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.