is a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. "It defies belief."

He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSA losing cooperation from telecom and internet companies.

"I mean the NSA could have written this draft," he said. "They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We're losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk."

His comments chime with British civil liberties groups who, having had time to read the small print, are growing increasingly sceptical about government claims last week that the bill is a stop-gap that will not increase the powers of the surveillance agencies.

David Cameron, searching for cross-party support, assured the Liberal Democrats and Labour that there would be no extension of the powers.

But internal Home Office papers seen by the Guardian appear to confirm that there would be an expansion of powers. Campaigners argue that the bill contains new and unprecedented powers for the UK to require overseas companies to comply with interception warrants and communications data acquisition requests and build interception capabilities into their products and infrastructure.

The interview with Snowden, in a city centre hotel, lasted seven hours. One of only a handful of interviews since he sought asylum in Russia a year ago, it was wide-ranging, from the impact of the global debate he unleashed on surveillance and privacy to fresh insights into life inside the NSA. The full interview will be published later this week.

His year-long asylum is due to expire on 31 July but is almost certain to be extended. Even in the unlikely event of a political decision to send him to the US, he would be entitled to a year-long appeal process.

During the interview, Snowden was taken aback on learning about the speed at which the British government is moving on new legislation and described it as "a significant change". He questioned why it was doing so now, more than a year after his initial revelations about the scale of government surveillance in the US, the UK and elsewhere around the world, a year in which the government had been largely silent.

He also questioned why there had been a move in the aftermath of a ruling by the European court of justice in April that declared some of the existing surveillance measures were invalid.

He said the government was asking for these "new authorities immediately without any debate, just taking their word for it, despite the fact that these exact same authorities were just declared unlawful by the European court of justice".

He added: "Is it really going to be so costly for us to take a few days to debate where the line should be drawn about the authority and what really serves the public interest?

"If these surveillance authorities are so interested, so invasive, the courts are actually saying they violate fundamental rights, do we really want to authorise them on a new, increased and more intrusive scale without any public debate?"

He said there had been government silence for the last year since he had exposed the scale of surveillance by the NSA and its British partner GCHQ. "And yet suddenly we're told there's a brand new bill that looks like it was written by the National Security Agency that has to be passed in the same manner that a surveillance bill in the United States was passed in 2007, and it has to happen now. And we don't have time to debate it, despite the fact that this was not a priority, this was not an issue that needed to be discussed at all, for an entire year. It defies belief."

It is questionable how much impact his comments will have on parliamentarians, even though he is an expert witness, with inside knowledge of the surveillance agencies.

Snowden has become a champion for privacy campaigners. But, though his revelations prompted inquiries by two parliamentary committees, he has won little vocal support among parliamentarians.

The Conservatives deny there is any need for a debate on surveillance versus privacy. Labour and Liberal Democrats have been hesitant too about joining the debate, fearful of a backlash in the event of a terrorist attack.

Even backbench MPs who think the intelligence agencies have a case to answer hold back from public expressions of support for a whistleblower sought by the US government.

The British government is justifying the proposed new legislation on the grounds not only of the European court ruling but of US intelligence fears of a terrorist attack, in particular concerns of an attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner said to be emanating from an alleged al-Qaida bombmaker in Yemen linked to hardline Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Snowden said the Bush administration had used the threat of another terrorist attack on America after 9/11 to push through the Protect America Act. The bill had to be brought in after the New York Times disclosed the surveillance agencies had been secretly engaged in wiretapping without a warrant.

Snowden said: "So what's extraordinary about this law being passed in the UK is that it very closely mirrors the Protect America Act 2007 that was passed in the United States at the request of the National Security Agency, after the warrantless wire-tapping programme, which was unlawful and unconstitutional, was revealed."

He said the bill was introduced into Congress on 1 August 2007 and signed into law on 5 August without any substantial open public debate. A year later it was renewed and the new version was even worse, he said, granting immunity to all the companies that had been breaking the law for the previous decade.

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GCHQ surveillance hearing to begin

Investigatory powers tribunal will examine concerns that human rights groups may have been monitored via Tempora programme

The UK's most secretive court is beginning a week-long hearing – mostly in public – into complaints that GCHQ's mass surveillance of the internet violates human rights.

The case against the monitoring agency at the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) is the result of revelations by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden. It has been brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and a number of other overseas human rights groups.

The legal challenge is the first of dozens of GCHQ-related claims to be examined in detail by the IPT, which hears complaints against British intelligence agencies and government bodies that carry out surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).

The civil liberties organisations are concerned that their private communications may have been monitored under GCHQ's electronic surveillance programme Tempora, whose existence was revealed by Snowden. They also complain that information obtained through the US National Security Agency's Prism and Upstream programmes may have been shared with the British intelligence services, sidestepping protections provided by the UK legal system.

On 10 July the government announced emergency measures to preserve the legality of data retention and at the same time promised a review of how Ripa operates.

James Welch, Liberty's legal director, said: "As legislation is introduced to paper over one crack in the crumbling surveillance state, another faces challenge. Not content with forcing service providers to keep details of our calls and browsing histories, the government is fighting to retain the right to trawl through our communications with anyone outside and many inside the country. When will it learn that it is neither ethical nor efficient to turn everyone into suspects?"

Most IPT hearings are conducted behind closed doors. Since the tribunal was established 14 years ago, no complaint against the intelligence services has ever been upheld. There is no appeal against the court's decisions although the European court of human rights in Strasbourg has signalled that it will consider appeals from the IPT on the presumption that claimants have exhausted domestic remedies.

Mr Justice Burton, who became president of the court last October, describes it as an "open tribunal" and has vowed to make its procedures less clandestine. In a departure from previous practice, the IPT posted advance notice of this week's hearing on its website, explaining that the case is "against the intelligence agencies in respect of alleged interception activity involving UK and US access to communications".

In defence documents already submitted, the government's most senior security official, Charles Farr, has explained how searches on Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as emails to or from non-British citizens abroad, can be monitored legally by the security services without obtaining an individual warrant because they are deemed to be "external communications".

The IPT hearing, at the Rolls Building in central London, may hear some of the most sensitive evidence about interceptions in private. This claim is expected to concentrate on the legality of two interception programmes, Tempora and Prism, and their use by the UK's monitoring agency, GCHQ, and its US counterpart, the NSA.

In Farr's submission, he says he can "neither confirm or deny" the existence of Tempora, although he does acknowledge that Prism exists "because it has been expressly avowed by the executive branch of the US government".

Much of the tribunal's deliberations will therefore have to proceed on the basis of agreed hypothetical facts. For example, if Tempora exists, lawyers will ask, does it violate the rights to privacy and freedom of expression enshrined in articles 8 and 10 of the European convention on human rights?

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Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet



The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an “emergency” to “help keep us safe,” a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called “JTRIG Tools and Techniques” provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit’s operations are. The document—available in full here—is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s “weaponised capability” when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc.



The “tools” have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including “distributed denial of service” attacks and “call bombing.” But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption. Here’s a list of how JTRIG describes its capabilities:

• “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS)

• “Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH)

• “Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal.” (SILVERLORD)

• “Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.” (MINIATURE HERO)

• “Find private photographs of targets on Facebook” (SPRING BISHOP)

• “A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE)

• “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM)

• “Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR)

• “Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)

• “A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE)

• “Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING)

• “For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE)

While some of the tactics are described as “in development,” JTRIG touts “most” of them as “fully operational, tested and reliable.” It adds: “We only advertise tools here that are either ready to fire or very close to being ready.”

And JTRIG urges its GCHQ colleagues to think big when it comes to internet deception: “Don’t treat this like a catalogue. If you don’t see it here, it doesn’t mean we can’t build it.”

The document appears in a massive Wikipedia-style archive used by GCHQ to internally discuss its surveillance and online deception activities. The page indicates that it was last modified in July 2012, and had been accessed almost 20,000 times.

GCHQ refused to provide any comment on the record beyond its standard boilerplate, in which it claims that it acts “in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework” and is subject to “rigorous oversight.” But both claims are questionable.

British watchdog Privacy International has filed pending legal action against GCHQ over the agency’s use of malware to spy on internet and mobile phone users. Several GCHQ memos published last fall by The Guardian revealed that the agency was eager to keep its activities secret not to protect national security, but because “our main concern is that references to agency practices (ie, the scale of interception and deletion) could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.” And an EU parliamentary inquiry earlier this year concluded that GCHQ activities were likely illegal.

As for oversight, serious questions have been raised about whether top national security officials even know what GCHQ is doing. Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012, insisted that ministers were in “utter ignorance” about even the largest GCHQ spying program, known as Tempora—not to mention “their extraordinary capability to hoover up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches.” In an October Guardian op-ed, Huhne wrote that “when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ and the [NSA], the depth of my ‘privileged information’ has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to The Guardian.”

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Google werkt samen met hackers aan 'veiliger internet'

Google heeft een speciaal team gevormd dat moet zorgen voor een veiliger internet. Op het bedrijfsblog wordt Project Zero onthuld. Het team bestaat uit hackers en talentvolle beveiligingsonderzoekers.

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'Mensen moeten internet zonder angst kunnen gebruiken', zegt Chris Evans van het team. 'Niemand hoort bang te zijn dat criminelen of overheden via bugs in software informatie stelen of de computer overnemen.'

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UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping

GENEVA — Governments on every continent are hiding an increasing reliance on private companies to snoop on citizens’ digital lives, the U.N. human rights office said Wednesday.

Stepping into a fierce debate over digital privacy rights, the U.N. office says it has strong evidence of a growing complicity among private companies in government spying. It says governments around the world are using both the law and covert methods to access private content and metadata.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the lack of transparency and tactics extend to governments’ ”de facto coercion of companies to gain broad access to information and data on citizens without them knowing.”

Her office’s report to the U.N. General Assembly says concerns about the erosion in privacy have increased since last year’s revelations of U.S. and British mass surveillance. The report said stricter laws are needed to prevent violations and ensure accountability when digital technology and surveillance is misused. It warned that mass surveillance is becoming “a dangerous habit rather than an exceptional measure.”

By law, Pillay said, governments must demonstrate the interference isn’t arbitrary or illegal.

“Secret rules and secret interpretations — even secret judicial interpretations — of law do not have the necessary qualities of ‘law,’” the report says. “Any capture of communications data is potentially an interference with privacy.”

The report comes as American technology companies’ reputations suffer from the perception they can’t protect customer data from U.S. spy agencies. The German government said last month it is ending a contract with Verizon over security concerns.

But U.S. officials say European and other foreign intelligence agencies also routinely demand cooperation from their national companies.

“All countries should immediately start to review their digital surveillance practices and bring them in line with international rights standards,” Human Rights Watch researcher Cynthia Wong said.

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Edward Snowden should not face trial, says UN human rights commissioner

Navi Pillay says of former NSA contractor: 'those who disclose human rights violations should be protected'

The United Nations's top human rights official has suggested that the United States should abandon its efforts to prosecute Edward Snowden, saying his revelations of massive state surveillance had been in the public interest.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, credited Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, with starting a global debate that has led to calls for the curtailing of state powers to snoop on citizens online and store their data.

"Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them," Pillay told a news conference.

"I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation," she said. "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."

The United States has filed espionage charges against Snowden, charging him with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Pillay declined to say whether President Barack Obama should pardon Snowden, saying he had not yet been convicted. "As a former judge I know that if he is facing judicial proceedings we should wait for that outcome," she said. But she added that Snowden should be seen as a human rights defender.

"I am raising right here some very important arguments that could be raised on his behalf so that these criminal proceedings are averted," she said.

Pillay was speaking after issuing a report on government surveillance, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age (pdf), which says governments must accept stronger checks on their data surveillance powers and companies must do more to stand up to the state's demands for data.

Revelations of mass US surveillance based on documents leaked by Snowden sparked outrage among American allies including Germany, Brazil and Mexico. He has sought asylum in Russia.

The leaked documents revealed massive programmes run by the NSA that gathered information on emails, phone calls and internet use by hundreds of millions of Americans.

Mona Rishmawi, head of the rule of law branch of Pillay's office, said: "In this particular case, the way we see the situation of Snowden is he really revealed information which is very, very important for human rights. We would like this to be taken into account in assessing his situation."

All branches of government must be involved in the oversight of surveillance programmes, and completely independent civilian institutions must also monitor surveillance, Pillay says in her report. Checks on government must also be clearly understandable by the public.

The report, which will be debated at the UN general assembly later this year, says any collection of communications data or metadata is potentially a breach of privacy.

Governments often force internet and telecoms firms to store metadata about their customers, which was neither necessary nor proportionate, Pillay said, adding that companies should always be ready to challenge government requests.

"This can mean interpreting government demands as narrowly as possible or seeking clarification from a government with regard to the scope and legal foundation for the demand; requiring a court order before meeting government requests for data; and communicating transparently with users about risks and compliance with government demands," she told reporters.

She added: "I would say there are serious questions over the extent to which consumers are truly aware of what data they are sharing, how, and with whom, and to what use they will be put.

"And for how long is this data going to be out there? I would say that the same rights that people have offline must be protected online."

An emergency data collection law being rushed through the British parliament may not address concerns raised by the European court of justice and is difficult to justify, Pillay said.

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Journalists will face jail over spy leaks under new security laws

George Brandis's new spying laws will include measure to criminalise media reporting of Snowden-style leaks


Australian journalists could face prosecution and jail for reporting Snowden-style revelations about certain spy operations, in an “outrageous” expansion of the government’s national security powers, leading criminal lawyers have warned.

A bill presented to parliament on Wednesday by the attorney general, George Brandis, would expand the powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio), including creation of a new offence punishable by five years in jail for “any person” who disclosed information relating to “special intelligence operations”.

The person would be liable for a 10-year term if the disclosure would “endanger the health or safety of any person or prejudice the effective conduct of a special intelligence operation”.

Special intelligence operations are a new type of operation in which intelligence officers receive immunity from liability or prosecution where they may need to engage in conduct that would be otherwise unlawful.

The bill also creates new offences that only apply to current and former intelligence operatives and contractors in a move which appeared to directly address the risk of documentary disclosures being made following revelations by the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden – whom Brandis has previously labelled a “traitor”.

On Thursday Brandis dismissed suggestions he was specifically going after journalists who reported information.

"No we're not and I think there has been a little bit of erroneous commentary on that provision," Brandis told the ABC.

"It's designed to plug a gap in the existing legislation. Under the existing legislation it's a criminal offence for an officer of a national security agency to disclose intelligence material to a third party, but it's not an offence for an officer to copy or wrongfully remove that material.

"In other words, communication with a third party is an element of the current offence but it seems to us that it should be wrong and it should be an offence to illicitly remove intelligence material from an agency. That's all that's about."

But the leading criminal barrister and Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesman Greg Barns said a separate provision in the “troubling” legislation could be used to prosecute and jail journalists who reported on information they received about special intelligence operations.

The offences relating to the unauthorised disclosure of information are outlined in section 35P of the national security legislation amendment bill, which was presented to the Senate on Wednesday and is set to face parliamentary debate after the winter recess.

The explanatory memorandum to the bill said the offence applied to “disclosures by any person, including participants in an SIO [special intelligence operation], other persons to whom information about an SIO has been communicated in an official capacity, and persons who are the recipients of an unauthorised disclosure of information, should they engage in any subsequent disclosure”.

Barns said: “I thought the Snowden clause [in the bill] was bad enough but this takes the Snowden clause and makes it a Snowden/Assange/Guardian/New York Times clause.”

“It’s an unprecedented clause which would capture the likes of Wikileaks, the Guardian, the New York Times, and any other media organisation that reports on such material.”

Barns, who has worked on terrorism cases and has also advised Wikileaks, said Asio could secretly declare many future cases to be special intelligence operations. This would trigger the option to prosecute journalists who subsequently discover and report on aspects of those operations.

He said it would be easy for Asio to declare special intelligence operations because it simply required the security director-general or deputy director-general to approve.

“Their own boss says, ‘I think we better call this a special intelligence operation, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ close it down. The more you talk about it the more outrageous it becomes,” Barns said.

Barns said operations in which Asio officers broke laws were the very ones that the community may regard as abuses of power. He argued Brandis wanted powers not available to governments in the UK and the US where citizens enjoyed greater protections for freedom of speech.

“In Australia we lack that fundamental human rights protection and therefore Brandis can get away with inserting a clause into a bill which you wouldn’t be able to do in the UK or in the US,” Barns said.

“It’s the sort of clause you’d expect to see in Russia or in China and in other authoritarian states but you don’t expect to see it in a democracy. I hope the Senate rejects it because it takes the law further than in jurisdictions which are similar to Australia.”

Leading criminal law barrister Shane Prince said the new offences relating to special operations were “quite draconian”.

“The five-year offence would seem to be able to apply even if the person had no idea about the special intelligence operation and they happened to release information which coincidentally was part of or related to the special intelligence operation,” he said.

“Add on to that the fact you probably in a trial wouldn’t be able to know what the special intelligence operation was about, would mean that you could have the situation where a person could be on trial for disclosing information which they say is related to a special intelligence operation, even if the person didn’t know that the information related to a special intelligence operation and they would never get to know in their trial.”

The Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the new offence could criminalise the actions of journalists. “I can’t see anything that conditions it or carves out any public interest disclosures. I can’t see anything that would protect journalists,” he said.

Electronic Frontiers Australia chief executive Jon Lawrence said the clause covering security personnel “appears to be a clear attempt to stamp down on whistleblowers to avoid an Australian Ed Snowden.

“The fact that they’re making that illegal doesn’t necessarily stop a whistleblower though I think in the general context of what is a pretty extreme crackdown on whistleblowers generally.”

The amendments would explicitly bring private contractors under the definition of intelligence operatives to make them subject to prosecution, and include any person “performing functions or services for the organisations in accordance with a contract, agreement or other arrangement”.

The new penalties criminalise copying, transcribing, retaining or recording intelligence material in any way, and carry a maximum penalty of three years. Evidence of disclosure is not required for these penalties.

Brandis said this measure filled a gap in existing legislation whereby it was not unlawful for an officer of Asio to illicitly copy or remove material from Asio. He said it was already an offence for officers to disclose confidential information to a third party, punishable by up to two years in jail, and that penalty would increase to 10 years.

The president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Stephen Blanks, said the penalties raised serious concerns.

“When things go awry total secrecy is not desirable. When something is seriously awry whistleblowers play a vital role in the provision of good governance. The recent case relating to East Timor has thrown some light on this balance in Australia.”

The bill is the first element of the government’s planned national security reforms, with further changes set to target the risk posed by Australians who fight in Syria and Iraq and then return home.

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, a former intelligence analyst, said on Wednesday it was important for intelligence officers to be able to make public interest disclosures. Australia’s whistleblower legislation leaves a narrow window for disclosure of intelligence information.

“It must be accompanied by protection for intelligence officials who copy and disseminate material in the public interest,” Wilkie said.

Brandis referred the bill to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security for a report by September, when MPs are set to debate the law.

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Make NSA Spying Easier

With paranoia over NSA surveillance reaching a fever pitch, foreign governments are making a reasonable plea: bring our data home.

But the Americans are doing their best to ensure that the world’s Internet data stays on U.S. soil, well within the reach of their spies.

To do so, American negotiators are leveraging trade deals with much of the developed world, inserting language to ensure “cross-border data flows”—a euphemism that actually means they want to inhibit foreign governments from keeping data hosted domestically.

The trade deals they’re influencing—the Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TPP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—are all so secretive that nobody but the governments themselves are privy to the details.

But thanks to the Australians and Wikileaks, both of whom have leaked details on TPP, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement that will act as a sort of NAFTA for Asia-Pacific region nations.

America is, essentially, the world’s data server. Since the dawn of the internet itself, every database of import has been hosted in the grand US of A. But now, foreign governments are starting to see the benefit of patriating their citizens’ private information.

Canada was an early adopter of the idea. Federal procurement regulations often require government departments to insert local data requirements, stating that businesses who wish to administer or host Canadians’ information must keep the information within Canadian borders. Most recently, the Canadian Government put out a tender for a company to merge and host the email servers for all their departments. In doing so, they stuck in a national security exemption, forbidding foreign contractors from applying.

Nova Scotia and British Columbia went a step further, flatly requiring any government-hosted personal data to be physically located in Canada.

Australia has taken similar steps, including setting up firm requirements for how companies store offshore data.

But the American government is not having any of it and is using TPP negotiations to strong-arm new provisions that favour American hosted data.

“In today’s information-based economy, particularly where a broad range of services are moving to ‘cloud’ based delivery where U.S. firms are market leaders; this law hinders U.S. exports of a wide array of products and services,” reads a report on Canada from the office of the United States trade commissioner.

The only reason the world is aware of the provisions in TPP on data hosting, is because the Australian negotiators, facing American insistence on the matter, leaked it to the press. Along with the New Zealanders, the Aussies are proposing changes to the agreement to short-circuit America’s proposal.

The TPP negotiations are top-secret, and highly controversial. As VICE reported earlier this month, provisions of the agreement could force American anti-piracy provisions onto the signatory countries.

“We know there is an e-commerce chapter and the general understanding is that the U.S. is pressing for a provision that would bar the ability to require localization of data,” says University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. “That has big implications.”

The Americans aren’t even making secret their insistence on the matter. On the American website for the trade deal, it clearly states there’s a priority for the TPP to include: “requirements that support a single, global Internet, including ensuring cross-border data flows, consistent with governments’ legitimate interest in regulating for purposes of privacy protection.”

And they’re not taking their concerns lightly. An Access to Information Request obtained by the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association shows that the Americans were furious over the Canada email tender barring foreign bidders.

A representative from the U.S. trade office insisted on a meeting with Canadian representatives after the tender went online. They later forwarded angry responses from American industry entities, featuring a list of questions from a technology association:

“Why did Canada feel compelled to issue the blanket [Natural Security Exemption] on May 25, 2012? Who was involved in making this decision to invoke a blanket NSE?…How does Canada justify all of these e-mail, data center, and networking projects as rising to the level of national security?”

What makes the TPP agreement so extreme is that it could allow those corporations to sue governments that don’t respect the data flow provisions. For example, an American cloud server company could sue Canada for slipping in a “Canadians only” provision on the contract tender to merge its email servers.

What is unclear, thanks to the cloak-and-dagger approach that the twelve participating countries are taking on the matter, is if there are any exceptions carved out in the latest draft of the TPP.

Indeed, we don’t even know if the provision is in there at all but, given American determination on the matter, it seems almost certain that it is.

One analyst, working for a think tank monitoring the talks, said that there could be caveats stuck in the eventual agreement allowing for governments to claim national security exemptions. It could also allow sub-national governments—provincial or territorial—to still implement laws requiring local data hosting.

But there’s no indication one way or the other. “It’s undoing privacy laws through the back door,” said the analyst, who was not authorized to comment publicly. “British Columbia and Nova Scotia are in the U.S. Government’s sights.”

Even if it is eventually removed from the TPP agreement, talk is also swirling that the language is included in the TTIP—which is basically the Atlantic equivalent of the Pacific deal, tying in America and much of Europe. It, too, is secretly being negotiated.

For TiSA, there’s no doubt that the data flow provisions have been stuck in. We only know this, again, because of Wikileaks.

“No Party shall take measures that prevent transfers of information or the processing of financial information, including transfers of data by electronic means, into and out of its territory,” reads language in the agreement, which only affects certain financial transactions.

Ultimately, keeping data within reach of the NSA puts it under the jurisdiction of the secretive United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts—spoken in hushed tones among privacy activists as the all-powerful FISA courts that hand over blank cheques to the American spies for warrants and the like.

“It means that the NSA has a more direct line and fewer restrictions,” says Tamir Israel, lawyer at the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic. “If the server is in Canada, and I’m in Canada, it’s going to be harder for them to get.”

Practically, Israel points out, the NSA will have an easier time of installing physical signals interception hardware or software. Because, functionally, the server is closer and more accessible.

“The practical matters are what’s important, because the legal barriers mean nothing,” he says. “It’s a lot harder for them to set up a wire tapping machine in Canada.”

The second is that, for countries with limits on how their own intelligence agencies can operate, offshoring the data is an open invitation to perform bulk collection programs. For Canadian spy shop CSEC, it’s an easy side-step of the legal limits on their ability to snoop Canadians on home turf.

The Canadians, Israel points out, “can assume that it’s foreign because it’s transiting the border.”

Bill Robinson, a keen watcher of CSEC who runs the blog Lux Ex Umbra (“Light From Darkness,” in case you’re not fluent in Latin) has a similar theory on the cross-national sharing of data.

“When a Canadian is dealing with Google or Yahoo in the United States, is that considered communicating with a foreigner?” he said. “We don’t really know where the line is drawn, in that respect.”

Given that uncertainty, the sort of data that could be captured by both domestic surveillance programs and the NSA’s “bulk trolling,” as Robinson puts it, is limited only by your paranoia.

Police reports, emails, phone calls, health records, tax information, credit card details, and much more. Admittedly, some of this data is already susceptible, considering that America does host much of the world’s private data already.

Government data, however, is the real problem. And, as countries look to update their hardware, opting for the cheaper and more efficient option of cloud servers rather than sticking servers in their basement—the issue will be hugely important.

If a government agency tenders a cloud server contract, and it is awarded to an American company, there’s no turning back. While the NSA might be a big winner from these changes, it’s not the spies that are driving these changes.

The language of TiSA, especially the language around cross-border data flows, was “a bunch of companies’ wish list that they gave a government and the government said ‘let’s do it,’” says Israel.

TPP is much of the same. It basically awards American companies the luxury of pushing out smaller, local, cloud companies that offer governments and citizens a piece of mind, while making sure that the mega Yankee server farms are never required to set foot outside of Iowa.

But the language around allowing the free flow of data across borders is a bit of a straw-man argument, says Israel.

“Data can already flow freely across borders. That’s the point of the internet,” he says. The real question is whether countries should be able to put up trade barriers in order to leverage their citizens’ privacy.

“A ‘digital economy’ can only truly flourish without restrictive legislative boundaries,” says Robert Hart, CEO of the Canadian Cloud Council, which represents Canuck server companies.

“Canadian data centre companies have a unique opportunity to go to market with ‘data-safe’ cloud computing services, but how long will this opportunity truly remain?” said Hart.

Hart does believe there is cause for concern over language in the TPP. “A ban on such requirements could potentially place Canadian data at risk and run counter to the government’s own policies on the storage of its email data,” he says.

But, at the end of the day, governments might not care. Some, in fact, might relish the ability to dispatch their domestic spies to snoop their citizens’ foreign-hosted data.

“Maybe they’re using it as a way of policy laundering,” says Israel.

Problem is: we have no clue. The meetings may as well be held 20,000 leagues under the sea.

“The government has been so secretive with the text on these treaties that, by the time you provide input on any of these things, things may have already moved, or it’s too late: because there’s already a deal in place,” says Geist.

The last round of TPP negotiations, which just wrapped up in Ottawa, could be finalized at any time. Geist figures Prime Minister Stephen Harper would readily jettison privacy concerns if it means securing new markets for Canadian goods.

“We’re talking about a government that hasn’t been particularly sympathetic to a lot of privacy concerns, at least not lately, so the notion that somehow this would stand in the way of the deal strikes many as incredibly unlikely,” says Geist.

In the end, he’s not optimistic privacy concerns will outweigh economic benefit, especially with a ruling party championing the economy and the signing of several other monumental trade deals.

In other words, look out Canada, here comes the TPP.

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As Feared, UK Data Retention Act Passed In Record Time; Fight Back Has Already Begun

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It was just a week ago that Techdirt warned about a new "Snooper's Charter" that would be rammed through the British Parliament in record time. As feared, that has happened, and the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill -- DRIP to its friends -- has received the Royal Assent and is now law in the UK. That's the bad news; the good news is that the fight back has already begun. Today, the UK's Open Rights Group (ORG) announced that it would be challenging DRIP in the courts:

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Snowden Mouthpiece Greenwald Shills For Islamist Terror Targets

War On Terror: It's now clear that ex-NSA contractor Ed Snowden and his journalist sidekick Glenn Greenwald have an agenda beyond exposing spying abuses. They're really aiding and abetting the Islamist enemy.

By releasing the names of several Muslim terrorist targets under surveillance by the NSA and FBI in a new expose — "Under Surveillance: Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On" — Snowden and his mouthpiece Greenwald have tipped off the enemy and jeopardized major counterterror investigations.

They make it seem as if the five American Muslim leaders they found listed in NSA and FBI surveillance records were victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, while glossing over the raft of counterterror evidence against them. In fact, the government has court-approved cause to spy on them.

One of the FBI's terrorist targets — a subject of a FISA court warrant — is the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, a group Greenwald describes as a harmless "civil-rights organization," though the FBI has called it a "Hamas front" and the Justice Department has implicated it in a plot to raise millions for Palestinian terrorists.

A federal judge OK'd warrants to read CAIR chief Nihad Awad's email accounts. The FBI showed Awad may be engaged in "certain criminal activity on behalf of a foreign power." No wonder the agency cut off ties to CAIR and its Palestinian leader.

Greenwald has pocketed thousands of dollars speaking at CAIR fundraising banquets.

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Snowden: Dropbox is an NSA surveillance target, use Spideroak instead

A remarkable moment from last night's remarkable Snowden video from the Guardian.

In a discussion (around the 7:40 mark) of zero-knowledge systems whose operators can't spy on you even if they want to, Snowden reminds us that Dropbox is an NSA surveillance target cited in the original Prism leaks, and that the company has since added Condoleeza Rice, "probably the most anti-privacy official we can imagine," to its Board of Directors.

He contrasts Dropbox with its competitor, Spideroak, whose system is structured so that it can't betray you, even if Condi Rice wanted it to.

Edward Snowden: 'If I end up in chains in Guantánamo I can live with that' - video interview [The Guardian]

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Lawyers blocked our Black hat demo on de-anonymising Tor

Shelved Black Hat presentation would have explained why you don't have to be the NSA to break Tor

The Tor network promises online privacy by routing users' internet traffic through a number of servers – or layers – while encrypting data.

The surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden is known to have used Tor to maintain his privacy, while the documents he leaked showed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) struggled to uncover identities of those on the network.

However, a presentation promising to detail flaws in the anonymising network has been cancelled, organisers of a major hacker conference have confirmed.

The talk, called "You don't have to be the NSA to break Tor: de-anonymising users on a budget", was due to be delivered by the Carnegie Mellon researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, but a notice on the Black Hat conference website said lawyers from the university had stepped in.

The counsel for Carnegie Mellon said that neither the university nor its Software Engineering Institute (SEI), had given approval for public disclosure of the material set to be detailed by Volynkin and McCord, according to the Black Hat organisers.

Their talk was one of the most anticipated sessions at this year’s conference, which starts on 2 August in Las Vegas. They promised to explain how anyone with $3,000 could de-anonymise users of Tor.

Details on the presentation, which have now been removed from the Black Hat site, suggested that a determined hacker could “de-anonymise hundreds of thousands Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months”.

Besides individual users, there are numerous criminal websites making use of Tor, including sites offering hitman services and illegal drugs, even though the most prominent example, Silk Road, was shut down in 2013.

Organisers from the Tor Project said they were working with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon, which is sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security, to release information on the problems identified by the researchers.

“We did not ask Black Hat or CERT to cancel the talk. We did (and still do) have questions for the presenter and for CERT about some aspects of the research, but we had no idea the talk would be pulled before the announcement was made,” said Tor Project president Roger Dingledine.

“We never received slides or any description of what would be presented in the talk itself beyond what was available on the Black Hat webpage. Researchers who have told us about bugs in the past have found us pretty helpful in fixing issues, and generally positive to work with.”

Carnegie Mellon had not responded to a request for comment by the Guardian at the time of publication.

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Burgers tegen Plasterk verliest zaak tegen staat

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De Nederlandse geheime diensten AIVD en MIVD mogen telecommunicatie uitwisselen met de Amerikaanse veiligheidsdienst NSA. Dat kan door de de beugel, besloot de rechtbank in Den Haag vandaag in de zaak die was aangespannen door de gelegenheidscoalitie Burgers tegen Plasterk.

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Russia offers 3.9m roubles for 'research to identify users of Tor'

Analysts say tender for research on service that anonymises browsing sends signal to online community amid crackdown on Russian internet

Russia's interior ministry has offered up to 3.9m roubles (£65,000) for research on identifying the users of the anonymous browsing network Tor, raising questions of online freedom amid a broader crackdown on the Russian internet.

The interior ministry's special technology and communications group published a tender earlier this month on the government procurement website offering the sum for "research work, Tor cipher".

Before changes to the tender were published on Friday, numerous news outlets reported that it originally sought "research work on the possibility to obtain technical information about users (user equipment) of the anonymous network Tor".

According to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on surveillance and security services, the interior ministry might be exploring possible ways to restrict Tor. But the fact that the tender was publicly announced meant that those seeking greater government control of the internet had defined their next target and were sending "yet another signal" to the online community, he argued.

"It's not important if the Russian government is able to block Tor or not," Soldatov said. "The importance is that they're sending signals that they are watching this. People will start to be more cautious."

The interior ministry refused to comment on Friday afternoon.

Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory as an "onion routing project", Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows users to hide the source and destination of their internet browsing and keeps websites from tracking them. It is often used by whistleblowers and residents of countries where the authorities restrict access to the internet, but has also been known to be used for criminal activity. A famous example was the Tor-based online market Silk Road, which was known as an "eBay for drugs" before the FBI shut it down in 2013.

Although many news outlets reported on the recent tender as a reward for "cracking Tor", internet security experts doubted Tor could be successfully decrypted, let alone for a mere 3.9m roubles.

Of all countries, the fifth largest contingent of Tor users come from Russia, where the network's popularity more than doubled in June, going from about 80,000 directly connecting users to more than 210,000. The growth followed a "bloggers law" – signed by the president, Vladimir Putin, in May – requiring any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily to register with the government. Media experts argued that the legislation would stifle opposition voices and restrict government criticism on the internet.

The move was part of a wider campaign to regulate the internet which saw the authorities block three major opposition news sites as well as the blog of anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny in March. Users located in Russia can now only access the news sites through anonymising services such as Tor.

This week, Putin signed a law requiring internet companies to store Russian user data in-country, where intelligence services enjoy sweeping access to electronic information through telecoms companies. Critics worry that websites such as Facebook and Twitter, which the opposition used to organise a string of huge rallies in 2011-2013, would be forced to stop operating in Russia when it comes into effect in 2016.

Unlike the Chinese system of internet censorship, which directly blocks websites such as Google, the Russian one is built on intimidation so that users "themselves become more cautious, and internet companies think up ways to block certain sites," Soldatov said.

But blogger, journalist and web entrepreneur Anton Nosik doubted that the Tor research tender would have any effect, arguing that the interior ministry was not a serious player among the various government agencies surveilling the internet but was now "trying to make a name for itself".

"The only significance [of the tender] is the money being paid and the PR surrounding it, showing that the ministry of interior is seriously working on issues of anonymising technology, so that everybody's talking about it. And everybody is talking about it," Nosik said.

More worrying, Nosik said, was leading communications provider Rostelecom's investment in Deep Packet Inspection technology that would filter web traffic based on its content rather than its source. This would severely reduce users' anonymity on the web, although Tor should be able to somewhat limit DPI capabilities, Nosik said.

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CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers

John Brennan issues apology after acknowledging that agency spied on Senate intelligence committee’s staff members

quote:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials.

Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

The admission brings Brennan’s already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama’s most trusted security aides.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. “Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet,” he said.

Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: “No.”

In March, the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the agency of violating constitutional boundaries by spying on the Senate.

Feinstein said the vindication, from CIA inspector general David Buckley, and Brennan’s apology were “positive first steps,” suggesting that the director had further work to do before she would consider the matter closed.

She stopped short of calling for Brennan’s resignation, and said she expected a prompt declassification of Buckley’s findings. But her fellow committee member Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, called Brennan’s future into question.

“From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in John Brennan,” Udall said.

“I also believe the administration should appoint an independent counsel to look into what I believe could be the violation of multiple provisions of the Constitution as well as federal criminal statutes and executive order 12333,” he added, referring to a Reagan-era presidential directive defining the roles of the intelligence agencies.

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Vertrouweling Snowden weigert medewerking aan spionageonderzoek

Snowden-vertrouweling en journalist Glenn Greenwald weigert mee te werken aan een Duits parlementair onderzoek naar de spionagepraktijken van de Amerikaanse geheime dienst NSA. Als de parlementariërs niet met 'kroongetuige' Edward Snowden praten, dan ook niet met hem.

Eerder besloten de Duitse parlementariërs Snowden niet uit te nodigen om de Verenigde Staten niet voor het hoofd te stoten. Volgens Greenwald betekent dit dat ze de relatie met Amerika boven hun eigen onderzoek stellen. 'Ik ben niet bereid om aan een vertoning mee te werken die de schijn van een oprecht onderzoek moet wekken,' zei Greenwald.

Greenwald zegt dat een 'serieus onderzoek' vermeden wordt. 'Het gaat puur om de symboliek', schrijft hij in een e-mail aan de Bondsdag.
De journalist zei in april nog bereid zijn voor het Duitse parlement te getuigen. Eerder deed hij dat al voor het Amerikaanse Congres, de Braziliaanse Senaat en het Europees Parlement. Greenwald pleitte ook meteen voor een Duitse verblijfsvergunning voor Snowden, die al ruim een jaar in Rusland zit.

Afgelopen donderdag om middernacht verliep Snowdens Russische verblijfsvergunning. Zijn aanvraag voor verlenging is tot dusverre niet goedgekeurd.

Partijen oneens over getuigenis Snowden
De Duitse parlementsleden willen onderzoek doen naar de afluisterpraktijken die vorig jaar door Snowden onthuld werden. Klokkenluider Snowden en journalist Greenwald brachten vorige zomer samen de NSA-documenten naar buiten, die voor enkele maanden de wereld in hun greep hielden.

In het Duitse parlement lagen verschillende partijen overhoop over de mogelijke getuigenis van Snowden. De linkse oppositiepartijen, die herhaaldelijk de getuigenis van de klokkenluider bepleitten, trokken aan het kortste eind. Snowden heeft na deze lange strijd gezegd voorlopig niet aan een onderzoek mee te willen werken.

Na de kroongetuige valt nu met Greenwald een tweede belangrijke getuige voor het Duitse onderzoek weg. Maar de lijst houdt hiermee niet op. Nog zo'n honderd experts en getuigen zullen voor het onderzoek worden ondervraagd.

De CEO's Mark Zuckerberg van Facebook, Eric Schmidt van Google, Tim Cook van Apple en Dick Costolo van Twitter zijn daar ook bij.

Mocht het Duitse parlement toch moedig genoeg zijn om Snowden te ondervragen, dan is hij alsnog bereid mee te werken, liet de onderzoeksjournalist weten.

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"Kerry afgeluisterd door Mossad"

De Israëlische geheime dienst heeft vorig jaar telefoontjes van de Amerikaanse minister Kerry afgeluisterd. Dat schrijft het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel, dat zich baseert op bronnen bij verscheidene westerse geheime diensten.

Kerry bemiddelde vorig jaar tussen Israël en de Palestijnen. Hij nodigde vertegenwoordigers van beide landen uit naar Washington en vloog zelf meerdere keren naar het Midden-Oosten om gesprekken te voeren. Dat deed hij volgens Der Spiegel niet altijd in beveiligde ruimtes of via speciale telefoonlijnen. Telefoontjes met gewone mobiele telefoons kon de Mossad moeiteloos onderscheppen.

Meer afluisteraars

Volgens het weekblad heeft zeker één andere geheime dienst ook meegeluisterd. Welke dat is, wordt niet vermeld.

Israël zou de onderschepte informatie hebben gebruikt bij de onderhandelingen, die dit voorjaar strandden. Kerry schetste daarna een buitengewoon somber beeld van het vredesproces.

Gazastrook

Een oplossing van het conflict tussen Israël en de Palestijnen lijkt verder weg dan ooit, nu in de Gazastrook een grondoorlog woedt. De afgelopen weken kwamen volgens Palestijnse autoriteiten meer dan 1700 inwoners van Gaza om het leven bij aanvallen en bombardementen. Aan Israëlische zijde vielen tot nu toe 67 slachtoffers.

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Klokkenluiders negatief over gevolgen melding

Werknemers bij de overheid en in het bedrijfsleven ervaren vaak negatieve gevolgen van het melden van strafbare feiten en andere misstanden op het werk.

In een uitgebreide evaluatie van allerhande klokkenluidersregelingen constateert onderzoeksbureau Berenschot dat 32 procent van de klokkenluiders de persoonlijke gevolgen als negatief beoordeelt. Misstanden worden in circa de helft van de gevallen niet aangepakt of opgelost.

Slechts een vijfde van de klokkenluiders zegt positieve ervaringen te hebben met het melden van misstanden, blijkt uit het maandag verschenen rapport 'Veilig misstanden melden op het werk', gemaakt in opdracht van het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken.

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Cash, Weapons and Surveillance: the U.S. is a Key Party to Every Israeli Attack

The U.S. government has long lavished overwhelming aid on Israel, providing cash, weapons and surveillance technology that play a crucial role in Israel’s attacks on its neighbors. But top secret documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shed substantial new light on how the U.S. and its partners directly enable Israel’s military assaults – such as the one on Gaza.

Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians. In many cases, the NSA and ISNU work cooperatively with the British and Canadian spy agencies, the GCHQ and CSEC.

The relationship has, on at least one occasion, entailed the covert payment of a large amount of cash to Israeli operatives. Beyond their own surveillance programs, the American and British surveillance agencies rely on U.S.-supported Arab regimes, including the Jordanian monarchy and even the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, to provide vital spying services regarding Palestinian targets.

The new documents underscore the indispensable, direct involvement of the U.S. government and its key allies in Israeli aggression against its neighbors. That covert support is squarely at odds with the posture of helpless detachment typically adopted by Obama officials and their supporters.

President Obama, in his press conference on Friday, said ”it is heartbreaking to see what’s happening there,” referring to the weeks of civilian deaths in Gaza – “as if he’s just a bystander, watching it all unfold,” observed Brooklyn College Professor Corey Robin. Robin added: ”Obama talks about Gaza as if it were a natural disaster, an uncontrollable biological event.”

Each time Israel attacks Gaza and massacres its trapped civilian population – at the end of 2008, in the fall of 2012, and now again this past month – the same process repeats itself in both U.S. media and government circles: the U.S. government feeds Israel the weapons it uses and steadfastly defends its aggression both publicly and at the U.N.; the U.S. Congress unanimously enacts one resolution after the next to support and enable Israel; and then American media figures pretend that the Israeli attack has nothing to do with their country, that it’s just some sort of unfortunately intractable, distant conflict between two equally intransigent foreign parties in response to which all decent Americans helplessly throw up their hands as though they bear no responsibility.

“The United States has been trying to broker peace in the Middle East for the past 20 years,” wrote the liberal commentator Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, last Tuesday. The following day, CNN reported that the Obama administration ”agreed to Israel’s request to resupply it with several types of ammunition … Among the items being bought are 120mm mortar rounds and 40mm ammunition for grenade launchers.”

The new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government, which is anything but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks. And the relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand, and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of that enabling.

Last September, the Guardian revealed that the NSA “routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens.” The paper published the full top secret Memoranadum of Understanding between the two agencies governing that sharing. But the NSA/ISNU relationship extends far beyond that.

One newly disclosed top secret NSA document, dated April 13, 2013 and published today by the Intercept, recounts that the “NSA maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting.”

Specifically, “this SIGINT relationship has increasingly been the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.” Moreover, “NSA’s cyber partnerships expanded beyond ISNU to include Israeli Defense Intelligence’s [Special Operation Division] SOD and Mossad.”

Under this expanded cooperation, the Americans and Israelis work together to gain access to “geographic targets [that] include the countries of North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union.” It also includes “a dedicated communications line between NSA and ISNU [that] supports the exchange of raw material, as well as daily analytic and technical correspondence.”

The relationship has provided Israel with ample support for both intelligence and surveillance: “The Israeli side enjoys the benefits of expanded geographic access to world-class NSA cryptanalytic and SIGINT engineering expertise, and also gains controlled access to advanced U.S. technology and equipment via accommodation buys and foreign military sales.” Among Israel’s priorities for the cooperation are what the NSA calls “Palestinian terrorism.”

The cooperation between the NSA and ISNU began decades ago. A top secret agreement between the two agencies from July 1999 recounts that the first formal intelligence-sharing agreement was entered into in 1968 between U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and informally began in the 1950s. But the relationship has grown rapidly in the last decade.

In 2003 and 2004, the Israelis were pressuring the NSA to agree to a massively expanded intelligence-sharing relationship called “Gladiator.” As part of that process, Israel wanted the Americans to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Israeli activities. The specific proposed “Gladiator” agreement appears never to have been consummated, derailed by Israeli demands that the U.S. bear the full cost, but documents in the Snowden archive pertaining to those negotiations contain what appear to be two receipts for one or more payments of $500,000 in cash to Israeli officials for unspecified purposes:

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'Amerika vreest dat er een nieuwe klokkenluider actief is'

De Amerikaanse regering houdt er rekening mee dat een nieuwe klokkenluider actief is. Dat meldt CNN op basis van regeringsfunctionarissen. De vrees is ontstaan doordat berichten over documenten van het Amerikaanse Antiterrorisme Centrum opdoken op The Intercept, een website van klokkenluiders.

Het gaat om documenten over de groei van opgeslagen informatie over terrorismeverdachten. De documenten daarover dateren van augustus 2013. Dat is na de vlucht van klokkenluider Edward Snowden naar Rusland.

De website The Intercept, waar de de artikelen over de documenten verschenen, is opgezet door voormalig The Guardian-journalist Glenn Greenwald die ook informatie van Snowden wereldkundig maakte.

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Barack Obamas Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers

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Snowden mag nog drie jaar in Rusland blijven

De Amerikaanse klokkenluider Edward Snowden heeft van de Russiche autoriteiten een verblijfsvergunning van 3 jaar gekregen. Dat heeft zijn Russische advocaat vandaag laten weten.

Snowdens politiek asiel liep officieel op 1 augustus af. Hij had gezegd langer in Rusland te willen blijven.

Snowden wordt door de VS gezocht, omdat hij geheimen van de NSA (Nationaal Security Agency) wereldkundig maakte. De enorme omvang van de wereldwijde spionagepraktijken van deze dienst schokte vriend en vijand van Washington.

De voortvluchtige klokkenluider arriveerde 23 juni 2013 vanuit Hongkong op de luchthaven Sjeremetjevo van Moskou. Hij was eigenlijk van plan door te reizen naar Latijns-Amerika. Hij vertoefde enige tijd in de vertrekhal. Pas op 1 augustus 2013 passeerde hij de douane na asiel in Rusland te hebben gekregen.

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Politie gebruikt mogelijk omstreden spionagesoftware

Digitale activisten hebben een Duits-Brits bedrijf gehackt dat geheime spionagesoftware aan overheden en opsporingsautoriteiten verkoopt. De Nederlandse politie lijkt ook tot de klanten te behoren.

Gisteren verscheen op internet een enorme berg aan technische en klanteninformatie van het bedrijf Gamma International. Dat is de maker van FinFisher, een softwareprogramma waarmee computers kunnen worden geïnfecteerd om op afstand bestanden te kopiëren, beeldschermkopieën te maken en toetsaanslagen te registreren. Spionagesoftware dus, die alleen wordt verkocht aan overheden.

De hack is een grote overwinning voor burgerrechtenactivisten. FinFisher werd onder meer door de overheid van Bahrein gebruikt om de computers van dissidenten te bespioneren gedurende de Arabische Lente. Sindsdien liggen het programma en het bedrijf onder vuur. Er wordt onder meer gepleit voor exportregels voor dergelijke software.

Politie mogelijk ook klant
Ook de Nederlandse politie lijkt gebruik te maken van het programma. In de gehackte klantenbestanden werd een versleutelingscode gevonden die toebehoort aan een lid van de Nationale Eenheid, de landelijke politie in Driebergen. De match werd gevonden door de Nederlandse hacker Jurre van Bergen, die zich met andere digitale experts op de geopenbaarde informatie had gestort.

Vervolgens werd duidelijk dat deze klant, waarschijnlijk de Nederlandse politie dus, gebruik maakt van drie van Gamma's softwareprogramma's. De licentie zou lopen van 2012 tot 2015.

In Nederland is het op afstand hacken en overnemen van verdachte computers door de politie niet toegestaan. Er is een nieuwe wet in de maak (Wet Computercriminaliteit III), die daar verandering in moet brengen.

Wob-verzoek
'Het is raar dat de politie die producten nu al in gebruik heeft', zegt Rejo Zenger van digitale burgerrechtenorganisatie Bits of Freedom. 'Bovendien hebben ze dat altijd verzwegen.' Zenger diende in 2012 een Wob-verzoek in om te vragen naar het gebruik van spyware. Toen kreeg hij als antwoord dat er geen documenten over waren gevonden.

Een woordvoerder van het ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie benadrukt dat het gebruik van spyware onder voorwaarden al is toegestaan. Dan gaat het om de installatie van deze software ter plekke, niet om het van afstand overnemen (en live volgen) van de activiteiten op de computer.

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Snowden casts doubt on NSA investigation into security disclosures

NSA whistleblower says he left detectable digital traces of his removal of documents which the agency did not pick up on

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has called into question the competence of the investigation into the aftermath of his disclosures, which was overseen by the NSA’s new deputy director, Rick Ledgett.

In a new cover story for Wired magazine, the former NSA contractor provided writer James Bamford with previously unreported allegations of NSA cyberattack tools, including a piece of software, codenamed MonsterMind, that would automate a hostile response when it detected a network intrusion. He also alleged that a 2012 incident that took Syria’s internet offline was the fault of the NSA.

Snowden told Bamford, a longtime chronicler of the agency, that he left detectable digital traces of his removal of scores of documents from the technically sophisticated agency, allowing the NSA to know precisely what he did and did not take. Yet making a specific determination of the extent of the data breach has escaped the agency, which has simultaneously made vast and dire claims about the damage Snowden caused.

The head of the NSA’s digital forensics investigation into the Snowden disclosures, considered the most extensive in the agency’s history, was Ledgett, who has since been promoted to deputy director, its most senior civilian position.

Ledgett told CBS’s 60 Minutes in December that he “wouldn’t dispute” that Snowden took with him from the NSA 1.7m documents – although subsequent clarifications by the NSA and its congressional allies indicate that the basis for that figure is the number of documents that Snowden was able to access, not what he actually took.

If Snowden’s allegation is true, it raises questions about the technical expertise and competence of Ledgett’s investigation, which informed months of NSA public pushback against Snowden. It would also call into question assurances, made by Ledgett in a December interview with Reuters and other NSA officials, that the agency has implemented robust post-Snowden technical defenses to forestall another mass breach of classified information.

“I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden told Bamford in an interview in Moscow, where he received asylum last year after his intended plans for asylum in Latin America were blocked, in part by US government officials.

“I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

Earlier this year, Lt Gen Michael Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that the intelligence community’s understanding of how many documents Snowden took was a blanket assessment, not verified fact.

“We assume that Snowden, everything that he touched, we assume that he took, stole,” Flynn testified in February.

That assessment provided NSA and its allies with a basis for publicly alleging that Snowden had done widespread damage to US intelligence efforts worldwide, endangered US military personnel and prompted terrorist organizations to harden their cyber defenses. It has provided public evidence for none of those assertions, the most dire of which the new director, Admiral Michael Rodgers, has abandoned.

The NSA did not address questions about what Bamford called Snowden’s “digital breadcrumbs”. It provided the Guardian with an omnibus response that did not deny any allegation Snowden made to Bamford.

“If Mr Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the US Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him,” NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said. It is the same response she provided to Bamford for his story.

The piece features dramatic photographs by the acclaimed photographer Platon of Snowden in Moscow, including a cover photo of Snowden gripping an American flag to his face. Another photo, presumably provided by Snowden, shows the future whistleblower in a tuxedo with a smiling Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director who began the constellation of post-9/11 warrantless bulk surveillance programs, the extent of which Snowden exposed.

Snowden also told Bamford about two other previously unknown NSA efforts. Both concern cyberattacks.

The MonsterMind software is a digital tool that would detect the beginnings of a hostile cyber incursion and automates a hostile response. If true, the software would turn a potential act of war into an automated command, without input from the chain of command, and not necessarily target at the culprit of the incursion, as many such digital penetrations are routed through third countries.

It is also unclear whether MonsterMind distinguishes between incursions aimed at data destruction, data exfiltration and network disruption; nor if it automates a proportional response.

As well, Snowden identified the elite NSA hacking unit, called Tailored Access Operations, accidentally cut off Syria’s access to the internet in 2012. The unit allegedly attempted to install an exploit in the hardware of an unnamed service provider that would have provided NSA with mass access to internet usage, communications and patterns in Syria, where a civil war was metastasizing into an Islamist insurgency destabilizing the Middle East.

Instead of gaining mass visibility into the internet habits of Syrians, Snowden alleged, a glitch took Syria offline. On 29 November 2012, the analysis firm Renesys reported that 92% of the routed networks providing internet connectivity for Syria, 77 of them, had gone dark.

Snowden told Bamford that NSA officials joked that if they were discovered, they would blame the outage on Israel.

At the time, the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, blamed the outage on “terrorists”, while opposition groups fighting Assad suspected his government itself was responsible.

NSA did not respond to questions about Ledgett, MonsterMind or the Syrian outage.

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'Geheime dienst Duitsland luisterde Hillary Clinton af'

De Duitse geheime dienst BND heeft zeker één telefoongesprek van de de vroegere Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Hillary Clinton afgeluisterd.

Ook gaf de Duitse overheid opdracht tot het afluisteren van een (niet nader genoemde) NAVO-bondgenoot. Dat blijkt volgens de Duitse krant Süddeutsche Zeitung uit documenten die een voormalig medewerker van de BND aan de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst CIA heeft gegeven. De spion is in juli gearresteerd.

De Duitse overheid ontkent dat de BND systematisch de VS afluistert. Het bewuste telefoongesprek zou toevallig zijn opgenomen. Clinton was minister van januari 2009 tot en met januari 2013.

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NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization

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Since the early days of TCP, port scanning has been used by computer saboteurs to locate vulnerable systems. In a new set of top secret documents seen by Heise, it is revealed that in 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a "standard tool" to be applied against entire nations (Figure 1, see the picture gallery). Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the HACIENDA program in the presentation (Figure 2), which comes with a promotional offer: readers desiring to do reconnaissance against another country need simply send an e-mail (Figure 3).

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'Duitsland bespioneerde Turkije en Albanië'

De Duitse geheime dienst BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) bespioneert Turkije al sinds 1976. Dat blijkt uit een publicatie van het Duitse tijdschrift Focus. Tot nu toe was alleen officieel bekend dat Duitsland de collega-lidstaat van de NAVO afluisterde sinds de regering-Schröder, die in 1998 aantrad. Turkije heeft de Duitse ambassadeur op het matje geroepen.

Het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel onthulde dat ook Albanië op de lijst van afgeluisterde landen staat. Reden daarvoor was onder meer Duitslands belangstelling in de Albanese georganiseerde misdaad. De publicatie komt op een gevoelig moment; op 28 augustus ontmoet bondskanselier Angela Merkel de premier van Albanië, Edi Rama.

Duitsland wordt in toenemende mate hypocrisie verweten nu blijkt dat het zelf ook bondgenoten bespioneert. Eerder ontstond een vertrouwenscrisis met de Verenigde Staten vanwege afluisterpraktijken in Duitsland. Onder meer de telefoon van bondskanselier Angela Merkel werd afgeluisterd.

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Which Linux distro is best for protecting your privacy?

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Among other things here at Linux Format we are also a bit clairvoyant. We decided that it was the right moment to look at 'anonymous' Linux distributions many weeks before mainstream media started discussing PRISM.

Of course, even if nothing like that existed, there would still be many good reasons to protect at least part of what you want or need to do online: the examples go from whistle-blowing to home banking or super-invasive advertising. In all these cases, proper configuration of (at least!) the tools you use for web surfing, email, instant messaging and file sharing is crucial.

Linux 'anonymous' distros are designed to help in just these kinds of situations. As a minimum, these systems are pre-configured to make it easier to surf the web without telling everybody in clear text where, or who, you really are.

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The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

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The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

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GCHQ backlash? Anonymous website hacked following privacy rights protest

Anonymous UK’s website was recently targeted and taken down in the midst of a four-day privacy rights protest organized by the collective. The demonstration was held outside Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

A spokesman for the hacktivist group believes the targeted attack was carried out by GCHQ officials.

The protest, which began outside Britain’s Cheltenham-based spy base last Friday, was reportedly launched to highlight an ongoing assault on Britons’ privacy rights against a backdrop of increasing mass surveillance. But prior to the main day of protest scheduled for Saturday, Anonymous UK’s website was taken down. The incident occurred late Friday evening.

This is not the first time the group has had such an experience. A spokesperson for the hacktivist collective, who runs Anonymous UK's online radio station, insists they have been unjustly targeted by GCHQ on multiple occasions.

“One of our servers was destroyed and our UK radio station has been shut down,” the spokesperson told RT on Friday, adding that the group's site was also taken down following the launch of a campaign to feed homeless people.

Commenting on the cyber attack, the spokesman said that if a member of the public targeted a government site in this manner, they could "get up to five years in prison the UK." Yet “GHHQ has no one to answer to.”

“This is why we protest,” he stressed.

Although GCHQ allegedly attempted to liaise with Anonymous UK in advance of the demonstration, a spokesperson for the collective said the group declined to respond. The collective believes privacy rights advocates have a democratic right to protest peacefully, and shouldn't have to justify their desire to do so to UK authorities.

Probed as to whether Anonymous UK plans to issue a formal complaint about the targeting of its website, a spokesperson said “we can’t complain to anyone” because “GCHQ would just deny it.”

Central to the group’s privacy rights concerns is an alleged UK intelligence operation called Tempora. Covert documents sent to the Guardian by US whistleblower Edward Snowden state that the program facilitates British intelligence officers’ access to private data. Such information relates specifically to email, social networking, and telephone conversations.

Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal is currently seeking to discern whether Tempora exists, and if it violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – which deals with citizens’ right to privacy. A final judgment on the case is yet to emerge, and the group of high profile UK and international civil liberties groups that launched the proceedings is currently awaiting an outcome.

Anonymous UK told RT on Friday that the collective is doubtful the final judgement will favor the public’s right to privacy.

According to the hacktivist collective, approximately 60 protesters attended the demonstration over the weekend in a bid to raise awareness about the intrusive nature of GCHQ mass surveillance. Others estimate the number of attendees may have been more moderate. Anonymous UK stated all activists demonstrated in a peaceful and lawful manner, and there were no arrests. Nevertheless, its site remains inaccessible visitors.

The UK-based collective is a subset of Anonymous, a nebulous international network of activists and hacktvists known for politically charged, subversive maneuvers worldwide. Recent actions carried out by the broader group include efforts to tackle global inequality, operations to counter government attacks on citizens’ privacy rights, efforts to mitigate child pornography, and a “cyber assault” against Israel to counter IDF operations in Gaza.

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NSA bulk collection of phone data under scrutiny as federal case opens

Justice Department officials face pointed questions on opening day of case that could push NSA privacy to supreme court

Federal judges pointedly questioned a Justice Department lawyer on Tuesday about the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of US phone data, in the opening day of case that represents a major step toward a supreme court ruling on the constitutionality of the program.

A three-judge panel from the second circuit court of appeals aimed skeptical questions at assistant attorney general Stuart Delery about the scope and breadth of the call-records dragnet, reported last year by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.

Judge Gerard Lynch, a Barack Obama appointee, asked what was “so uniquely valuable about phone records” that compelled the NSA to collect all domestic phone records, in bulk, without individual suspicion of terrorism, espionage or any other wrongdoing.

Getting the data “rapidly has to be what this is about”, said Lynch, a former New York federal prosecutor. “Some of us up here have done this in criminal investigations.”

Delery was put in the position of defending a program that Obama no longer supports in public. The president earlier this year endorsed divesting NSA of its phone records databases, which struck the judges as curious.

The Justice Department official’s more immediate task was to convince the judges that they lacked the authority to consider the legality of the bulk call-records collection. “Congress has not provided jurisdiction to the court to reach statutory claims,” he argued. The judges noted that his contention left the panel in the position of considering constitutionality ahead of legality, an inversion of US legal doctrine.

While none of the three judges were inclined to rule from the bench Tuesday, they peppered Delery with sharp questions for over half an hour. Some were curious about factual aspects of the phone records program and appeared mildly frustrated at their inability to get public answers about what until last year was among the US government’s most closely held secrets.

“You seem to rely on declassified material,” judge Robert D Sack, a Bill Clinton appointee, told Delery. “What else aren’t you telling us?”

The case reached the appeals court after a December ruling from Judge William Pauley declined to grant its petitioner, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an injunction to stop the bulk records collection. That ruling contradicted one barely a week earlier from a Washington DC judge, Richard Leon, that called the collection “almost Orwellian”. Judges wondered aloud about the implications if they ordered a halt to the bulk collection while a DC appeals court, scheduled to hear a government appeal in the case Leon ruled on, reaches the opposite conclusion.

Alexander Abdo, an attorney for the ACLU, said the supreme court would likely have to resolve the dispute, something that legal scholars and observers on both sides of the past year’s surveillance debate have anticipated.

Abdo received a grilling from the judges as well, if not quite as intensely. They pushed Abdo to define a “reasonable” expectation of privacy over metadata, even as they later asked Delery if bulk phone data was “content-divulging.”

Underscoring an element of the case likely to be stated openly should the supreme court rule, Lynch mused to Abdo: “Say we’re wrong and somebody blows up a subway train.”

Since Pauley and Leon’s ruling, Congress, the NSA and the Obama administration have begun to embrace a legislative effort that would end the NSA’s direct bulk collection of domestic phone records, but permit the government to collect thousands of phone records based on a single court order, alarming privacy advocates. While the House passed the bill in May, the Senate still has not, and the legislative calendar is ticking down ahead of November’s congressional elections.

Until then, Abdo said, “the injury is ongoing on a daily basis”, as the NSA, through the secret Fisa court, continues to collect phone data in bulk ahead of legislative action, albeit on a somewhat circumscribed scale.

Judges on the appeals court openly joked about their likely status as a stepping stone for a landmark high-court decision on surveillance and privacy.

“We gave you probably more time than you’ll get in the supreme court,” Lynch told Delery as the assistant attorney general concluded his presentation.

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Judge may hold Microsoft in contempt after refusal to hand over foreign data

Obama administration contends that company with operations in US must comply with warrants for data, even if stored abroad

A federal judge may hold Microsoft in contempt of court this week over its refusal to give the US government data stored overseas.

Judge Loretta Preska, chief of the US district court in New York, gave the company until Friday to comply with an order which could further dent trust in the cloud.

In a statement on Tuesday Microsoft, citing privacy concerns, told Ars Technica it would continue to defy the court order. “We will not be turning over the email.”

US prosecutors who are investigating narcotic trafficking obtained a search warrant last December to access an email account controlled and maintained by Microsoft servers in Dublin, Ireland.

The Redmond-based technology company resisted, arguing that emails belong to its customers and that the servers are beyond US jurisdiction, a challenge to the Obama administration’s contention that a company with operations in the US must comply with warrants for data, even if stored abroad.

Judge Preska ruled in July that Microsoft must comply because it was a US company and controlled the data. She suspended enforcement of the order pending an appeal by the company.

In a procedural wrangle the judge lifted the suspension last week, saying the ruling was not appealable, but added that Microsoft could in fact obtain an appeal if it refused to comply and was found in contempt. “If Microsoft refuses to comply, the court could find Microsoft in contempt, which would be a final order subject to appellate review,” the judge wrote.

Microsoft said all sides agreed the case should and would go to appeal. “This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen.”

The government asked Judge Preska to hold Microsoft in contempt, leading to a “properly appealable final order”.

By handing over the data Microsoft would violate Irish law. A graver concern for the company, and other US technology giants, is another blow to public trust in their ability to protect privacy.

Several companies, including AT&T Inc, Apple Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, have filed court briefs supporting Microsoft. They fear losing billions of dollars in revenue to foreign competitors who could be perceived as better guardians of privacy.

The German government has reportedly told Microsoft it will shun data storage from US companies unless the ruling is overturned.

In seeking the emails the US government was looking to sidestep legal protections enshrined in the constitution’s fourth amendment, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Timeless values should endure, and digital commons sense should prevail.”

Trust in the cloud has been battered by Edward Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance and by the recent hacking of hundreds of celebrities’ photos.

It is unclear which government agency is seeking the emails stored in Dublin because the warrant and all related documents are sealed.

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AIVD schond privacyregels bij onderzoek naar sociale media

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Inlichtingendienst AIVD heeft bij het onderzoek naar sociale media de privacyregels overtreden. Daarnaast heeft de dienst bij het hacken van een aantal grote algemene webfora ten onrechte alle informatie over bezoekers van deze fora verzameld. Dat concludeert de CTIVD, de toezichthouder op de veiligheidsdiensten, in het rapport dat vanmiddag naar de Tweede Kamer is gestuurd.

NRC Handelsblad onthulde eind vorig jaar op basis van documenten van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA dat de AIVD webfora hackt en daarmee informatie verzamelt over alle bezoekers van die fora. Indertijd meldde zowel de AIVD als minister Plasterk van Binnenlandse Zaken dat het hacken van deze webfora valt binnen de wettelijke bevoegdheden van de dienst.

Bij vijf hackoperaties van webfora waarbij agenten zijn ingezet schiet de motivering voor de operatie tekort. Daarom beoordeelt de CTIVD de inzet van dit middel als “onrechtmatig”. Het gaat hierbij om hacks die zij uitgevoerd op verzoek van buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten.

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The CIA’s Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication

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A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

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The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations

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Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that. The document, the 2009 Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review—provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—is a fascinating window into the mindset of America’s spies as they identify future threats to the U.S. and lay out the actions the U.S. intelligence community should take in response. It anticipates a series of potential scenarios the U.S. may face in 2025, from a “China/Russia/India/Iran centered bloc [that] challenges U.S. supremacy” to a world in which “identity-based groups supplant nation-states,” and games out how the U.S. intelligence community should operate in those alternative futures—the idea being to assess “the most challenging issues [the U.S.] could face beyond the standard planning cycle.”

One of the principal threats raised in the report is a scenario “in which the United States’ technological and innovative edge slips”— in particular, “that the technological capacity of foreign multinational corporations could outstrip that of U.S. corporations.” Such a development, the report says “could put the United States at a growing—and potentially permanent—disadvantage in crucial areas such as energy, nanotechnology, medicine, and information technology.”

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The Sabu Effect: An Interview with Jay Leiderman

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Leiderman’s been called Anonymous’ lawyer of choice, and has defended or advised Anons from political refugee Commander X through LulzSec, AntiSec, incarcerated Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, and more. We asked him why he chose this field rather than something that might buy him a yacht or at least the ability to sleep at night. He replied that it was certainly anything but a calculated careerist move, and less his choice than the inevitable result of recent changes in the way the courts are used by The Powers That be.

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Now that all the news about the NSA and private security contractors is out in public what is the point of locking up Barrett Brown now? Barn door, horse, all that jazz?

Well isn’t that a great question? All the stuff that Barrett alleged turned out to be true! People made fun of him! “He’s a crackpot, saying these things,” but they actually were happening.

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'Five Eyes' surveillance pact should be published, Strasbourg court told

Appeal lodged at European court of human rights for disclosure of intelligence sharing policies of UK and foreign agencies

The secret "Five Eyes" treaty that authorises intelligence sharing between the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand should be published, according to an appeal lodged on Tuesday at the European court of human rights.

The application by Privacy International (PI), which campaigns on issues of surveillance, to the Strasbourg court is the latest in a series of legal challenges following the revelations of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden aimed at forcing the government to disclose details of its surveillance policies.

The civil liberties group alleges that the UK is violating the right to access information by "refusing to disclose the documents that have an enormous impact on human rights in the UK and abroad".

PI says that it has exhausted all domestic legal remedies because its freedom of information request for the document, detailing how the UK's security services collaborate with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US and other foreign intelligence agencies, met with outright refusal.

"The UK government's GCHQ monitoring service invoked a blanket exemption that excuses it from any obligation to be transparent about its activities to the British public," said PI.

Eric King, deputy director of PI, said: "More than a year after Snowden, the British government continues to dodge the question of just how integrated the operations of GCHQ and NSA truly are. Key documents like the Five Eyes arrangement remain secret, despite them being critical to proper scrutiny of the spy agencies.

"The hushing-up of the extent of the alliance is shameful. The public deserve to know about the dirty deals going on between the Five Eyes, who trade and exploit our private information through this illicit pact. For trust to be restored, transparency around these secret agreements is a crucial first step."

Rosa Curling, of the law firm Leigh Day, which represents PI, said: "The UK's Freedom of Information Act precludes government authorities from disclosing to the public information directly or indirectly supplied by GCHQ.

"This absolute exemption is unlawful and contrary to article 10 of the European convention on human rights, which provides for the right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to receive information.

"It cannot be correct that all information, without exception, directly or indirectly supplied by GCHQ is exempt from public disclosure. With the credibility and public confidence in the activities of the UK's secret service at an all-time low, it is crucial that the [Strasbourg] court considers whether the current darkness in which GCHQ operates is allowed to continue."

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Europe gears up to fight back against giant US beasts of the internet

EU regulators are confronting the 'voluntary self-subjugation' of Europe to the dominance of Google, Amazon and Facebook

In Germany, they have a term for silicon valley companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, the big beasts of the internet that have come to dominate our online lives. They are known as the datenkraken. The word means data octopuses, and it is intended to frighten – in Norse myth, the Kraken was a murderous sea monster.

Today's datenkraken do not drag mariners into the deep, but they have tentacles that reach around the world, gathering the data of private citizens on a scale that, since Snowden's revelations about US surveillance, has created huge unease in Europe.

Last Monday, the European Commission's outgoing competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, decided to reopen his five-year investigation into Google's search rankings. Finishing the job will fall to Almunia's replacement, the former Danish finance minister Margrethe Vestager. Her colleague, Europe's new digital economy commissioner Guenther Oettinger, has already made his feelings known. On Wednesday, he said Google's market power could be limited, adding that he would work to ensure that the search engine's services preserve neutrality and objectivity.

The message from Brussels is clear, according to Ian Maude, new media expert at Enders Analysis: "Google is the new Microsoft. As far as the regulators are concerned, it is the big bad wolf."

Over the course of investigations and legal battles that ran from 1993 to 2013, the commission imposed more than ¤2bn in fines on Microsoft. There were probes into licensing practices, and orders to unbundle its products, so that European Windows users had a choice of web browsers and media players other than those produced by Microsoft.

The relationship between the US group and Brussels was highly confrontational. Microsoft did not send its executives to woo the commissioners, it sent armies of lawyers to fight each proposal. But now, the shoe is on the other foot.

Google has become as dominant on our personal computers – laptops, phones and tablets – as Microsoft was a decade ago. In search, its position seems unassailable. An estimated 90% of user queries pass through Google in Europe, according to StatCounter. As one of the lead plaintiffs against Google in Brussels, Microsoft is now only too willing to use the regulatory powers of the commission against its rival.

Google's strategy has been to send its chairman, Eric Schmidt, on diplomatic missions to Brussels, and work with the commission to find a solution. The controversy is over natural search – as opposed to the paid-for results that appear on the right hand side or at the top of the Google page. Rather than producing a series of blue links in response to queries, Google has begun answering questions itself. Ask for the weather today, and you will be shown a forecast for your region. Look up French food in Nottingham, and you will be shown a map with pins locating each restaurant, plus a list of establishments with addresses and star ratings.

Rivals complain this diverts traffic away from specialist websites offering the same information, like OpenTable or TripAdvisor. Google offered to change the way it presented search results. Its first two solutions were rejected by Almunia, but the third was accepted. It would involve two boxes – one containing Google's own information, and another showing information from rivals, with places auctioned to the highest bidder. Research by Microsoft shows that even with these changes, the Google links box, which is more prominent, will attract 99 times more clicks than the rival links box.

Google insists it does not promote its own products at the expense of others. Schmidt said in a letter to the Financial Times last week: "We aim to show results that answer the user's queries directly (after all we built Google for users, not websites) … To date, no regulator has objected to Google giving people direct answers to their questions for the simple reason that it is better for users."

Google's constructive, conciliatory approach initially convinced Almunia. But in February 2014, when he gave the US group's third proposal a preliminary thumbs up, the result was uproar, not just from competitors but from the French and German governments.

Egged on by European media companies and telecoms firms, whose sectors are most threatened by the digital revolution, politicians rushed to criticise the decision. In France, opposition was led by Arnaud Montebourg, who was economy minister until president François Hollande dissolved his government last month. Along with his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, he wrote to Almunia demanding a rethink.

"We don't want to become a digital colony of global internet giants," Montebourg said in May. "What's at stake is our sovereignty itself."

In parts of Europe, Google is more than the next Microsoft. It is an agent of American colonialism. By gathering the private data of European citizens, Montebourg believes that Facebook and Amazon are creating databases that can be exploited for virtually tax-free commercial gain, or mined by intelligence experts in Washington DC.

In the German press, Gabriel wrote: "Every time we "search" for something on Google, Google searches us and captures information about ourselves which can not only be sold for targeted personalised advertising, but is, essentially, also available to our bank, our health insurance company, our car or life insurance company, or – if the need arises – to the secret service.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch – we pay for these services with our personal data – and, unless we are careful, at the end of the day with our personal and social freedom as well. It is the core task of liberalism and social democracy to tame and restrain data capitalism gone wild."

Sigmar's words read like a political manifesto. It is a manifesto that has been adopted by Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission's newly elected president. "Europe's path to growth is paved with tablets and smartphones," the former Luxembourg prime minister states on his personal website. While Europe led the world in mobile technology, it has trailed America in the creation of internet corporations and jobs. Juncker believes bringing Eruope's 500m citizens into a single market for technology – with common laws for things like copyright, co-ordinated mobile phone spectrum auctions, and regional regulators – will create strong businesses and jobs. It is his top priority, above even energy security.

Among Google's most powerful critics is Mathias Döpfner, whose Axel Springer group publishes the tabloid Bild, Germany's most widely read newspaper. When Angela Merkel humiliated David Cameron by switching sides and supporting Juncker for the top job in Europe, fingers were pointed at Döpfner. Convinced that the Luxembourgian politician would back his calls for tougher sanctions on Google, he is said to have used Bild's influence to turn Merkel.

In an open letter to Google's Schmidt, penned in April, Döpfner warned: "Voluntary self-subjugation cannot be the last word from the Old World. On the contrary, the desire of the European digital economy to succeed could finally become something for European policy, which the EU has so sorely missed in the past few decades: an emotional narrative."

It is a narrative that has cast the American datenkraken as the arch enemy. Brussels would like to dismantle their low tax corporate structures, and Almunia made a first move in June, announcing a probe into tax arrangements used by Apple in Ireland and Starbucks in the Netherlands.

Now the Google search inquiry has been re-opened. Another, delving into Google's Android mobile platform, and how phone makers are required to pre-install its Chrome internet browser and other services, is waiting in the wings.

The Berlin wall has fallen, but Europe is erecting new defences: it is building a firewall to protect the Old World from becoming a digital colony of the New World.

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Greenwald, Dotcom, Snowden and Assange take on 'adolescent' John Key

Internet interceptors unfazed by mega-drills or media drilling as they reveal Moment of Truth to New Zealand ahead of election

An international all-star lineup of the White House's most-loathed shared a stage in New Zealand's largest city for a rally billed by the event's host, Kim Dotcom, as the "Moment of Truth".

Bathed in red and white lights and cheered on by a capacity audience of about 1,500 at the Auckland town hall, the internet entrepreneur turned political party founder sat alongside journalist Glenn Greenwald at a table emblazoned, in case there were any doubt, with the words THE MOMENT OF TRUTH.

On the big screen above, Greenwald's famous source, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was beamed in live from Moscow, while fellow fugitive Julian Assange peered from a screen beside him, also beamed in live but this time from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

All were given thundering ovations from a crowd who, five days away from New Zealand's general election, were energised by articles published hours earlier by Greenwald and Snowden alleging mass surveillance in New Zealand and duplicity on the part of the prime minister, John Key.

Greenwald, whose arrival in New Zealand on Friday ignited another powder keg in an already explosive election campaign, began by marvelling at the criticisms he has faced from Key, who has labelled him "Dotcom's little henchman" and a "loser".

"It is not all that common to arrive in a country, and within 24 hours, literally, find oneself being publicly maligned and attacked by the nation's head of state, using the most adolescent epithets imaginable," said Greenwald to applause, and peels of laughter from Dotcom.

He went on to dismiss the prime minister's claim of political motives as "reckless accusations". Key has repeatedly rubbished Greenwald's claims of mass surveillance by the New Zealand spy agency, the Government Security Communications Bureau, a member of the NSA-led Five Eyes alliance, saying that while the government had considered a programme for "mass protection", he had rejected the GCSB proposal.

Within hours of Greenwald and Snowden's articles being published on the Intercept website – drawing on NSA documents that detailed a programme called "Speargun" which involved a "cable access" tap, apparently into the undersea cable that connects the New Zealand internet to the world – Key had responded by releasing declassified documents which proved, he said, that the claims were "simply wrong" and "based on incomplete information".

Greenwald hit back with an express-pace address at the town hall. "He's not releasing that classified information for any other reason than protecting his reputation and for political gain," he said, pausing to sip on a can of Diet Coke.

Retracing the evidence in the Intercept report and an accompanying article by Snowden, Greenwald said: "The Key government has radically misled and deceived the New Zealand citizenry. I don't make that accusation lightly … unless I have the evidence to back it up. And in this case I can categorically and with great confidence say that it is."

The biggest roar of the night greeted the arrival on the big screen of Snowden, white earphones dangling from his ears. His contribution, the most compelling of the night, began with a new piece of information: the NSA had a facility somewhere in Auckland, and another further north.

As to the prime minister's denials, Snowden detected a "careful parsing of words". His own experience as an NSA analyst, he said, left him with no doubt that New Zealanders' communications were swept up by the XKeyScore mass surveillance programme.

"Maybe the people of New Zealand think that's appropriate," he said. "Maybe they think that they want to sacrifice a certain measure of their liberty … That's what democracy is about; that's what self-government is about. But that decision doesn't belong to John Key or officials in the GCSB making these decisions behind closed doors."

Next came Assange. The WikiLeaks founder first apologised for the background noise of mysterious "tunnelling" – building works were under way in the flat below the embassy. He went on to lay out the "wider context" for the spying revelations: New Zealand had been "effectively annexed", he said, a tired voice competing with the incessant hammering of a power tool.

Dotcom is sought by the US for extradition from New Zealand in relation to alleged copyright infringements around his now defunct Megaupload site. He lavished praise on his guests.

"You are heroes and I thank you very much for letting humanity know what is going on," he enthused in his distinctive staccato German accent.

There was no "moment of truth" from Dotcom, however. The Internet party's founder and "visionary" – as a non-citizen resident he is prohibited from standing for parliament – had promised to produce evidence to support his belief that Key had colluded with Hollywood executives to reverse a decision to deny him residency in New Zealand in 2010, in preparation for an extradition attempt from the US. Key has consistently said he knew nothing of Dotcom's existence until the eve of the dramatic FBI-backed raid on his north Auckland mansion in January 2012.

The anticipated "big reveal" had been published in the New Zealand Herald several hours before the Town Hall extravaganza. It came in the form of a purported email from 2010, in which the Warner Brothers chairman informs a Motion Picture Association of America executive: "John Key told me in private that they are granting Dotcom residency despite pushback from officials about his criminal past. His AG [attorney general] will do everything in his power to assist us with our case. VIP treatment and then a one-way ticket to Virginia [where charges would be filed]."

The email which, according to the Herald, was "the evidence Dotcom is planning on producing at the Moment of Truth event", was quickly dismissed as a fake by Warner Bros and the MPAA, while Key said no such conversation ever took place.

The disputed email was mentioned only fleetingly during the Monday night rally by lawyer Robert Amsterdam, who said it had been referred to the parliamentary privileges committee. However it dominated a heated press conference afterwards. Attempts to prevent discussion of the disputed email on the basis it would be the subject of an inquiry were scoffed at by journalists seeking information on its provenance and authenticity.

Greenwald was largely a bystander as Dotcom responded to questions by chiding the media: "You have failed us in the past. You need to wake up and do your jobs."

Dotcom insisted the email was genuine. "I believe it to be 100% real," he said. "Everything I've produced in the past, everything I've said in the past, has been proved true."

He may need to produce proof promptly if he is likely to dent Key's chances of surviving Saturday's election.

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EU court to investigate laws allowing GCHQ to snoop on journalists

Bureau of Investigative Journalism files application with European court of human rights over protection of sources

The European court of human rights (ECHR) is to investigate British laws that allow GCHQ and police to secretly snoop on journalists.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has gone straight to Strasbourg in a bid to get a finding that domestic law is incompatible with provisions in European law which give journalists the right to keep sources confidential from police and others.

Its application was filed on Friday and has been accepted by the ECHR, which has indicated in the past it will expedite cases on surveillance through its legal system.

The move follows concerns arising out of Edward Snowden’s revelations last year that GCHQ had been secretly gathering intelligence from the country’s largest telecoms companies using a secret computer system code-named Tempora without the knowledge of the companies.

Also of concern is a recent revelation, which has alarmed journalists and lawyers, that the police secretly obtained the records of the Sun’s political editor after he refused to reveal the identity of sources in his Plebgate story about an altercation between police and the then Tory whip Andrew Mitchell.

Gavin Millar, QC, who is working on the case with the BIJ, said if the application was successful, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) should be torn up.

“The whole thing is completely incompatible with European law, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and find a statutory framework that says only in the most exceptional circumstances would it be okay to collect journalists metadata or content of their phones.”

Both Tempora and the Metropolitan Police actions against the Sun’s political editor were enabled by Ripa.

Part 1, chapter 11 of the Act allows a police officer of superintendent rank or above to seize the phone records of a journalist without the journalist even knowing.

Part 1 Chapter 1 of the Act enables GCHQ to collect metadata on the agreement of the Secretary of State.

The revelation that the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn’s telephone records were requisitioned from Vodafone and those of the paper’s newsdesk, sent alarm bells throughout the industry with fears that this could have a chilling effect on press freedom with fewer whistleblowers willing to take the risk of phoning a journalists.

Millar said he believed the UK authorities were routinely carrying out data collection of journalists and their organisations to build up a picture of their sources and their lines of inquiry.

Christopher Hird, chair of the BIJ’s editorial board, said he understood why the government feels the need to have the power to intercept communications.

But Hird added that he did not believe there were “sufficient safeguards to ensure the protection of journalists’ sources”. This, he said, amounted to a restriction on the free press.

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NSA spying can't be ruled out: PM

Prime Minister John Key cannot rule out that the United States National Security Agency is undertaking mass surveillance of New Zealanders' data but has rejected claims New Zealand spies would have access to such information.

"What I can say is the GCSB [Government Communications Security Bureau] does not have access to any information through XKeyscore or any other database, unless they basically comply with the New Zealand law, and the New Zealand law forbids that unless there is a warrant to do so," he said.

Asked whether that was an admission GCSB spies on occasion used the controversial XKeyscore programme, Key declined to elaborate.

"I don't talk about whatever programmes they have," he said.

"You can talk about whatever ones they might use, and there're lots of them out there."

With the general election just three days away, Key is under pressure to explain documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden pointing to wholesale spying of New Zealand citizens using XKeyscore.

At an event hosted by the Internet Party on Monday, Snowden and US journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that NSA agents had sites of operation in New Zealand.

Greenwald's reporting has led to the Government admitting this week that the GCSB was working on a mass surveillance programme that Key canned because it was deemed too intrusive.

Key said today that he was unaware of any NSA site in New Zealand. If there were, they were operating without his knowledge and illegally.

"I don't run the NSA any more than I run any other foreign intelligence agency or any other country," he said.
Key welcomed today's statement from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn, who has backed his version of the story.

Gwyn said she reviewed whether the GCSB complied with restrictions on intercepting New Zealanders' communications as part of her role.

While she could only comment on specific GCSB activities through her annual and inquiry reports, Gwyn said she had not identified any indiscriminate interception of New Zealanders' data in her work to date.

The review of GCSB activities was ongoing, and she would continue to monitor the bureau to ensure communications were intercepted only for authorised purposes, she said.

Key said it was "pleasing to have someone that's completely independent of the political process coming out very clearly and very strongly, saying there is no evidence to support there has been mass surveillance by the GCSB on New Zealanders".

"That is absolutely the correct position," he said.

"I can say it. I hope New Zealanders will accept my word on it because we've got the inspector-general saying it, you've got the former head of the GCSB and the current head of the GCSB saying it."

Key said he had provided strong evidence of what the GCSB had and had not carried out, but the other side had failed to do that.

He defended Gwyn against claims by some critics that she was politicising her role, saying she was "completely neutral".

She is conducting an investigation into the SIS over allegations made in Nicky Hager's book, Dirty Politics, that classified information was declassified and handed to a blogger for political gain.

"She went out there and did that in the middle of an election campaign," Key said.

"She is in a position to see under the covers, what's really taking place, and give an objective view to New Zealanders."

But she could not see what activities, if any, the NSA might be carrying out in New Zealand.

"We've always said, in the end, there are other agencies around the world either legally as a result of their own laws or illegally will be out there potentially collecting information on New Zealanders," Key said.

"But the big control check from New Zealand's point of view is we absolutely do not circumnavigate the law and use our departments to do that.

"The United States of America has some interesting issues it's having to deal with, and tangentially there's always a risk that a New Zealander is involved in that, whether as a foreign fighter or whatever it might be.

"But New Zealand is not the primary interest of the United States."

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Former UK ambassador to the United States given data-access role

Sir Nigel Sheinwald will work to ensure British spies and police officers can access data from overseas firms

A former senior diplomat has been appointed by the prime minister to work with the United States and other countries to ensure that British spies and police officers can access data from overseas firms.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, former ambassador to the United States, has been appointed as special envoy on intelligence and law enforcement data sharing.

He will lead discussions with governments and communications service providers on ways to improve access to and sharing of law enforcement and intelligence data in different jurisdictions.

David Cameron set out the need for the post when he announced emergency legislation on data sharing in July.

He said: "A number of overseas companies have asserted that their ability to work with the UK government is being severely constrained by international conflicts of jurisdiction.

"For example, where they think they have a British law saying that they should share data, and an American law saying that they shouldn't."

He said the envoy would work to ensure that "lawful and justified transfer of information across borders takes place to protect our people's safety and security".

Home affairs select committee chairman Keith Vaz said: "The prime minister has made an excellent choice in selecting Sir Nigel Sheinwald for this post.

"It is vital that we work in partnership with other countries on this serious matter, particularly given the security implications of data sharing. I firmly believe that Sir Nigel has the necessary expertise and experience to carry out this role effectively.

"The committee is looking forward to working with Sir Nigel in the near future."

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Joseph Gordon Levitt to play Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone's NSA whistleblower movie

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Op dinsdag 23 september 2014 08:18 schreef Jibberism_ het volgende:
Puik werk dit topic keep it up

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Snowden: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Isn’t Telling the Truth About Mass Surveillance

Like many nations around the world, New Zealand over the last year has engaged in a serious and intense debate about government surveillance. The nation’s prime minister, John Key of the National Party, has denied that New Zealand’s spy agency GCSB engages in mass surveillance, mostly as a means of convincing the country to enact a new law vesting the agency with greater powers. This week, as a national election approaches, Key repeated those denials in anticipation of a report in The Intercept today exposing the Key government’s actions in implementing a system to record citizens’ metadata.

Let me be clear: any statement that mass surveillance is not performed in New Zealand, or that the internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, or that this is not intentionally and actively abetted by the GCSB, is categorically false. If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched. At the NSA I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called “XKEYSCORE.” It allows total, granular access to the database of communications collected in the course of mass surveillance. It is not limited to or even used largely for the purposes of cybersecurity, as has been claimed, but is instead used primarily for reading individuals’ private email, text messages, and internet traffic. I know this because it was my full-time job in Hawaii, where I worked every day in an NSA facility with a top secret clearance.

The prime minister’s claim to the public, that “there is no and there never has been any mass surveillance” is false. The GCSB, whose operations he is responsible for, is directly involved in the untargeted, bulk interception and algorithmic analysis of private communications sent via internet, satellite, radio, and phone networks.

If you have doubts, which would be quite reasonable, given what the last year showed us about the dangers of taking government officials at their word, I invite you to confirm this for yourself. Actual pictures and classified documentation of XKEYSCORE are available online now, and their authenticity is not contested by any government. Within them you’ll find that the XKEYSCORE system offers, but does not require for use, something called a “Five Eyes Defeat,” the Five Eyes being the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and yes, New Zealand.

This might seem like a small detail, but it’s very important. The Five Eyes Defeat is an optional filter, a single checkbox. It allows me, the analyst, to prevent search results from being returned on those countries from a particular search. Ask yourself: why do analysts have a checkbox on a top secret system that hides the results of mass surveillance in New Zealand if there is no mass surveillance in New Zealand?

The answer, one that the government of New Zealand has not been honest about, is that despite claims to the contrary, mass surveillance is real and happening as we speak. The GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB station at Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact. Importantly, they do not merely use XKEYSCORE, but also actively and directly develop mass surveillance algorithms for it. GCSB’s involvement with XKEYSCORE is not a theory, and it is not a future plan. The claim that it never went ahead, and that New Zealand merely “looked at” but never participated in the Five Eyes’ system of mass surveillance is false, and the GCSB’s past and continuing involvement with XKEYSCORE is irrefutable.

But what does it mean?

It means they have the ability see every website you visit, every text message you send, every call you make, every ticket you purchase, every donation you make, and every book you order online. From “I’m headed to church” to “I hate my boss” to “She’s in the hospital,” the GCSB is there. Your words are intercepted, stored, and analyzed by algorithms long before they’re ever read by your intended recipient.

Faced with reasonable doubts, ask yourself just what it is that stands between these most deeply personal communications and the governments of not just in New Zealand, but also the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia?

The answer is that solitary checkbox, the Five Eyes Defeat. One checkbox is what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty. When an officer of the government wants to know everything about everyone in their society, they don’t even have to make a technical change. They simply uncheck the box. The question before us is no longer “why was this done without the consent and debate of the people of this country,” but “what are we going to do about it?”

This government may have total control over the checkbox today, but come Sept. 20, New Zealanders have a checkbox of their own. If you live in New Zealand, whatever party you choose to vote for, bear in mind the opportunity to send a message that this government won’t need to spy on us to hear: The liberties of free people cannot be changed behind closed doors. It’s time to stand up. It’s time to restore our democracies. It’s time to take back our rights. And it starts with you.

National security has become the National Party’s security. What we’re seeing today is that in New Zealand, the balance between the public’s right to know and the propriety of a secret is determined by a single factor: the political advantage it offers to a specific party and or a specific politician. This misuse of New Zealand’s spying apparatus for the benefit of a single individual is a historic concern, because even if you believe today’s prime minister is beyond reproach, he will not remain in power forever. What happens tomorrow, when a different leader assumes the same power to conceal and reveal things from the citizenry based not on what is required by free societies, but rather on what needs to be said to keep them in power?

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Edward Snowden and Alan Rusbridger receive Right Livelihood award

Award for whistleblower and Guardian editor recognises their work in exposing mass surveillance by the NSA and others

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger have been jointly given the 2014 Right Livelihood honorary award.

The award, from Swedish charity the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, recognised Snowden’s “courage and skill in revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance violating basic democratic processes and constitutional rights”.

Rusbridger’s citation recognised his role in “building a global media organisation dedicated to responsible journalism in the public interest, undaunted by the challenges of exposing corporate and government malpractices”.

The foundation said it would fund legal support for Snowden.

The Right Livelihood award was established in 1980 to honour and support those “offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today”, with 153 laureates from 64 countries.

It is presented annually at a ceremony at the Swedish parliament and there are normally four winners.

Three other 2014 laureates will share the cash award of SEK1.5million equally: Pakistani human rights lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir; Basil Fernando of the Asian Human Rights Commission; and American environmentalist, author and journalist Bill McKibben.

Ole von Uexkull, executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, said: “This year’s Right Livelihood laureates are stemming the tide of the most dangerous global trends. With this year’s awards, we want to send a message of urgent warning that these trends – illegal mass surveillance of ordinary citizens, the violation of human and civil rights, violent manifestations of religious fundamentalism, and the decline of the planet’s life-supporting systems – are very much upon us already.

“If they are allowed to continue, and reinforce each other, they have the power to undermine the basis of civilised societies.”

The Right Livelihood Foundation promotes scientific research, education and public understanding of issues related to global ecological balance, eliminating material and spiritual poverty and contributing to lasting world peace and justice.

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Spies given new phone tapping powers and anyone who identifies a secret agent will be jailed for 10 years under the toughest anti-terror laws the country has ever seen

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Australian spies will soon get unprecedented powers to help fight terrorism, including giving ASIO operatives the ability to monitor phones, iPads, laptops and any other devices at and address with just one search warrant.

And anyone who outs a member of the security services faces ten years behind bars - a tenfold increase in the penalty.

The government's first tranche of tougher anti-terrorism laws, which beef up the domestic spy agency's powers, passed the Senate on Thursday with bipartisan support.

Attorney-General George Brandis said in a 'newly dangerous age' it was vital that those protecting Australia were equipped with the powers and capabilities they needed.

The bill will now be sent to the House of Representatives, where passage is all but guaranteed.

The legislation addresses a number of recommendations of a bipartisan joint parliamentary inquiry into Australia's national security laws.

It allows ASIO to access third party computers and apply one warrant to multiple devices.

After concerns were raised by Labor and Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm, the government agreed to amend the legislation to specifically rule out ASIO using torture.

'ASIO cannot, does not and has never engaged in torture,' Senator Brandis said.

The Palmer United Party was successful in amending the law so anyone who exposes an undercover ASIO operative could face up to 10 years behind bars instead of one.

This included 'reckless' journalists, whistleblowers and bloggers who disclose sensitive information, Fairfax Media report.

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'The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence', says Australian senator Glenn Lazarus - video

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The internet is a serious threat because it can be used to orchestrate and undertake criminal behaviour across the world, Australia's Palmer United party senator Glenn Lazarus said during a debate on national security laws giving sweeping new powers to Australian intelligence services

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Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A.

WASHINGTON — Devoted customers of Apple products these days worry about whether the new iPhone 6 will bend in their jean pockets. The National Security Agency and the nation’s law enforcement agencies have a different concern: that the smartphone is the first of a post-Snowden generation of equipment that will disrupt their investigative abilities.

The phone encrypts emails, photos and contacts based on a complex mathematical algorithm that uses a code created by, and unique to, the phone’s user — and that Apple says it will not possess.

The result, the company is essentially saying, is that if Apple is sent a court order demanding that the contents of an iPhone 6 be provided to intelligence agencies or law enforcement, it will turn over gibberish, along with a note saying that to decode the phone’s emails, contacts and photos, investigators will have to break the code or get the code from the phone’s owner.

Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.)

Already the new phone has led to an eruption from the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey. At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to combating terror threats from the Islamic State, Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”

He cited kidnapping cases, in which exploiting the contents of a seized phone could lead to finding a victim, and predicted there would be moments when parents would come to him “with tears in their eyes, look at me and say, ‘What do you mean you can’t’ ” decode the contents of a phone.

“The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened — even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order — to me does not make any sense.”

Apple declined to comment. But officials inside the intelligence agencies, while letting the F.B.I. make the public protests, say they fear the company’s move is the first of several new technologies that are clearly designed to defeat not only the N.S.A., but also any court orders to turn over information to intelligence agencies. They liken Apple’s move to the early days of Swiss banking, when secret accounts were set up precisely to allow national laws to be evaded.

“Terrorists will figure this out,” along with savvy criminals and paranoid dictators, one senior official predicted, and keep their data just on the iPhone 6. Another said, “It’s like taking out an ad that says, ‘Here’s how to avoid surveillance — even legal surveillance.’ ”

The move raises a critical issue, the intelligence officials say: Who decides what kind of data the government can access? Until now, those decisions have largely been a matter for Congress, which passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in 1994, requiring telecommunications companies to build into their systems an ability to carry out a wiretap order if presented with one. But despite intense debate about whether the law should be expanded to cover email and other content, it has not been updated, and it does not cover content contained in a smartphone.

At Apple and Google, company executives say the United States government brought these changes on itself. The revelations by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden not only killed recent efforts to expand the law, but also made nations around the world suspicious that every piece of American hardware and software — from phones to servers made by Cisco Systems — have “back doors” for American intelligence and law enforcement.

Surviving in the global marketplace — especially in places like China, Brazil and Germany — depends on convincing consumers that their data is secure.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has emphasized that Apple’s core business is to sell devices to people. That distinguishes Apple from companies that make a profit from collecting and selling users’ personal data to advertisers, he has said.

This month, just before releasing the iPhone 6 and iOS 8, Apple took steps to underscore its commitment to customer privacy, publishing a revised privacy policy on its website.

The policy described the encryption method used in iOS 8 as so deep that Apple could no longer comply with government warrants asking for customer information to be extracted from devices. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode, and therefore cannot access this data,” the company said.

Under the new encryption method, only entering the passcode can decrypt the device. (Hypothetically, Apple could create a tool to hack into the device, but legally the company is not required to do that.)

Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher who has taught forensics courses to law enforcement agencies on collecting data from iPhones, said to think of the encryption system as a series of lockers. In the older version of iOS, there was always at least one locker that was unlocked, which Apple could enter to grab certain files like photos, call history and notes, in response to a legal warrant.

“Now what they’re saying is, ‘We stopped using that locker,’ ” Mr. Zdziarski said. “We’re using a locker that actually has a combination on it, and if you don’t know the combination, then you can’t get inside. Unless you take a sledgehammer to the locker, there’s no way we get to the files.”

The new security in iOS 8 protects information stored on the device itself, but not data stored on iCloud, Apple’s cloud service. So Apple will still be able to obtain some customer information stored on iCloud in response to government requests.

Google has also started giving its users more control over their privacy. Phones using Google’s Android operating system have had encryption for three years. It is not the default setting, however, so to encrypt their phones, users have to go into their settings, turn it on, and wait an hour or more for the data to be scrambled.

That is set to change with the next version of Android, set for release in October. It will have encryption as the default, “so you won’t even have to think about turning it on,” Google said in a statement.

A Google spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Comey’s suggestions that stronger encryption could hinder law enforcement investigations.

Mr. Zdziarski said that concerns about Apple’s new encryption to hinder law enforcement seemed overblown. He said there were still plenty of ways for the police to get customer data for investigations. In the example of a kidnapping victim, the police can still request information on call records and geolocation information from phone carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

“Eliminating the iPhone as one source I don’t think is going to wreck a lot of cases,” he said. “There is such a mountain of other evidence from call logs, email logs, iCloud, Gmail logs. They’re tapping the whole Internet.”

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The journalist Erich Möchel leaked photos reported alleged NSA monitoring stations in Vienna which are used by the Intelligence to spy on UN.

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Photos published by the journalist Erich Möchel in a blog post seems to confirm the presence of an NSA surveillance infrastructure, mentioned in the Snowden’s leaked documents “Vienna Annex”, in the attics of IZD Towers next to the UNO-City.

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New Documents Shed Light on One of the NSA's Most Powerful Tools

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Today, we're releasing several key documents about Executive Order 12333 that we obtained from the government in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the ACLU filed (along with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School) just before the first revelations of Edward Snowden. The documents are from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others agencies. They confirm that the order, although not the focus of the public debate, actually governs most of the NSA's spying.

In some ways, this is not surprising. After all, it has been reported that some of the NSA's biggest spying programs rely on the executive order, such as the NSA's interception of internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s data centers abroad, the collection of millions of email and instant-message address books, the recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least two countries, and the mass cellphone location-tracking program. In other ways, however, it is surprising. Congress's reform efforts have not addressed the executive order, and the bulk of the government's disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA's extensive mandate under EO 12333.

The order, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, imposes the sole constraints on U.S. surveillance on foreign soil that targets foreigners. There's been some speculation, too, that the government relies directly on the order — as opposed to its statutory authority — to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

There's a key difference between EO 12333 and the two main legal authorities that have been the focus of the public debate — Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, which the government relies on to justify the bulk collection of Americans' phone records and the PRISM program. Because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts. That's why uncovering the government's secret interpretations of the order is so important. We've already seen that the NSA has taken a "collect it all" mentality even with the authorities that are overseen by Congress and the courts. If that history is any lesson, we should expect — and, indeed, we have seen glimpses of — even more out-of-control spying under EO 12333.

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The Guardian wins an Emmy for coverage of NSA revelations

Interactive NSA Decoded explained implications of the Edward Snowden leaks on mass surveillance by intelligence agencies

* NSA Decoded: the award-winning interactive

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The Guardian US has won an Emmy for its groundbreaking coverage of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about mass surveillance by US intelligence agencies.

The Guardian’s multimedia interactive feature NSA Decoded was announced as the winner in the new approaches: current news category at the news and documentary Emmy awards in New York on Tuesday night.

The comprehensive interactive walks the audience through the facts and implications of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, revealed by the Guardian last year in coverage based on leaks by Snowden.

The interactive includes interviews and discussions with key players including the journalist Glenn Greenwald, former NSA employees, senators and members of US congress.

The project was led by interactives editor and reporter Gabriel Dance, reporter Ewen MacAskill and producers Feilding Cage and Greg Chen.

The Guardian’s former US editor-in-chief Janine Gibson accepted the award.

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The NSA and Me

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It was July 8, 1981, a broiling Wednesday in Harvard Square, and I was in a quiet corner of the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street. A cool, souk-like basement room, with the piney aroma of frankincense, it made for a perfect hideout to sort through documents, jot down notes, and pore over stacks of newspapers while sipping bottomless cups of Arabic coffee and espresso the color of dark chocolate.

For several years I had been working on my first book, The Puzzle Palace, which provided the first in-depth look at the National Security Agency. The deeper I dug, the more troubled I became. Not only did the classified file from the Justice Department accuse the NSA of systematically breaking the law by eavesdropping on American citizens, it concluded that it was impossible to prosecute those running the agency because of the enormous secrecy that enveloped it. Worse, the file made clear that the NSA itself was effectively beyond the law—allowed to bypass statutes passed by Congress and follow its own super-classified charter, what the agency called a “top-secret birth certificate” drawn up by the White House decades earlier.

Knowing the potential for such an unregulated agency to go rogue, I went on to write two more books about the NSA, Body of Secrets, in 2001, and The Shadow Factory, in 2008. My goal was to draw attention to the dangers the agency posed if it is not closely watched and controlled—dangers that would be laid bare in stark detail by Edward Snowden years later.

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But the NSA knew nothing about one of my biggest finds, which took place on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute. Nicknamed “the West Point of the South,” VMI housed the papers of William F. Friedman, a founder of both the NSA and of American cryptology. The NSA’s own auditorium is named after him. Yet Friedman had soured on the agency by the time he retired, and deliberately left his papers to a research library at VMI to get them as far away from the NSA as possible.

After Friedman’s death, and without his permission, agency officials traveled to the library, pulled out hundreds of his personal letters, and ordered them locked away in a secure vault. When I discovered what the NSA had done, I persuaded the library’s archivist to give me access to the letters, all of which were unclassified. Many were embarrassingly critical of the agency, describing its enormous paranoia and obsession with secrecy. Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries.

I also discovered that a former NSA director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, had left his papers – including reams of unclassified documents from his NSA office – to the same research library at VMI. They included personal, handwritten correspondence from Carter’s British counterpart about listening posts, cooperative agreements, and other sensitive topics. Later, Carter gave me a long and detailed interview about the NSA. The agency knew nothing about either the documents or the interview.

Following the publication of my book, the NSA raided the research library, stamped many of the Friedman documents secret, and ordered them put back into the vault. “Just because information has been published,” NSA director Lincoln Faurer explained to The New York Times, “doesn’t mean it should no longer be classified.” Faurer also flew to Colorado, where Gen. Carter was living in retirement, met with him at the NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base, and threatened him with prosecution if he ever gave another interview or allowed anyone else access to his papers.