Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 9

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Do NSA's Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?

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

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

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NSA Turned Germany Into Its Largest Listening Post in Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Snowdens Deutschland-Akte: Die Dokumente im PDF-Format

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How Secret Partners Expand NSA’s Surveillance Dragnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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House Passes Landmark Amendment To Stop Warrantless NSA Searches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Home secretary denies security services engaged in mass surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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US to extend privacy protection rights to EU citizens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NSA fears prompt Germany to end Verizon contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airship Over the NSA Data Center

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'NSA mag vrijwel iedereen bespioneren'

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

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

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

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Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PayPal freezes account of email encryption startup ProtonMail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hearing was adjourned until October.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymity outfit responds to NSA targeting allegations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


'Serious matter'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The NSA Revelations All in One Chart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the reality.

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

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Duitsland opent jacht op tweede Amerikaanse mol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NSA chief knew of Snowden file destruction by Guardian in UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Inhoud e-mails grondwettelijk beschermd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Juncker: spionage VS en gas Rusland zorgelijk

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

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

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Edward Snowden condemns Britain's emergency surveillance bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GCHQ surveillance hearing to begin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

• “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Google werkt samen met hackers aan 'veiliger internet'

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

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

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UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Journalists will face jail over spy leaks under new security laws

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Make NSA Spying Easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Snowden Mouthpiece Greenwald Shills For Islamist Terror Targets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lawyers blocked our Black hat demo on de-anonymising Tor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Burgers tegen Plasterk verliest zaak tegen staat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interior ministry refused to comment on Friday afternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers

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

quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vertrouweling Snowden weigert medewerking aan spionageonderzoek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Kerry afgeluisterd door Mossad"

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

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

Meer afluisteraars

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

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

Gazastrook

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

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Klokkenluiders negatief over gevolgen melding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'Amerika vreest dat er een nieuwe klokkenluider actief is'

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

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

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

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Barack Obamas Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers

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Snowden mag nog drie jaar in Rusland blijven

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

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

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

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

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Politie gebruikt mogelijk omstreden spionagesoftware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Snowden casts doubt on NSA investigation into security disclosures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'Geheime dienst Duitsland luisterde Hillary Clinton af'

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

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

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

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NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization

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

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'Duitsland bespioneerde Turkije en Albanië'

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

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

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

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Which Linux distro is best for protecting your privacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GCHQ backlash? Anonymous website hacked following privacy rights protest

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is why we protest,” he stressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AIVD schond privacyregels bij onderzoek naar sociale media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Sabu Effect: An Interview with Jay Leiderman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EU court to investigate laws allowing GCHQ to snoop on journalists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NSA spying can't be ruled out: PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what does it mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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Edward Snowden and Alan Rusbridger receive Right Livelihood award

Award for whistleblower and Guardian editor recognises their work in exposing mass surveillance by the NSA and others

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger have been jointly given the 2014 Right Livelihood honorary award.

The award, from Swedish charity the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, recognised Snowden’s “courage and skill in revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance violating basic democratic processes and constitutional rights”.

Rusbridger’s citation recognised his role in “building a global media organisation dedicated to responsible journalism in the public interest, undaunted by the challenges of exposing corporate and government malpractices”.

The foundation said it would fund legal support for Snowden.

The Right Livelihood award was established in 1980 to honour and support those “offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today”, with 153 laureates from 64 countries.

It is presented annually at a ceremony at the Swedish parliament and there are normally four winners.

Three other 2014 laureates will share the cash award of SEK1.5million equally: Pakistani human rights lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir; Basil Fernando of the Asian Human Rights Commission; and American environmentalist, author and journalist Bill McKibben.

Ole von Uexkull, executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, said: “This year’s Right Livelihood laureates are stemming the tide of the most dangerous global trends. With this year’s awards, we want to send a message of urgent warning that these trends – illegal mass surveillance of ordinary citizens, the violation of human and civil rights, violent manifestations of religious fundamentalism, and the decline of the planet’s life-supporting systems – are very much upon us already.

“If they are allowed to continue, and reinforce each other, they have the power to undermine the basis of civilised societies.”

The Right Livelihood Foundation promotes scientific research, education and public understanding of issues related to global ecological balance, eliminating material and spiritual poverty and contributing to lasting world peace and justice.

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Spies given new phone tapping powers and anyone who identifies a secret agent will be jailed for 10 years under the toughest anti-terror laws the country has ever seen

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Australian spies will soon get unprecedented powers to help fight terrorism, including giving ASIO operatives the ability to monitor phones, iPads, laptops and any other devices at and address with just one search warrant.

And anyone who outs a member of the security services faces ten years behind bars - a tenfold increase in the penalty.

The government's first tranche of tougher anti-terrorism laws, which beef up the domestic spy agency's powers, passed the Senate on Thursday with bipartisan support.

Attorney-General George Brandis said in a 'newly dangerous age' it was vital that those protecting Australia were equipped with the powers and capabilities they needed.

The bill will now be sent to the House of Representatives, where passage is all but guaranteed.

The legislation addresses a number of recommendations of a bipartisan joint parliamentary inquiry into Australia's national security laws.

It allows ASIO to access third party computers and apply one warrant to multiple devices.

After concerns were raised by Labor and Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm, the government agreed to amend the legislation to specifically rule out ASIO using torture.

'ASIO cannot, does not and has never engaged in torture,' Senator Brandis said.

The Palmer United Party was successful in amending the law so anyone who exposes an undercover ASIO operative could face up to 10 years behind bars instead of one.

This included 'reckless' journalists, whistleblowers and bloggers who disclose sensitive information, Fairfax Media report.

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'The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence', says Australian senator Glenn Lazarus - video

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The internet is a serious threat because it can be used to orchestrate and undertake criminal behaviour across the world, Australia's Palmer United party senator Glenn Lazarus said during a debate on national security laws giving sweeping new powers to Australian intelligence services

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Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A.

WASHINGTON — Devoted customers of Apple products these days worry about whether the new iPhone 6 will bend in their jean pockets. The National Security Agency and the nation’s law enforcement agencies have a different concern: that the smartphone is the first of a post-Snowden generation of equipment that will disrupt their investigative abilities.

The phone encrypts emails, photos and contacts based on a complex mathematical algorithm that uses a code created by, and unique to, the phone’s user — and that Apple says it will not possess.

The result, the company is essentially saying, is that if Apple is sent a court order demanding that the contents of an iPhone 6 be provided to intelligence agencies or law enforcement, it will turn over gibberish, along with a note saying that to decode the phone’s emails, contacts and photos, investigators will have to break the code or get the code from the phone’s owner.

Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.)

Already the new phone has led to an eruption from the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey. At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to combating terror threats from the Islamic State, Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”

He cited kidnapping cases, in which exploiting the contents of a seized phone could lead to finding a victim, and predicted there would be moments when parents would come to him “with tears in their eyes, look at me and say, ‘What do you mean you can’t’ ” decode the contents of a phone.

“The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened — even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order — to me does not make any sense.”

Apple declined to comment. But officials inside the intelligence agencies, while letting the F.B.I. make the public protests, say they fear the company’s move is the first of several new technologies that are clearly designed to defeat not only the N.S.A., but also any court orders to turn over information to intelligence agencies. They liken Apple’s move to the early days of Swiss banking, when secret accounts were set up precisely to allow national laws to be evaded.

“Terrorists will figure this out,” along with savvy criminals and paranoid dictators, one senior official predicted, and keep their data just on the iPhone 6. Another said, “It’s like taking out an ad that says, ‘Here’s how to avoid surveillance — even legal surveillance.’ ”

The move raises a critical issue, the intelligence officials say: Who decides what kind of data the government can access? Until now, those decisions have largely been a matter for Congress, which passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in 1994, requiring telecommunications companies to build into their systems an ability to carry out a wiretap order if presented with one. But despite intense debate about whether the law should be expanded to cover email and other content, it has not been updated, and it does not cover content contained in a smartphone.

At Apple and Google, company executives say the United States government brought these changes on itself. The revelations by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden not only killed recent efforts to expand the law, but also made nations around the world suspicious that every piece of American hardware and software — from phones to servers made by Cisco Systems — have “back doors” for American intelligence and law enforcement.

Surviving in the global marketplace — especially in places like China, Brazil and Germany — depends on convincing consumers that their data is secure.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has emphasized that Apple’s core business is to sell devices to people. That distinguishes Apple from companies that make a profit from collecting and selling users’ personal data to advertisers, he has said.

This month, just before releasing the iPhone 6 and iOS 8, Apple took steps to underscore its commitment to customer privacy, publishing a revised privacy policy on its website.

The policy described the encryption method used in iOS 8 as so deep that Apple could no longer comply with government warrants asking for customer information to be extracted from devices. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode, and therefore cannot access this data,” the company said.

Under the new encryption method, only entering the passcode can decrypt the device. (Hypothetically, Apple could create a tool to hack into the device, but legally the company is not required to do that.)

Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher who has taught forensics courses to law enforcement agencies on collecting data from iPhones, said to think of the encryption system as a series of lockers. In the older version of iOS, there was always at least one locker that was unlocked, which Apple could enter to grab certain files like photos, call history and notes, in response to a legal warrant.

“Now what they’re saying is, ‘We stopped using that locker,’ ” Mr. Zdziarski said. “We’re using a locker that actually has a combination on it, and if you don’t know the combination, then you can’t get inside. Unless you take a sledgehammer to the locker, there’s no way we get to the files.”

The new security in iOS 8 protects information stored on the device itself, but not data stored on iCloud, Apple’s cloud service. So Apple will still be able to obtain some customer information stored on iCloud in response to government requests.

Google has also started giving its users more control over their privacy. Phones using Google’s Android operating system have had encryption for three years. It is not the default setting, however, so to encrypt their phones, users have to go into their settings, turn it on, and wait an hour or more for the data to be scrambled.

That is set to change with the next version of Android, set for release in October. It will have encryption as the default, “so you won’t even have to think about turning it on,” Google said in a statement.

A Google spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Comey’s suggestions that stronger encryption could hinder law enforcement investigations.

Mr. Zdziarski said that concerns about Apple’s new encryption to hinder law enforcement seemed overblown. He said there were still plenty of ways for the police to get customer data for investigations. In the example of a kidnapping victim, the police can still request information on call records and geolocation information from phone carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

“Eliminating the iPhone as one source I don’t think is going to wreck a lot of cases,” he said. “There is such a mountain of other evidence from call logs, email logs, iCloud, Gmail logs. They’re tapping the whole Internet.”

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The journalist Erich Möchel leaked photos reported alleged NSA monitoring stations in Vienna which are used by the Intelligence to spy on UN.

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Photos published by the journalist Erich Möchel in a blog post seems to confirm the presence of an NSA surveillance infrastructure, mentioned in the Snowden’s leaked documents “Vienna Annex”, in the attics of IZD Towers next to the UNO-City.

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New Documents Shed Light on One of the NSA's Most Powerful Tools

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Today, we're releasing several key documents about Executive Order 12333 that we obtained from the government in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the ACLU filed (along with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School) just before the first revelations of Edward Snowden. The documents are from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others agencies. They confirm that the order, although not the focus of the public debate, actually governs most of the NSA's spying.

In some ways, this is not surprising. After all, it has been reported that some of the NSA's biggest spying programs rely on the executive order, such as the NSA's interception of internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s data centers abroad, the collection of millions of email and instant-message address books, the recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least two countries, and the mass cellphone location-tracking program. In other ways, however, it is surprising. Congress's reform efforts have not addressed the executive order, and the bulk of the government's disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA's extensive mandate under EO 12333.

The order, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, imposes the sole constraints on U.S. surveillance on foreign soil that targets foreigners. There's been some speculation, too, that the government relies directly on the order — as opposed to its statutory authority — to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

There's a key difference between EO 12333 and the two main legal authorities that have been the focus of the public debate — Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, which the government relies on to justify the bulk collection of Americans' phone records and the PRISM program. Because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts. That's why uncovering the government's secret interpretations of the order is so important. We've already seen that the NSA has taken a "collect it all" mentality even with the authorities that are overseen by Congress and the courts. If that history is any lesson, we should expect — and, indeed, we have seen glimpses of — even more out-of-control spying under EO 12333.

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The Guardian wins an Emmy for coverage of NSA revelations

Interactive NSA Decoded explained implications of the Edward Snowden leaks on mass surveillance by intelligence agencies

* NSA Decoded: the award-winning interactive

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The Guardian US has won an Emmy for its groundbreaking coverage of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about mass surveillance by US intelligence agencies.

The Guardian’s multimedia interactive feature NSA Decoded was announced as the winner in the new approaches: current news category at the news and documentary Emmy awards in New York on Tuesday night.

The comprehensive interactive walks the audience through the facts and implications of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, revealed by the Guardian last year in coverage based on leaks by Snowden.

The interactive includes interviews and discussions with key players including the journalist Glenn Greenwald, former NSA employees, senators and members of US congress.

The project was led by interactives editor and reporter Gabriel Dance, reporter Ewen MacAskill and producers Feilding Cage and Greg Chen.

The Guardian’s former US editor-in-chief Janine Gibson accepted the award.

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The NSA and Me

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It was July 8, 1981, a broiling Wednesday in Harvard Square, and I was in a quiet corner of the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street. A cool, souk-like basement room, with the piney aroma of frankincense, it made for a perfect hideout to sort through documents, jot down notes, and pore over stacks of newspapers while sipping bottomless cups of Arabic coffee and espresso the color of dark chocolate.

For several years I had been working on my first book, The Puzzle Palace, which provided the first in-depth look at the National Security Agency. The deeper I dug, the more troubled I became. Not only did the classified file from the Justice Department accuse the NSA of systematically breaking the law by eavesdropping on American citizens, it concluded that it was impossible to prosecute those running the agency because of the enormous secrecy that enveloped it. Worse, the file made clear that the NSA itself was effectively beyond the law—allowed to bypass statutes passed by Congress and follow its own super-classified charter, what the agency called a “top-secret birth certificate” drawn up by the White House decades earlier.

Knowing the potential for such an unregulated agency to go rogue, I went on to write two more books about the NSA, Body of Secrets, in 2001, and The Shadow Factory, in 2008. My goal was to draw attention to the dangers the agency posed if it is not closely watched and controlled—dangers that would be laid bare in stark detail by Edward Snowden years later.

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But the NSA knew nothing about one of my biggest finds, which took place on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute. Nicknamed “the West Point of the South,” VMI housed the papers of William F. Friedman, a founder of both the NSA and of American cryptology. The NSA’s own auditorium is named after him. Yet Friedman had soured on the agency by the time he retired, and deliberately left his papers to a research library at VMI to get them as far away from the NSA as possible.

After Friedman’s death, and without his permission, agency officials traveled to the library, pulled out hundreds of his personal letters, and ordered them locked away in a secure vault. When I discovered what the NSA had done, I persuaded the library’s archivist to give me access to the letters, all of which were unclassified. Many were embarrassingly critical of the agency, describing its enormous paranoia and obsession with secrecy. Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries.

I also discovered that a former NSA director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, had left his papers – including reams of unclassified documents from his NSA office – to the same research library at VMI. They included personal, handwritten correspondence from Carter’s British counterpart about listening posts, cooperative agreements, and other sensitive topics. Later, Carter gave me a long and detailed interview about the NSA. The agency knew nothing about either the documents or the interview.

Following the publication of my book, the NSA raided the research library, stamped many of the Friedman documents secret, and ordered them put back into the vault. “Just because information has been published,” NSA director Lincoln Faurer explained to The New York Times, “doesn’t mean it should no longer be classified.” Faurer also flew to Colorado, where Gen. Carter was living in retirement, met with him at the NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base, and threatened him with prosecution if he ever gave another interview or allowed anyone else access to his papers.

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Op zaterdag 4 oktober 2014 14:02 schreef xepera9 het volgende:
Goed bezig, Papierversnipperaar.

Ik las dit vandaag:
RT: Germany handed law-protected private data to NSA for years

[..]

Duitstalig: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/thema/NSA

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Plasterk houdt hoeveelheid afluisteroperaties AIVD geheim

Minister Ronald Plasterk (Binnenlandse Zaken) wil niet bekendmaken hoeveel personen door de Algemene Inlichtingendienst en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) zijn afgeluisterd en bij hoeveel operaties de afluisterbevoegdheid wordt ingezet.

De Commissie van Toezicht betreffende de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (CTIVD) had deze getallen opgenomen in een rapport (pdf) over het functioneren van de AIVD.

Plasterk besloot echter om de getallen onleesbaar te maken in de uiteindelijk gepubliceerde versie van het rapport, omdat deze te veel inzicht geven in de werkwijze van de inlichtingendienst.

In een brief aan de Tweede Kamer (pdf) stelt Plasterk dinsdag dat de informatie "zich niet leent voor openbaarmaking, zeker wanneer die vanaf nu over meerdere jaren zou worden verstrekt". De 'Commissie Stiekem', bestaande uit alle fractieleiders van de Tweede Kamer, krijgt wel inzicht in de cijfers.

De CTIVD ging van september 2012 tot en met augustus 2013 na hoe de AIVD de afluisterbevoegdheid inzet. Uit het rapport wordt wel duidelijk dat in het onderzochte jaar 11 procent meer personen werden afgeluisterd dan een jaar eerder.

Veiligheid

Ook schrijft de toezichthouder over de "bevoegdheid tot selectie van sigint", waarmee de AIVD bijvoorbeeld activiteit op telefoonnummers of e-mailadressen in de gaten kan houden. Er worden "duizenden" van zulke adressen in de gaten gehouden, stelt de CTIVD.

Burgerrechtenbeweging Bits of Freedom is ontevreden met de geheimhouding van de gegevens, en wil deze via een verzoek op de Wet openbaarheid van bestuur (Wob) alsnog duidelijkheid krijgen.

"De CTIVD kan zelf beter dan minister Plasterk bepalen of dit de nationale veiligheid raakt", aldus Ton Siedsma van Bits of Freedom.

D66-Kamerlid Gerard Schouw zegt te willen weten waarom de cijfers zijn achtergehouden. Hij noemt dit "wonderlijk" en zegt zich af te vragen of dit neerkomt op censuur van de toezichthouder.

Geheimhouding

De Commissie concludeert dat de AIVD in het onderzochte jaar meermaals onrechtmatig heeft gehandeld. Zo zijn tweemaal gesprekken afgeluisterd met 'verschoningsgerechtigden', bijvoorbeeld artsen en advocaten die recht hebben op geheimhouding van communicatie met cliënten. Ook is twee keer te lang afgeluisterd.

Bij een afluisteroperatie naar iemand die samenwerkte met de AIVD, is minister Plasterk niet op de hoogte gebracht van deze samenwerking. Volgens de Commissie was dit "essentieel" voor de beoordeling van het afluisterverzoek en had dat dus wel moeten gebeuren.

Verder gaat de CTIVD in op de mogelijkheid van de AIVD om een gehele organisatie in de gaten te houden, de zogenoemde 'organisatielast'. Hierbij kunnen nieuwe leden van een organisatie worden afgeluisterd zonder dat daar opnieuw toestemming voor hoeft te worden gevraagd aan de minister.

Deze organisatielast is één keer ingezet tegen een groep mensen die volgens de wet niet kan worden gezien als een organisatie, stelt de CTIVD. Ook vindt de Commissie het onduidelijk in welke gevallen mensen kunnen worden toegevoegd aan de organisatielast.

Identiteiten

Het is volgens de Commissie illegaal om in bulk verzamelde gegevens te doorzoeken op zoek naar potentiële doelwitten. Een wetswijziging moet hier verandering in brengen, maar ondertussen doet de AIVD dit al wel.

De CTIVD wil daarom dat het gebruik van de data wordt beperkt tot het vaststellen van identiteiten en het bepalen van de relevantie voor een bepaald onderzoek. Ook moet goed worden geregistreerd welke communicatie is ingezien en wat de uitkomst was.

"Het is hoog tijd dat er een wetswijziging komt, zodat de Kamer zich kan uitlaten over dit soort kwesties", zegt Siedsma van Bits of Freedom.

Minister Plasterk zegt alle aanbeveligen van de Commssie aan te nemen. In sommige gevallen is de werkwijze van de AIVD al aangepast, of wordt de organisatie gevraagd om een betere werkwijze te formuleren.

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Reporter Radio naar rechter om tapgegevens AIVD

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Reporter Radio stapt naar de rechter omdat minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Ronald Plasterk (PvdA) weigert vrij te geven hoeveel mensen door de AIVD worden afgeluisterd.

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Politie breekt met spyware op afstand in computers in

De Nederlandse politie dringt met spyware op afstand computers binnen. De wet wordt erg opgerekt, zeggen deskundigen.

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In een brief aan de Tweede Kamer erkent minister Opstelten van Veiligheid en Justitie voor het eerst deze praktijk. Volgens hem mag de politie 'op afstand een computersysteem betreden en gegevensbestanden in beslag nemen'.

Dat is gebeurd 'in een aantal strafzaken waarin het ging om zeer ernstige feiten', schrijft hij in antwoord op vragen van SP-kamerlid Sharon Gesthuizen. Over de precieze werkwijze en effectiviteit wil Opstelten niets zeggen.

De minister reageert hiermee op onthullingen dat de Nederlandse politie het spionageprogramma FinFisher zou gebruiken. In augustus werd de producent van die software, Gamma Intenational, door activisten gehackt. Uit de buitgemaakte bestanden bleek de Landelijke Eenheid van de politie een van de klanten. FinFisher is ook gebruikt door de overheid in Bahrein om dissidenten in de gaten te houden. In het VPRO-programma Tegenlicht, aanstaande zondag, figureert FinFisher als bedrijf dat bugs verkoopt om in computers in te breken.

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EE, Vodafone and Three give police mobile call records at click of a mouse

Three of UK’s big four mobile phone networks are providing customer data to police forces automatically through Ripa

Three of the UK’s four big mobile phone networks have made customers’ call records available at the click of a mouse to police forces through automated systems, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

EE, Vodafone and Three operate automated systems that hand over customer data “like a cash machine”,as one phone company employee described it.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, a transparency watchdog, said: “If companies are providing communications data to law enforcement on automatic pilot, it’s as good as giving police direct access [to individual phone bills].”

O2, by contrast, is the only major phone network requiring staff to review all police information requests, the company said.

Mobile operators must by law store a year of call records of all of their customers, which police forces and other agencies can then access without a warrant using the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).

Ripa is the interception law giving authority to much of GCHQ’s mass surveillance. The law was again under the spotlight recently after it was used to identify sources of journalists from at least two national newspapers, the Sun and the Mail on Sunday.

Documents from software providers and conversations with mobile companies staff reveal how automatic this system has become, with the “vast majority” of records demanded by police delivered through automated systems, without the involvement of any phone company staff.

The Home Office argues communications data is “a critical tool” and its use of Ripa was “necessary and proportionate”.

Despite politicians’ assurances that the UK laws requiring phone companies to keep records would not create a state database of private communications, critics argue that the practice comes very close to doing so. King warned that “widespread, automatic access of this nature” meant the UK telecoms industry “essentially already provides law enforcement with the joined-up databases they claimed they didn’t have when pushing for the ‘snooper’s charter’.”

In the automated systems used by the phone companies, police officers seeking phone records must gain permission from another officer on the same force, who then enters the details into an online form. That mirrors the US Prism programme, revealed by Edward Snowden, which in effect created a backdoor into the products of US tech corporations. In the vast majority of cases, the information is then delivered without any further human role.

One document prepared by Charter Systems, which sells the type of software used by police forces to connect with mobile phone companies, explains the automated process saves “32 minutes” of human time per application.

“Charter Systems have worked in partnership with the Home Office and Detica [a firm providing data interception for security services and the police, now called BAE Systems Applied Intelligence].

to develop a solution that links directly to all CSPs [communication service providers, a term covering phone companies],” it states. The document explains the system produces “an automated solution for gathering electronic data information. The new solution saves time and effort for the authority in requesting and receiving ever increasing amounts of data.”

The systems were so interconnected, a separate sales document produce by Charter reveals, that “[d]ata can be retrieved from multiple CSPs in one request”.

Privacy groups reacted angrily to the details of how little day-to-day scrutiny records requests receive, warning that the automation of the system removes even the limited oversight ability – the right to refer requests to oversight agencies – phone networks have over Ripa requests.

“We urgently need clarity on just how unquestioning the relationship between telecommunications companies and law enforcement has become,” said King. “It’s crucial that each individual warrant for communications data is independently reviewed by the companies who receive them and challenged where appropriate to ensure the privacy of their customers is not being inappropriately invaded.”

Privacy advocates are also concerned that the staff within phone companies who deal with Ripa and other requests are often in effect paid by the Home Office – a fact confirmed by several networks – and so may, in turn, be less willing to challenge use of surveillance powers.

Several mobile phone networks confirmed the bulk of their queries were handled without human intervention. “We do have an automated system,” said a spokesman for EE, the UK’s largest network, which also operates Orange and T-Mobile. “[T]he vast majority of Ripa requests are handled through the automated system.” The spokesman added the system was subject to oversight, with monthly reports being sent to the law enforcement agency requesting the data, and annual reports going to the interception commissioner and the Home Office.

A spokesman for Vodafone said the company processed requests in a similar way. “The overwhelming majority of the Ripa notices we receive are processed automatically in accordance with the strict framework set out by Ripa and underpinned by the code of practice,” he said. “Even with a manual process, we cannot look behind the demand to determine whether it is properly authorised.”

A spokesman for Three, which is also understood to use a largely automated system, said the company was simply complying with legal requirements. “We take both our legal obligations and customer privacy seriously,” he said. “Three works with the government and does no more or less than is required or allowed under the established legal framework.”

Unlike the other networks, O2 said it did manually review all of its Ripa requests. “We have a request management system with which the law enforcement agencies can make their requests to us,” said the O2 spokeswoman. “All O2 responses are validated by the disclosure team to ensure that each request is lawful and the data provided is commensurate with the request.

Mike Harris, director of the Don’t Spy On Us campaign, said the automated systems posed a serious threat to UK freedom of expression. “How do we know that the police through new Home Office systems aren’t making automated requests that reveal journalist’s sources or even the private contacts of politicians?” he said.

“Edward Snowden showed that both the NSA and GCHQ had backdoor access to our private information stored on servers. Now potentially the police have access too, when will Parliament stand up and protect our fundamental civil liberties?”

A spokesman for the Home Office declined to respond to specific queries about the use of automatic systems to retrieve call records, but defended police forces’ use of Ripa. “Communications data is an absolutely critical tool used by police and other agencies to investigate crime, preserve national security and protect the public,” he said in a statement.

“This data is stored by communications service providers themselves and can only be acquired by public authorities under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 on a case by case basis, and where it is necessary and proportionate to do so.

“The acquisition of communications data under RIPA is subject to stringent safeguards in existing legislation and is independently overseen by the Interception of Communications Commissioner.”

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Second leaker in US intelligence, says Glenn Greenwald

Citizenfour, new film on spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, shows journalist Greenwald discussing other source

The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has found a second leaker inside the US intelligence agencies, according to a new documentary about Edward Snowden that premiered in New York on Friday night.

Towards the end of filmmaker Laura Poitras’s portrait of Snowden – titled Citizenfour, the label he used when he first contacted her – Greenwald is seen telling Snowden about a second source.

Snowden, at a meeting with Greenwald in Moscow, expresses surprise at the level of information apparently coming from this new source. Greenwald, fearing he will be overheard, writes the details on scraps of paper.

The specific information relates to the number of the people on the US government’s watchlist of people under surveillance as a potential threat or as a suspect. The figure is an astonishingt 1.2 million.

The scene comes after speculation in August by government officials, reported by CNN, that there was a second leaker. The assessment was made on the basis that Snowden was not identified as usual as the source and because at least one piece of information only became available after he ceased to be an NSA contractor and went on the run.

The two-hour documentary was the highlight of the New York Film Festival.

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Edward Snowden: state surveillance in Britain has no limits

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UK intelligence agencies need stronger oversight, says David Blunkett

Former home secretary tells committee continued secrecy is undermining public confidence in wake of Snowden revelations

The former home secretary David Blunkett has called for stronger oversight of the UK’s intelligence agencies and warned that the “old-fashioned paternalism” of secrecy based on perceived security interests was undermining public confidence in their activities.

Blunkett called for the legal framework on mass surveillance to be updated on a regular basis and for judicial oversight to be made much more robust and transparent.

The Labour MP’s call came during only the second public evidence session ever held by the intelligence and security committee. Its inquiry into security and privacy was set up following the disclosures by Edward Snowden of the scale of the bulk collection of personal data by GCHQ and the NSA.

The committee heard evidence from the heads of the intelligence agencies earlier this year – its first public evidence session. The inquiry is to take evidence in public from Nick Clegg and Yvette Cooper on Wednesday and from the home secretary, Theresa May, on Thursday. Half of May’s two-hour session will be held in secret.

The chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Onora O’Neill, told the committee’s MPs and peers that the privacy implications of big data and data mining were such that “the Stasi would have loved it. Thank god they didn’t have it.”

Blunkett, who as home secretary oversaw the introduction of the complex rules surrounding the use of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which legislates surveillance, warned the committee that it was no longer good enough for the security services to argue that “we know and you mustn’t know” to maintain public confidence in their activities.

He said Britain’s most sophisticated opponents already had a good idea of the capacity of the UK’s security services, and in some cases were ahead of them. Blunkett said it was necessary to tell the public about the methods of the security services to reassure them and to secure their consent: “That is the essence of a free democracy,” he said. “Therefore ensuring people feel comfortable and know enough about what we are doing to feel it is in their interests.

“Sometimes we have to be more sophisticated than saying ‘we can’t tell you anything because it might be a danger’. That actually undermines confidence and consent. It is real old-fashioned paternalism because it is ‘we know but you mustn’t know’.”

Blunkett said the need to update Ripa, which has been described as an “analogue law in a digital age”, was obvious. He reflected that when he first introduced the regulations surrounding the law they were already out of date and needed a ‘second go’.”

Blunkett said the legal framework surrounding surveillance needed updating “each fixed-term parliament” if it was to continue to command public confidence “because people are pushing the boundaries all the time.”

Blunkett also called for a much stronger judicial oversight regime saying the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal , which is the only court that can hear complaints of illegal surveillance or human rights breaches by the security services, was in need of a radical overhaul.

“The Investigatory Powers Tribunal needs to be ramped up completely. People need to know a lot more about it. It needs to be a lot more transparent and it needs to demonstrate that it is worth having,” said the former home secretary.

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Op dinsdag 14 oktober 2014 17:59 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Zou Snowden ooit de nobelprijs voor de vrede gegund worden?

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UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights

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The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded.

Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”

Mass surveillance thus “amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.”

In concluding that mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty.

Article 17 of the Covenant guarantees the right of privacy, the defining protection of which, the report explained, is “that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”

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FBI director attacks tech companies for embracing new modes of encryption

James Comey says data encryption could deprive police and intelligence companies of potentially live-saving information

The director of the FBI savaged tech companies for their recent embrace of end-to-end encryption and suggested rewriting laws to ensure law enforcement access to customer data in a Thursday speech.

James Comey said data encryption such as that employed on Apple’s latest mobile operating system would deprive police and intelligence companies of potentially life-saving information, even when judges grant security agencies access through a warrant.

“Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out,” he said. Technologists have found such statements reminiscent of the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s, an earlier period in which the US government warned about encryption constraining law enforcement.

Framing his speech at the Brookings Institution as kickstarting a “dialogue” and insisting he was not a “scare-monger”, Comey said “encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place.”

Comey also posed as a question “whether companies not subject currently to Calea should be required to build lawful intercept capabilities for law enforcement,” something he contended would not “expand” FBI authorities.” Calea is a 1994 surveillance law mandating that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have access to telecommunications data, which Comey described as archaic in the face of technological innovation.

“I’m hoping we can now start a dialogue with Congress on updating it,” Comey said.

Privacy advocates contend Comey is demagoguing the issue.

It took a June supreme court ruling, they point out, for law enforcement to abandon its contention that it did not require warrants at all to search through smartphones or tablets, and add that technological vulnerabilities can be exploited by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies as the US government. Additionally, the FBI and police retain access to data saved remotely in the so-called “cloud” – where much data syncs for storage from devices like Apple’s – for which companies like Apple keep the encryption keys.

Comey, frequently referring to “bad guys” using encryption, argued access to the cloud is insufficient.

“Uploading to the cloud doesn’t include all the stored data on the bad guy’s phone,” he said.

“It’s the people who are most worried what’s on the device who will be most likely to avoid the cloud.”

Tech companies contend that their newfound adoption of encryption is a response to overarching government surveillance, much of which occurs either without a warrant, subject to a warrant broad enough to cover indiscriminate data collection, or under a gag order following a non-judicial subpoena. Comey did not mention such subpoenas, often in the form of National Security Letters, in his remarks.

The National Security Agency, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, accesses customer information in transit between Google and Yahoo data centers, as one of its surveillance tools.

“The people who are criticizing this are the ones who should have expected this,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last week.

Christopher Soghoian, the chief technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, called Comey’s speech “disappointing”.

“What was missing from his remarks was an acknowledgement that when Congress passed Calea in 1994, they explicitly protected the rights of companies that wanted to build encryption into their products – encryption with no backdoors, encryption with no keys that are held by the company,” Soghoian said.

“So if he wants to get what he’s describing, not only is he talking about expanding Calea to technology companies and not just communications companies, but to be successful, he would have to remove that provision of Calea, and that would be a major and negative step.”

Comey praised Apple and Google as run by “good people” and said he recognized their embrace of encryption responded to “perceive[d]” market pressures in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures. But Comey suggested that end-to-end mobile device encryption amounted to a safe haven for criminals.

“Are we no longer a country that is passionate both about the rule of law and about their being no zones in this country beyond the reach of that rule of law? Have we become so mistrustful of government and law enforcement in particular that we are willing to let bad guys walk away, willing to leave victims in search of justice?” he said.

Comey acknowledged that the Snowden disclosures caused “justifiable surprise” among the public about the breadth of government surveillance, but hoped to mitigate it through greater transparency and advocacy.

Yet the FBI keeps significant aspects of its surveillance reach hidden even from government oversight bodies. Intelligence officials said in a June letter to a US senator that the FBI does not tally how often it searches through NSA’s vast hoards of international communications, without warrants, for Americans’ identifying information.

Comey frequently described himself as being technologically unprepared to offer specific solutions, and said he meant to begin a conversation, even at the risk of putting American tech companies at a competitive disadvantage.

“Where we may get is to a place where the US, through its Congress, says, ‘You know what, we need to force this on American companies,’ and maybe they’ll take a hit. Someone in some other country will say, ‘Ah, we sell a phone that even with lawful authority people can’t get into.’ But that we as a society are willing to have American companies take that hit. That’s why we have to have this conversation,” Comey said.

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Apple defies FBI and offers encryption by default on new operating system

New version of Mac OS X will encrypt users’ hard drives unless they explicitly decline, in spite of pleas by the FBI not to

The latest version of Apple’s operating system for desktop and laptop computers, Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite”, encourages users to turn on the company’s FileVault disk encryption, as the company hardens its pro-security stance.

The decision to encourage encryption, so that users must opt out – rather than opting in as has been the case since FileVault was introduced in 2003 – shows the company refusing to back down to pressure from the US government to restrict the availability of cryptographic tools to the public.

On Thursday, the FBI’s director, James Comey, decried the company’s decision to offer similar tools on mobile devices running iOS 8.

“With Apple’s new operating system, the information stored on many iPhones and other Apple devices will be encrypted by default,” Comey told the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. “Shortly after Apple’s announcement, Google announced plans to follow suit with its Android operating system. This means the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops, and tablets to reveal photos, documents, email, and recordings stored within.”

Comey continued: “At the outset, Apple says something that is reasonable – that it’s not that big a deal … Apple argues, for example, that its users can back up and store much of their data in ‘the cloud’ and that the FBI can still access that data with lawful authority. But uploading to the cloud doesn’t include all of the stored data on a bad guy’s phone, which has the potential to create a black hole for law enforcement.”

But despite Comey’s pleas, the company shipped Yosemite with the FileVault option intact. The install process for the new operating system asks users if they would “like to use FileVault to encrypt the disk” on their Macs. Ticked by default are two boxes, “Turn on FileVault disk encryption” and “Allow my iCloud account to unlock my disk”.

That means that unless the user actively declines the offer, their hard drives will be encrypted.

Unlike a standard password-protected computer, which leaves the contents of a hard-drive accessible to anyone with the patience to remove the drive, FileVault encrypts the entire contents of a device at disk level, rendering it impossible for anyone without the login password to access the data on the computer.

While the FBI has condemned Apple’s new commitment to security, civil liberties organisations have welcomed the decision. “We applaud tech leaders like Apple and Google that are unwilling to weaken security for everyone to allow the government yet another tool in its already vast surveillance arsenal,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Laura Murphy following Comey’s speech. “We hope that others in the tech industry follow their lead and realize that customers put a high value on privacy, security and free speech.”

Users on older versions of Mac OS X can still enable FileVault, but must dig into the operating system’s settings to do so; the feature is buried under the Security & Privacy option in the system preferences. Windows users have long had access to a similar tool, also not enabled by default, called BitLocker, which can be turned on using Windows Explorer. It is not yet known whether Microsoft will make BitLocker use opt-out in its forthcoming Windows 10 release, expect next year and presently in developer testing.

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Senior NSA official moonlighting for private cybersecurity firm

- Patrick Dowd recruited by former NSA director Keith Alexander
- Unusual for US official to work for private, for-profit company

The former director of the National Security Agency has enlisted the US surveillance giant’s current chief technology officer for his lucrative cybersecurity business venture, an unusual arrangement undercutting Keith Alexander’s assurances he will not profit from his connections to the secretive, technologically sophisticated agency.

Patrick Dowd continues to work as a senior NSA official while also working part time for Alexander’s IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm reported to charge up to $1m a month for advising banks on protecting their data from hackers. It is exceedingly rare for a US official to be allowed to work for a private, for-profit company in a field intimately related to his or her public function.

Reuters, which broke the story of Dowd’s relationship with IronNet, reported that the NSA is reviewing the business deal.

Since retiring from the NSA in March and entering the burgeoning field of cybersecurity consulting, Alexander has vociferously defended his ethics against charges of profiting off of his NSA credentials. Alexander was the founding general in charge of US Cyber Command, the first military command charged with defending Defense Department data and attacking those belonging to adversaries. Both positions provide Alexander with unique and marketable insights into cybersecurity.

His final year as the agency’s longest serving director was characterised by reacting to Edward Snowden’s disclosures – and the embarrassment of presiding over the largest data breach in the agency’s history – and publicly urging greater cybersecurity cooperation between the agency and financial institutions.

“I’m a cyber guy. Can’t I go to work and do cyber stuff?” Alexander told the Associated Press in August.

Alexander, whose adult life was spent in uniform, intends to file patents for what he has described obliquely as a new forecasting model for detecting network intrusions. His assurance prompted speculation that the retired general is profiting from technical sophistication that competitors who do not have a US intelligence pedigree cannot hope to replicate.

Alexander portrayed Dowd’s unusual joint positions with the NSA and IronNet as a way for the public to keep benefitting from Dowd’s expertise, while saying less about how Alexander will profit from the same skill set.

“I just felt that his leaving the government was the wrong thing for NSA and our nation,” Alexander told Reuters.

The NSA, whose operations are almost entirely secret, has long been criticised for its close corporate ties. One long-serving official, William Black Jr, left the agency for Science Applications International Corporation, before returning in 2000 as deputy director.

While Black was in his senior position, SAIC won an NSA contract to develop a data-mining programme, called Trailblazer, that was never implemented, despite a cost of over $1bn. Whistleblowers have charged that Trailblazer killed a more privacy-protective system called ThinThread.

Black, however, did not serve simultaneously at the NSA and SAIC.

Compounding the potential financial conflicts at the NSA, Buzzfeed reported that the home of chief of its Signals Intelligence Directorate, Teresa Shea, has a signals-intelligence consulting firm operating out of it. The firm is run by her husband James, who also works for a signals-intelligence firm that Buzzfeed said appears to do business with the NSA; and Teresa Shea runs an “office and electronics” business that lists a Beechcraft plane among its assets.

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Whisper chief executive answers privacy revelations: 'We're not infallible'

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The chief executive of the “anonymous” social media app Whisper broke his silence late on Saturday, saying he welcomed the debate sparked by Guardian US revelations about his company’s tracking of users and declaring “we realise that we’re not infallible”.

Michael Heyward’s statement was his first public response to a series of articles published in the Guardian which revealed how Whisper monitors the whereabouts of users of an app he has in the past described as “the safest place on the internet”.

Whisper hosts 2.6 million messages a day posted through its app, which promises users a place to “anonymously share your thoughts and secrets” and has billed itself as a platform for whistleblowers.

The Guardian’s disclosures, which were based on a visit to Whisper’s headquarters and detailed conversations with its executives, prompted privacy experts to call for a federal inquiry into the company.

Heyward, who stayed silent for more than 48 hours, came under intense pressure to respond to the controversy. His statement was posted on a blog late on Saturday.

Unlike other Whisper representatives, who have strongly denied the disclosures, Heyward did not dispute the accuracy of the Guardian’s reporting. But he insisted his company was founded on “honesty and transparency” and indicated Whisper would take firm action against employees who breach those values.

“Above all else, we always strive to do right by our users,” he said. “We have zero tolerance for any employee who violates that trust.”

Heyward expressed “dismay” that the Guardian, which had previously collaborated with Whisper on three small projects, “published a series of stories questioning our commitment to your privacy”.

“While we’re disappointed with the Guardian’s approach, we welcome the discussion,” Heyward said. “We realise that we’re not infallible, and that reasonable people can disagree about a new and quickly evolving area like online anonymity.”

In formal responses to the Guardian’s reports, Whisper had insisted it “does not follow or track users”. Heyward, however, said only that Whisper does not “actively” track users.

The 27-year-old CEO’s remarks contrast with those of his editor-in-chief, Neetzan Zimmerman, who mounted an offensive immediately after the reports were published, accusing Guardian journalists of fabricating quotes and denouncing the reports as “a pack of vicious lies”.

The Guardian witnessed how Zimmerman’s editorial team monitors the movements of certain users during a three-day visit to the company’s California headquarters to explore the possibility of future editorial collaboration. Two Guardian reporters were given access to Whisper’s back-end tools and spoke extensively with company executives.

Zimmerman’s team uses an in-house mapping tool to research the movements of users who have opted into geolocation services, using GPS data which is “fuzzed” to be accurate within 500 metres of where messages are posted. The reporters witnessed how Zimmerman’s team tried to determine the “veracity” of potentially newsworthy users by researching their location, sifting through their trail of previous posts and and tracing their movements over time.

When researching users who had disabled geolocation services – preventing the company from accessing their GPS-based data – Whisper executives explained how the editorial team instead relied on IP data to work out a targeted user’s approximate location.

Zimmerman contested the Guardian’s detailed account of those practices, saying it was “100% false” and “a 100% lie” to say the editorial team ever accessed rough location data for people who have opted out. “When I specifically say that they are lying, that’s what I mean – that does not happen, and it simply can’t happen,” he told the tech news site Gigaom.

However, Whisper’s senior vice-president, Eric Yellin, had already acknowledged the practice, telling the Guardian before the stories were published: “We occasionally look at user IP addresses internally to determine very approximate locations.” The admission was made in an email exchange about the location-tracking practices of Whisper’s editorial team.

Heyward acknowledged in his statement on Saturday that Whisper collects IP data which can infer rough location data but did not specify how that information is used – except to say it is sometimes shared with law enforcement. Heyward also acknowledged that Whisper does look at the past activity of some users on the app to “assess the authenticity” of their posts.

Heyward also responded to the Guardian’s disclosure that Whisper was sharing user information with a suicide prevention study run by the Pentagon, based on smartphones the social media app can pinpoint to military bases. Users had not been told about the research. Heyward said Whisper was “proudly working with organisations to lower suicide rates, including the Department of Defense’s Suicide Prevention Office”. He added: “We can’t wait to establish more of these relationships and effect real change.”

The Guardian also revealed on Thursday that Whisper was developing a version of its app to comply with Chinese censorship laws, and indefinitely archiving data, including messages users may think they have deleted, in a database. Heyward’s statement did not address those disclosures.

His company had built media partnerships with the cable TV channel Fusion and the online news website Buzzfeed, and was searching for new partners. Heyward said a key part of Whisper’s mission was to “shine a light” on important social issues, and his blogpost linked to stories that have been published on Buzzfeed. “We look forward to continuing this important work with our partners,” Heyward said.

Both Buzzfeed and Fusion have suspended their partnerships with the social media app in the wake of the Guardian’s revelations.

Heyward said changes to Whisper’s terms of use and privacy policy were “not related” to the Guardian’s reporting. Whisper rewrote its terms of service on Monday – four days after learning the Guardian planned to publish details about its business practices.

Heyward said these changes were finalised in July and were due to be published in October, along with a new website. Heyward did not mention the update to Whisper’s terms of service that occurred in September. Explaining the decision to change the terms of service, again, on Monday, he said: “Our communications with the Guardian made it clear that our users would benefit from seeing them sooner”.

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‘Crypto wars’ return to Congress

FBI Director James Comey has launched a new “crypto war” by asking Congress to update a two-decade old law to make sure officials can access information from people’s cell phones and other communication devices.

The call is expected to trigger a major Capitol Hill fight about whether or not tech companies need to give the government access to their users.

“It's going to be a tough fight for sure,” Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the Patriot Act’s original author, told The Hill in a statement.

He argues Apple and other companies are taking the privacy of consumers into their own hands because Congress has failed to pass legislation in response to public anger over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

“While Director Comey says the pendulum has swung too far toward privacy and away from law enforcement, he fails to acknowledge that Congress has yet to pass any significant privacy reforms,” he added. “Because of this failure, businesses have taken matters into their own hands to protect their consumers and their bottom lines.”

Comey argues that trend will make it harder to solve crimes.

“If this becomes the norm, I suggest to you that homicide cases could be stalled, suspects walked free, child exploitation not discovered and prosecuted,” he said last week.

Comey is asking that Congress update the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law that required telephone companies make it possible for federal officials to wiretap their users.

Many new mobile applications and other modern devices aren’t included under the law, however, making it difficult if not impossible for police to get a suspect’s records — even with a warrant.

Forcing companies to put in a “back door” to give officials access would also open them up to hackers in China and Russia, opponents claim, as well as violate Americans’ privacy rights.

Comey claimed the FBI was not looking for a “back door” into people’s devices.

“We want to use the front door with clarity and transparency,” he said.

But for critics, that’s a distinction without a difference.

“The notion that it’s not a back door; it’s a front door — that’s just wordplay,” said Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It just makes no sense.”

It was reminiscent, he said, of the mid-1990s debate over the “Clipper Chip,” an electronic chip that federal officials wanted to insert in devices allowing them to get access to people’s communications. In the end, Congress did not require that companies use that chip in their technology.

Similar arguments have emerged every few years, as technology has gotten better and government agents have feared being left behind.

“This is the third or fourth replay,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “So far Congress has done the right thing and stood aside when companies are given the latitude they need to make communications devices and services more secure.”

Early indications are that it could be an uphill push for the FBI.

“I’d be surprised if more than a handful of members would support the idea of backdooring Americans’ personal property,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who would staunchly oppose the measure, said in a statement shared with The Hill.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, on Friday tweeted that the administration would be making a “tough sell” by pushing an update to CALEA.

“To FBI Director Comey and the [administration] on criticisms of legitimate businesses using encryption: you reap what you sow,” he wrote.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) predicted that any bill would have “zero chance” of passing.

Earlier this year, she and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced a measure to the defense spending bill banning the National Security Agency from using “backdoor” searches to spy on Americans through a legal provision targeting foreigners. That measure overwhelmingly passed the House 293-123.

While the NSA’s spying is different from the FBI’s requested updated to CALEA, the spirit is the same, she said.

“I think the public would not support it, certainly industry would not support it, civil liberties groups would not support it,” Lofgren told The Hill. “I think [Comey is] a sincere guy, but there’s just no way this is going to happen.”

Still, the FBI is unlikely to drop the pressure, especially if tech companies keep putting a focus on their privacy protections.

“This is a long-term discussion that has been coming and I expect to continue,” said Carl Szabo, a lobbyist for NetChoice, a trade group for online businesses including Google, eBay and Yahoo.

As for the chances of a CALEA update, he is opposed but isn’t assuming the FBI will stand down.

“I never underestimate anything,” he said.

“I always think that there is a chance, even if it’s not as sweeping as installing a front door master key on every mobile device, it could be installing a small backdoor.”

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Ministers should assess UK surveillance warrants, says Philip Hammond

Foreign secretary rejects judicial scrutiny, saying political judgment is required to assess validity of GCHQ operations

The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, on Thursday rejected suggestions that judges should approve electronic surveillance warrants, arguing that only ministers could exercise the political judgment necessary to ensure that such surveillance was necessary and proportionate.

Hammond was giving evidence to parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which is reviewing the need for new oversight legislation to regulate the UK’s electronic espionage agency, GCHQ, in the light of the revelations on bulk data collection made by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Hammond told the committee that GCHQ’s bulk collection of private data from emails, internet activity and telephone usage did not amount to mass surveillance because the state did not have the resources to trawl through the huge volume of information involved, and because of legal safeguards on how the data was used.

“There’s also a very important safeguard provided by the culture within the agencies, which is the exact opposite of what some movies might like to suggest,” he said.

“The agencies are extremely cautious, extremely focused on their responsibility to maintain the culture of proportionality and necessity in everything they do. And there is an atmosphere … which is very far from a gung-ho approach. It is very cautious, very measured.”

Hammond – who oversees the work of GCHQ and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 – confirmed that any email or internet search that went through a foreign server was treated as an external communication and therefore subject to a different clause in the Intelligence Services Act. That in turn allows the foreign secretary to authorise much broader examination by the intelligence agencies than is the case with domestic communications. However, he insisted that once it becomes clear someone on British soil is party to the communication, there is a legal mechanism that once more narrows the scope of warrant.

Privacy and civil rights groups have argued that, in light of the Snowden revelations, all electronic surveillance warrants should go before a judge to ensure the phenomenal power available to government as a result of modern surveillance technology should be subject to some form of judicial constraint. Hammond countered that judges would assess surveillance warrant requests primarily from a legal standpoint. Only an elected official could properly apply political judgment on the necessity and proportionality of an eavesdropping operation.

The foreign secretary said that in issuing surveillance warrants he was subject not just to legal but also to political constraints, which were narrower.

“Perhaps it is a feature of the times that we live in, but I’m sure I can speak for all my colleagues who sign warrants that we all have, in the back of our minds, that at some point in the future we will – not might be, but will – be appearing before some inquiry or tribunal or court to account for the decisions we’ve made,” Hammond said.

Mike Harris, the campaign director of Don’t Spy on Us, a coalition of privacy and digital rights advocacy groups, argued that ministers should indeed make political judgments on warrants, but their decisions should then be reviewed by judges.

“The safeguards he talks about are not safeguards at all. It is very hard to tell in practice who is a UK-based party to a communication,” Harris said. “This comes in the context of an absence of judicial oversight and a lack of scrutiny from parliament and an under-resourcing of the intelligence commissioners, so in effect the public can’t be certain that the reassurances from the minister are upheld in any way by intelligence agencies.”

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Former NSA Official: Anyone Who 'Justified' Snowden's Leaks Shouldn't Be Allowed A Gov't Job

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A few days ago, the FTC announced that it had appointed Ashkan Soltani as its chief technology officer. Soltani is a well-known (and often outspoken) security researcher who has worked at the FTC in the past. Nothing about this appointment should be all that surprising or even remotely controversial. However, recently, Soltani had been doing a lot of journalism work, as a media consultant at the Washington Post helping Barton Gellman and other reporters really understand the technical and security aspects of the Snowden documents. His name has appeared as a byline in a number of stories about the documents, detailing what is really in those documents, and how they can impact your privacy.

Apparently, this has upset the usual crew of former NSA officials.

Let's start with former NSA director Michael Hayden. The publication FedScoop heard the news about Soltani, and decided to ask Hayden and other NSA-types their thoughts. You can tell by the opening paragraph what angle FedScoop is digging for with its article:

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The Really Dark Internet

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Deception and Propaganda in Social Media

A year after the revelations by Edward Snowden, more or less everybody is aware of the astonishing extent of online surveillance. An outcome of this increased awareness is the development of various protective measures, including encryption practices, privacy protection measures as well as the development of anonymised platforms, such as Kwikdesk, an anonymous and ephemeral version of Twitter. However, other aspects of state and corporate control of social media have received less attention. In the face of rising inequality and increasing political mobilisation from the bottom, the ruling class must pro-actively defend the current power structures and a way to do this includes not only surveillance, but also deception and propaganda in social media. The really dark Internet is a reference to this layer of surveillance and disinformation – the spread of false information which intends to undermine, confuse, disrupt, and eventually defuse any socio-political action that threatens to unsettle the status quo.

With surveillance a given, we must now begin to learn about strategies and tactics of deception and disinformation, coming from states, reactionary and fascist political groupings, and corporations.

While a lot has been written on the signal intelligence contents of the NSA documents, less is known about the kinds of human intelligence used by government agencies and corporations. In a leaked NSA presentation which would have made Goebbels proud, a British spy agency – the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) – explicitly refers to its digital propaganda tactics: the circulation of false information aimed at destroying the reputation of its targets and the use of insights from the social sciences in order to manipulate online communications in line with their political objectives.

The presentation goes on to list techniques for dissimulation or ‘hiding the real’ through ‘masking, repackaging, and dazzling’, and for simulation, or ‘showing the false’ through ‘mimicking, inventing and decoying’; it goes on to refer to techniques for managing attention, infiltrating networks, planting ruses and causing disruption. The aim is to build ‘cyber-magicians’, who can confuse and manipulate ‘targets’. The presentation concludes by estimating that ‘by 2013 JTRIG will have a staff of 150+, fully trained’. Though we cannot be sure of the status of such plans following the leaks, it would be naïve to assume that they have been dropped.
- See more at: http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13166#sthash.2yopTRUk.dpuf

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AnonyOps twitterde op dinsdag 28-10-2014 om 14:45:06 The FBI has reportedly raided the home of a "2nd Snowden". Watch how they treat them for an example of how they would have treated Snowden reageer retweet

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Feds identify suspected 'second leaker' for Snowden reporters

The FBI recently searched a government contractor's home, but some officials worry the Justice Department has lost its 'appetite' for leak cases

The FBI has identified an employee of a federal contracting firm suspected of being the so-called "second leaker" who turned over sensitive documents about the U.S. government's terrorist watch list to a journalist closely associated with ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the case.

The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect's home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said.

But the case has also generated concerns among some within the U.S. intelligence community that top Justice Department officials — stung by criticism that they have been overzealous in pursuing leak cases — may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media, the sources said. One source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said there was concern "there is no longer an appetite at Justice for these cases."

Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on the investigation into the watch-list leak, citing department rules involving pending cases.

As for the department's overall commitment to pursue leak cases, he added: "We're certainly going to follow the evidence wherever it leads us and take appropriate action."

Another source familiar with the case said: "Investigators are continuing to pursue it, but are not ready to charge yet."

The case in question involves an Aug. 5 story published by The Intercept, an investigative website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who first published sensitive NSA documents obtained from Snowden.

Headlined "Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers," the story cited a classified government document showing that nearly half the people on the U.S. government's master terrorist screening database had "no recognized terrorist affiliation."

The story, co-authored by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, was accompanied by a document "obtained from a source in the intelligence community" providing details about the watch-listing system that were dated as late as August 2013, months after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and revealed himself as the leaker of thousands of top secret documents from the NSA.

This prompted immediate speculation that there was a "second leaker" inside the U.S. intelligence community providing material to Greenwald and his associates.

That point is highlighted in the last scene of the new documentary about Snowden released this weekend, called "Citizenfour," directed by filmmaker Laura Poitras, a co-founder with Greenwald and Scahill of The Intercept.

Greenwald tells a visibly excited Snowden about a new source inside the U.S. intelligence community who is leaking documents. Greenwald then scribbles notes to Snowden about some of the details, including one briefly seen about the U.S. drone program and another containing a reference to the number of Americans on the watch list.

"The person is incredibly bold," Snowden says. Replies Greenwald: "It was motivated by what you did."

In an interview on the radio show "Democracy Now," Scahill, who also briefly appears in "Citizenfour," says the new source described in the film provided him with a document that "outlines the rulebook for placing people on a variety of watch lists." The source is "an extremely principled and brave whistleblower" who made his disclosures "at great personal risk," Scahill says in the interview.

Contacted Monday, Scahill declined any comment about his source, but said neither he nor The Intercept had been notified by federal officials about the investigation. He added, however, that he is not surprised to learn of the probe: "The Obama administration in my view is conducting a war against whistleblowers and ultimately against independent journalism."

John Cook, editor of The Intercept, said the website's stories had revealed "crucial information" about the excesses of the U.S. watch-listing system. "Any attempt to criminalize the public release of those stories benefits only those who exercise virtually limitless power in secret with no accountability," he told Yahoo News.

Sources familiar with the investigation say the disclosures prompted the National Counterterrorism Center to file a "crimes report" with the Justice Department — an official notification that classified material has been compromised and a violation of federal law may have taken place.

The documents in question disclose multiple details about how federal intelligence agencies provide entries and track suspects on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE — a master database with over 1 million names that provides the basis for watch-listing individuals and placing them on "no fly" lists when there are sufficient links to terrorism.

One document is stamped as "Secret" and "NOFORN," meaning it cannot be shared with foreign governments. These, however, are far less sensitive than some of the NSA materials leaked by Snowden.

During Obama's first five years as president, the Justice Department and the U.S. military brought seven criminal prosecutions for national security leaks — more than twice as many as all previous presidents put together.

But the Obama administration's aggressive anti-leak efforts triggered a firestorm of criticism last year after disclosures that, in pursuing these cases, prosecutors had secretly subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press and filed a search warrant identifying a Fox News reporter as a potential "co-conspirator" under the Espionage Act for his efforts to coax information from a confidential source.

Since September of last year, when a former FBI agent pleaded guilty to disclosing details about an al-Qaida bomb plot to the AP, the Justice Department has brought no further leak cases. Attorney General Eric Holder — who sources say was personally stung by the criticism — has also unveiled new "guidelines" that restrict how the Justice Department would seek information from the news media in leak cases.

Holder, who recently announced his plans to step down, also appeared to signal that he was eager to avoid further confrontations with the press when he was asked whether he would seek to incarcerate New York Times reporter James Risen if he refused to testify in an upcoming trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking him information about a covert effort to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. Risen has vowed he will never testify about a confidential source.

"As long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job will go to jail," Holder said at a meeting with news media representatives when asked about the Risen case.

But Steve Aftergood, who closely tracks government secrecy efforts, said, "It's an open question at this point whether the administration will indict any other leakers or pursue other prosecutions."

He noted that, despite Holder's comments, Justice Department prosecutors had yet to formally inform a federal judge whether they will call Risen at the trial of the former CIA officer — a move that could result in a direct confrontation with the reporter if he is asked to identify his source.

"These leaks are taken extremely seriously," he said. If prosecutors have sufficient evidence against the suspected new leaker, "I don't think they will let it slide."

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GCHQ views data without a warrant, government admits

GCHQ’s secret ‘arrangements’ for accessing bulk material revealed in documents submitted to UK surveillance watchdog

British intelligence services can access raw material collected in bulk by the NSA and other foreign spy agencies without a warrant, the government has confirmed for the first time.

GCHQ’s secret “arrangements” for accessing bulk material are revealed in documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the UK surveillance watchdog, in response to a joint legal challenge by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. The legal action was launched in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations published by the Guardian and other news organisations last year.

The government’s submission discloses that the UK can obtain “unselected” – meaning unanalysed, or raw intelligence – information from overseas partners without a warrant if it was “not technically feasible” to obtain the communications under a warrant and if it is “necessary and proportionate” for the intelligence agencies to obtain that information.

The rules essentially permit bulk collection of material, which can include communications of UK citizens, provided the request does not amount to “deliberate circumvention” of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which governs much of the UK’s surveillance activities.

This point – that GCHQ does not regard warrants as necessary in all cases – is explicitly spelled out in the document. “[A] Ripa interception warrant is not as a matter of law required in all cases in which unanalysed intercepted communications might be sought from a foreign government,” it states. The rules also cover communicationsdata sent unsolicited to the UK agencies.

Campaigners say that this contrasts with assurances by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in July last year that a warrant signed by a minister was in place whenever GCHQ obtained intelligence from the US.

The data can then be stored for up to two years, the same duration as information collected directly by the agency. This can be extended unilaterally if a senior official believes it to be necessary and proportionate for national security purposes.

Privacy International, one of several advocacy groups mounting legal challenges against GCHQ and NSA surveillance, said the revelation should cast further doubts on legal safeguards in the UK.

“We now know that data from any call, internet search, or website you visited over the past two years could be stored in GCHQ’s database and analysed at will, all without a warrant to collect it in the first place,” said deputy director Eric King. “It is outrageous that the government thinks mass surveillance, justified by secret “arrangements” that allow for vast and unrestrained receipt and analysis of foreign intelligence material is lawful.”

The group also said information obtained through these overseas “arrangements” was treated as if it were targeted surveillance, removing a requirement under UK law not to search for UK citizens and residents in such data troves. This means that British citizens could, in theory, be subject to warrantless monitoring by GCHQ.

Amnesty International and Liberty, the co-complainants in the IPT case, echoed Privacy International’s call for reform of surveillance safeguards.

“It is time the government comes clean on such crucial issues for people’s privacy as the sharing of communications intercepts with foreign governments,” said Amnesty International director of law and policy Mike Bostock. “Secret rules are woefully inadequate.”

Liberty’s legal director James Welsh said the tribunal submissions contradicted public statements from the government.

“The line the Government took at the hearing was that there were adequate safeguards, they just couldn’t be made public,” he said. “Leaving aside whether secret safeguards can ever be adequate, this reluctantly-made disclosure suggests otherwise.”

Last week, the foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, told parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee he expected that minister who signed surveillance warrants would likely have to justify themselves in front of a public inquiry at some point in the future.

“I’m sure I can speak for all of my colleague who sign warrants that we all have, in the back of our minds, that at some point in the future we will – not might be, but will – be appearing before some inquiry or tribunal or court accounting for the decisions that we’ve made and essentially accounting for the way we’ve applied the proportionality and necessity tests,” he said.

Hammond was also criticised for some of his answers to the committee, with experts suggesting the foreign secretary appeared not to understand the legal framework for the warrants he was signing , following a mischaracterisation of which types of communication would or would not require individual warrants.

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FBI demands new powers to hack into computers and carry out surveillance

Agency requests rule change but civil liberties groups say ‘extremely invasive’ technique amounts to unconstitutional power grab

The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement that would grant it significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the US and around the world.

Civil liberties groups warn that the proposed rule change amounts to a power grab by the agency that would ride roughshod over strict limits to searches and seizures laid out under the fourth amendment of the US constitution, as well as violating first amendment privacy rights. They have protested that the FBI is seeking to transform its cyber capabilities with minimal public debate and with no congressional oversight.

The regulatory body to which the Department of Justice has applied to make the rule change, the advisory committee on criminal rules, will meet for the first time on November 5 to discuss the issue. The panel will be addressed by a slew of technology experts and privacy advocates concerned about the possible ramifications were the proposals allowed to go into effect next year.

“This is a giant step forward for the FBI’s operational capabilities, without any consideration of the policy implications. To be seeking these powers at a time of heightened international concern about US surveillance is an especially brazen and potentially dangerous move,” said Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in computer law at UC Hastings college of the law who will be addressing next week’s hearing.

The proposed operating changes related to rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, the terms under which the FBI is allowed to conduct searches under court-approved warrants. Under existing wording, warrants have to be highly focused on specific locations where suspected criminal activity is occurring and approved by judges located in that same district.

But under the proposed amendment, a judge can issue a warrant that would allow the FBI to hack into any computer, no matter where it is located. The change is designed specifically to help federal investigators carry out surveillance on computers that have been “anonymized” – that is, their location has been hidden using tools such as Tor.

The amendment inserts a clause that would allow a judge to issue warrants to gain “remote access” to computers “located within or outside that district” (emphasis added) in cases in which the “district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means”. The expanded powers to stray across district boundaries would apply to any criminal investigation, not just to terrorist cases as at present.

Were the amendment to be granted by the regulatory committee the FBI would have the green light to unleash its capabilities – known as “network investigative techniques” – on computers across America and beyond. The techniques involve clandestinely installing malicious software, or malware, onto a computer that in turn allows federal agents effectively to control the machine, downloading all its digital contents, switching its camera or microphone on or off, and even taking over other computers in its network.

“This is an extremely invasive technique,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, who will also be addressing the hearing. “We are talking here about giving the FBI the green light to hack into any computer in the country or around the world.”

A glimpse into the kinds of operations that could multiply under the new powers was gained this week when Soghoian discovered from documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that in 2007 the FBI had faked an Associated Press story as a ruse to insert malware into the computer of a US-based bomb plot suspect. The revelation prompted angry responses from the AP and from the Seattle Times, whose name was also invoked in the documents, though the FBI said it had not in the end imitated the newspaper.

Civil liberties and privacy groups are particularly alarmed that the FBI is seeking such a huge step up in its capabilities through such an apparently backdoor route. Soghoian said of next week’s meeting: “This should not be the first public forum for discussion of an issue of this magnitude.”

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford center for internet and society, said that “this is an investigative technique that we haven’t seen before and we haven’t thrashed out the implications. It absolutely should not be done through a rule change – it has to be fully debated publicly, and Congress must be involved.”

Ghappour has also highlighted the potential fall-out internationally were the amendment to be approved. Under current rules, there are no fourth amendment restrictions to US government surveillance activities in other countries as the US constitution only applies to domestic territory.

However, the US government does accept that it should only carry out clandestine searches abroad where the fourth amendment’s “basic requirement of reasonableness” applies. In a letter setting out its case for the Rule 41 reform, the department of justice states that new warrants issued to authorise FBI hacking into computers whose location was unknown would “support the reasonableness of the search”.

Ghappour fears that such a statement amounts to “possibly the broadest expansion of extraterritorial surveillance power since the FBI’s inception”. He told the Guardian that “for the first time the courts will be asked to issue warrants allowing searches outside the country”.

He warned that the diplomatic consequences could be serious, with short-term FBI investigations undermining the long-term international relationship building of the US state department. “In the age of cyber attacks, this sort of thing can scale up pretty quickly.”

Another insight into the expansive thrust of US government thinking in terms of its cyber ambitions was gleaned recently in the prosecution of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged founder of the billion-dollar drug site the Silk Road. Experts suspect that the FBI hacked into the Silk Road server, that was located in Reykjavik, Iceland, though the agency denies that.

In recent legal argument, US prosecutors claimed that even if they had hacked into the server without a warrant, it would have been justified as “a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary”.

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Brazil Is Keeping Its Promise to Avoid the U.S. Internet

Brazil was not bluffing last year, when it said that it wanted to disconnect from the United States-controlled internet due to the NSA's obscenely invasive surveillance tactics. The country is about to stretch a cable from the northern city of Fortaleza all the way to Portugal, and they've vowed not to use a single U.S. vendor to do it.

At first glance, Brazil's plan to disconnect from the U.S. internet just seemed silly. The country was not happy when news emerged that the NSA's tentacles stretched all the way down to Brazil. And the country was especially not happy when news emerged that the NSA had been spying on the Brazilian government's email for years. But really, what are you gonna do?

Brazil made a bunch of bold promises, ranging in severity from forcing companies like Facebook and Google to move their servers inside Brazilian borders, to building a new all-Brazilian email system—which they've already done. But the first actionable opportunity the country was presented with is this transatlantic cable, which had been in the works since 2012 but is only just now seeing construction begin. And with news that the cable plan will not include American vendors, it looks like Brazil is serious; it's investing $185 million on the cable project alone. And not a penny of that sum will go to an American company.

The implications of Brazil distancing itself from the US internet are huge. It's not necessarily a big deal politically, but the economic consequences could be tremendously destructive. Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world, and it continues to grow. So when Brazil finally does divorce Uncle Sam—assuming things continue at this rate—a huge number of contracts between American companies and Brazil will simply disappear. On the whole, researchers estimate that the United States could lose about $35 billion due to security fears. That's a lot of money.

We knew there would be backlash to the Snowden leaks, but it's not just political; Edward Snowden cost the United States a lot of money, even if that wasn't his plan. Yet here we are, waving goodbye to information technology revenues from one of the world's largest countries. Still, that's a small price to pay for knowing just how little privacy we've had all along.

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GCHQ chief accuses US tech giants of becoming terrorists' 'networks of choice'

New director of UK eavesdropping agency accuses US tech firms of becoming ‘networks of choice’ for terrorists

Privacy has never been “an absolute right”, according to the new director of GCHQ, who has used his first public intervention since taking over at the helm of Britain’s surveillance agency to accuse US technology companies of becoming “the command and control networks of choice” for terrorists.

Robert Hannigan said a new generation of freely available technology has helped groups like Islamic State (Isis) to hide from the security services and accuses major tech firms of being “in denial”, going further than his predecessor in seeking to claim that the leaks of Edward Snowden have aided terror networks.

GCHQ and sister agencies including MI5 cannot tackle those challenges without greater support from the private sector, “including the largest US technology companies which dominate the web”, Hannigan argued in an opinion piece written for the Financial Times just days into his new job.

Arguing that GCHQ needed to enter into the debate about privacy, Hannigan said: “I think we have a good story to tell. We need to show how we are accountable for the data we use to protect people, just as the private sector is increasingly under pressure to show how it filters and sells its customers’ data.

“GCHQ is happy to be part of a mature debate on privacy in the digital age. But privacy has never been an absolute right and the debate about this should not become a reason for postponing urgent and difficult decisions.”

Hannigan, who was born in Gloucestershire, not far from GCHQ’s base, has advised the prime minister on counter-terrorism, intelligence and security policy, goes on to take aim at the role of major technology companies. A senior Foreign Office official, Hannigan succeeded Sir Iain Lobban at the Cheltenham-based surveillance agency.

While not naming any company in particular, the GCHQ director writes: “To those of us who have to tackle the depressing end of human behaviour on the internet, it can seem that some technology companies are in denial about its misuse.

“I suspect most ordinary users of the internet are ahead of them: they have strong views on the ethics of companies, whether on taxation, child protection or privacy; they do not want the media platforms they use with their friends and families to facilitate murder or child abuse.”

Hannigan asserts that the members of the public “know” the internet grew out of the values of western democracy and insists that customers of the technology firms he criticises would be “comfortable with a better, more sustainable relationship between the agencies and the technology companies.”

Heading towards the 25th anniversary of the creation of the world wide web, he calls for a “new deal” between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting citizens.

“It should be a deal rooted in the democratic values we share. That means addressing some uncomfortable truths. Better to do it now than in the aftermath of greater violence.”

In the same piece, Hannigan says Isis differs from its predecessors in the security of its communications, presenting an even greater challenge to the security services.

He writes: “Terrorists have always found ways of hiding their operations. But today mobile technology and smartphones have increased the options available exponentially.

“Techniques for encrypting messages or making them anonymous which were once the preserve of the most sophisticated criminals or nation states now come as standard. These are supplemented by freely available programs and apps adding extra layers of security, many of them proudly advertising that they are ‘Snowden approved’. There is no doubt that young foreign fighters have learnt and benefited from the leaks of the past two years.”

Among the advocates of privacy protection who reacted to Hannigan’s comments, the deputy director of Privacy International, Eric King, said: “It’s disappointing to see GCHQ’s new director refer to the internet – the greatest tool for innovation, access to education and communication humankind has ever known – as a command-and-control network for terrorists.”

King added: “Before he condemns the efforts of companies to protect the privacy of their users, perhaps he should reflect on why there has been so much criticism of GCHQ in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. GCHQ’s dirty games – forcing companies to handover their customers’ data under secret orders, then secretly tapping the private fibre optic cables between the same companies’ data centres anyway – have lost GCHQ the trust of the public, and of the companies who services we use. Robert Hannigan is right, GCHQ does need to enter the public debate about privacy - but attacking the internet isn’t the right way to do it.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) meanwhile rejected the notion that an agreement between companies and governments was needed.

Jillian York, director of international free expression at EFF said: “A special “deal” between governments and companies isn’t necessary - law enforcement can conduct open source intelligence on publicly-posted content on social networks, and can already place legal requests with respect to users. Allowing governments special access to private content is not only a violation of privacy, it may also serve to drive terrorists underground, making the job of law enforcement even more difficult.”

Welcoming Hannigan’s participation in the public debate, the Labour Party MP Tom Watson said it helped to map out where we should draw the line on privacy and helps the same agencies “to rebuild their legitimacy post-Snowden”.

But he added: “I hope they do not confuse the use of public propaganda through social media by extremists with the use of the covert communications. It is illogical to say that because Isis use Twitter, all our metadata should be collected without warrant.”

Hannigan’s comments come after the director of the FBI, James Comey, called for “a regulatory or legislative fix” for technology companies’ expanding use of encryption to protect user privacy.

Reacting last month to the introduction of strong default encryption by Apple and Google on their latest mobile operating systems, Comey said “the post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far in one direction - in a direction of fear and mistrust.”

“Justice may be denied because of a locked phone or an encrypted hard drive,” said Comey. Without a compromise, “homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk free, and child exploitation victims might not be identified or recovered.”

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Federal Judge Says Public Has a Right to Know About FBI’s Facial Recognition Database

A federal judge has ruled that the FBI's futuristic facial-recognition database is deserving of scrutiny from open-government advocates because of the size and scope of the surveillance technology.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said the bureau's Next Generation Identification program represents a "significant public interest" due to concerns regarding its potential impact on privacy rights and should be subject to rigorous transparency oversight.

"There can be little dispute that the general public has a genuine, tangible interest in a system designed to store and manipulate significant quantities of its own biometric data, particularly given the great numbers of people from whom such data will be gathered," Chutkan wrote in an opinion released late Wednesday.

Her ruling validated a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center that last year made a 2010 government report on the database public and awarded the group nearly $20,000 in attorneys' fees. That government report revealed the FBI's facial-recognition technology could fail up to 20 percent of the time. Privacy groups believe that failure rate may be even higher, as a search can be considered successful if the correct suspect is listed within the top 50 candidates.

"The opinion strongly supports the work of open-government organizations and validates their focus on trying to inform the public about government surveillance programs," said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel with EPIC.

Privacy groups, including EPIC, have long assailed Next Generation Identification, which they argue could be used as an invasive means of tracking that collects images of people suspected of no wrongdoing. The program—a biometric database that includes iris scans and palm prints along with facial recognition—became "fully operational" this summer, despite not undergoing an internal review, known as a Privacy Impact Assessment, since 2008. Government officials have repeatedly pledged they would complete a new privacy audit.

FBI Director James Comey has told Congress that the database would not collect or store photos of ordinary citizens, and instead is designed to "find bad guys by matching pictures to mug shots." But privacy groups contend that the images could be shared among the FBI and other agencies, including the National Security Agency, and even with state motor-vehicle departments.

In his testimony, given in June, Comey did not completely refute that database information could potentially be shared with states, however.

Government use of facial-recognition technology has undergone increasing scrutiny in recent years, as systems once thought to exist only in science fiction movies have become reality. TheNew York Times reported on leaks from Edward Snowden revealing that the NSA intercepts "millions of images per day" across the Internet as part of an intelligence-gathering program that includes a daily cache of some 55,000 "facial-recognition quality images."

The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment regarding whether it will appeal Chutkan's decision.

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IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality

IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality

In 1996, the IAB and IESG recognized that the growth of the Internet
depended on users having confidence that the network would protect
their private information. RFC 1984 documented this need. Since that
time, we have seen evidence that the capabilities and activities of
attackers are greater and more pervasive than previously known. The IAB
now believes it is important for protocol designers, developers, and
operators to make encryption the norm for Internet traffic. Encryption
should be authenticated where possible, but even protocols providing
confidentiality without authentication are useful in the face of
pervasive surveillance as described in RFC 7258.

Newly designed protocols should prefer encryption to cleartext operation.
There may be exceptions to this default, but it is important to recognize
that protocols do not operate in isolation. Information leaked by one
protocol can be made part of a more substantial body of information
by cross-correlation of traffic observation. There are protocols which
may as a result require encryption on the Internet even when it would
not be a requirement for that protocol operating in isolation.

We recommend that encryption be deployed throughout the protocol stack
since there is not a single place within the stack where all kinds of
communication can be protected.

The IAB urges protocol designers to design for confidential operation by
default. We strongly encourage developers to include encryption in their
implementations, and to make them encrypted by default. We similarly
encourage network and service operators to deploy encryption where it is
not yet deployed, and we urge firewall policy administrators to permit
encrypted traffic.

We believe that each of these changes will help restore the trust users
must have in the Internet. We acknowledge that this will take time and
trouble, though we believe recent successes in content delivery networks,
messaging, and Internet application deployments demonstrate the
feasibility of this migration. We also acknowledge that many network
operations activities today, from traffic management and intrusion
detection to spam prevention and policy enforcement, assume access to
cleartext payload. For many of these activities there are no solutions
yet, but the IAB will work with those affected to foster development of
new approaches for these activities which allow us to move to an Internet
where traffic is confidential by default.

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Judge threatens detective with contempt for declining to reveal cellphone tracking methods

Baltimore prosecutors withdrew key evidence in a robbery case Monday rather than reveal details of the cellphone tracking technology police used to gather it.

The surprise turn in Baltimore Circuit Court came after a defense attorney pressed a city police detective to reveal how officers had tracked his client.

City police Det. John L. Haley, a member of a specialized phone tracking unit, said officers did not use the controversial device known as a stingray. But when pressed on how phones are tracked, he cited what he called a "nondisclosure agreement" with the FBI.

"You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court," Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams replied. Williams threatened to hold Haley in contempt if he did not respond. Prosecutors decided to withdraw the evidence instead.

The tense exchange during a motion to suppress evidence in the robbery trial of 16-year-old Shemar Taylor was the latest confrontation in a growing campaign by defense attorneys and advocates for civil liberties nationwide to get law enforcement to provide details of their phone tracking technology, and how and when they use it.

Law enforcement officials in Maryland and across the country say they are prohibited from discussing the technology at the direction of the federal government, which has argued that knowledge of the devices would jeopardize investigations.

"Courts are slowly starting to grapple with these issues," said Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is tracking stingray cases. "What we're talking about is basic information about a very commonly used police tool, but because of the extreme secrecy that police have tried to invoke, there are not many court decisions about stingrays."

Defense attorney Joshua Insley still believes that police used a stingray to find Taylor. He cited a letter in which prosecutors said they were prohibited by the Department of Justice from disclosing information about methods used in their investigation.

The portable device was developed for the military to help zero in on cellphones. It mimics a cellphone tower to force nearby phones to connect to it.

Records shows that the Baltimore Police Department purchased a stingray for $133,000 in 2009.

Some critics say the use of such technology might be appropriate, with court approval, to help law enforcement locate a suspect. But in the secrecy surrounding its use, they say, it's not always clear that law enforcement officials have secured the necessary approval, or stayed within their bounds.

They also express concern for the privacy of other cellphones users whose data are caught up in a search.

In the case before the court Monday, two teens are accused of robbing a Papa John's pizza delivery driver at gunpoint in April.

Police say phone records show that the phone that was used to call in the delivery was also used to make and receive hundreds of calls to and from Taylor's phone. Police believe the first phone belonged to Taylor's co-defendant. They say Taylor confessed after he was arrested.

Taylor is being tried as an adult. The other suspect is being tried as a juvenile.

In court Monday, the robbery detective who prepared the warrant to search Taylor's home testified that members of the department's Advanced Technical Team did a "ride-by" — described in court papers as "sophisticated technical equipment" — to determine one of the phones was inside the home. Detective Alan Savage said he did not know what technology or techniques the unit employs.

The defense then called Haley to the stand. He said police can use data from the cellphone companies to locate phones in real time.

Insley asked Haley whether police can ascertain a phone's location "independently," without the help of a phone company. Haley said yes.

When asked how, he balked.

"I wouldn't be able to get into that," Haley said.

Insley tried again later. Haley responded that police can get GPS location data from phone companies.

"Then there's equipment we would use that I'm not going to discuss that would aid us in that investigation," Haley said.

Williams, the judge, instructed Haley to answer the question. Haley invoked the nondisclosure agreement.

"I can't. I'm sorry. I can't," Haley said.

Williams called Insley's question "appropriate," and threatened to hold Haley in contempt if he did not answer.

Haley demurred again, and Assistant State's Attorney Patrick R. Seidel conferred with other prosecutors in court to observe the hearing.

Finally, Seidel said prosecutors would drop all evidence found during the search of the home — including, authorities have said, a .45-caliber handgun and the cellphone. The prosecutor said the state would continue to pursue the charges.

Wessler, of the ACLU, said Williams was right to ignore the nondisclosure agreement with the FBI.

"You can't contract out of constitutional disclosure obligations," Wessler said. "A secret written agreement does not invalidate the Maryland public records law [and] does not invalidate due process requirements of giving information to a criminal defendant."

Attorneys say they have suspected for years that police were employing secret methods to track cellphones. But only recently have they begun to find what they believe are clear examples.

Police and prosecutors in another case ran into a similar problem in September, when they were asked to reveal how a cellphone was tracked.

Sgt. Scott Danielczyk, another member of the Advanced Technical Team, testified in that home invasion case — also before Judge Williams — that police used data from a court order to track a cellphone to the general area of the 1400 block of E. Fayette St.

Danielczyk and three other members of the unit were tasked to "facilitate finding it," he testified, and determined the phone was in the possession of someone on a bus.

Williams asked how Danielczyk concluded the phone was being carried by the suspect.

"Um, we had information that he had the property on him," the officer said.

Williams pressed.

"This kind of goes into Homeland Security issues, your honor," Danielczyk said.

"If it goes into Homeland Security issues, then the phone doesn't come in," Williams said. "I mean, this is simple. You can't just stop someone and not give me a reason."

In that case, too, the phone evidence is no longer in play. Prosecutors are proceeding without it.

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The Irrelevance of the U.S. Congress in Stopping NSA Mass Surveillance: What Matters Instead

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The “USA Freedom Act” – which its proponents were heralding as “NSA reform” despite its suffocatingly narrow scope – died in the august U.S. Senate last night when it attracted only 58 of the 60 votes needed to close debate. All Democratic and independent Senators except one (Bill Nelson of Florida) voted in favor, as did three tea-party GOP Senators (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Dean Heller). One GOP Senator, Rand Paul, voted against it on the ground that it did not go nearly far enough in reining in the NSA. On Monday, the White House issued a statement “strongly supporting” the bill.

The “debate” among the Senators that preceded the vote was darkly funny and deeply boring, in equal measure. The black humor was due to the way one GOP Senator after the next – led by ranking Senate Intelligence Committee member Saxby Chambliss (pictured above) – stood up and literally screeched about 9/11 and ISIS over and over and over, and then sat down as though they had made a point. Their scary script was unveiled earlier that morning by a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Bush Attorney General Mike Mukasey and former CIA and NSA Director Mike Hayden warning that NSA reform would make the terrorists kill you; it appeared under this Onion-like headline:



So the pro-NSA Republican Senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult.

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There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95% of the planet called “non-Americans”).

There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public advocates” at the FISA court so that someone contests the claims of the US Government; the prohibition on the NSA holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat.

When pro-privacy members of Congress first unveiled the bill many months ago, it was actually a good bill: real reform. But the White House worked very hard – in partnership with the House GOP – to water that bill down so severely that what the House ended up passing over the summer did more to strengthen the NSA than rein it in, which caused even the ACLU and EFF to withdraw their support. The Senate bill rejected last night was basically a middle ground between that original, good bill and the anti-reform bill passed by the House.

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. Government is . . . the U.S. Government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

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Those who like to claim that nothing has changed from the NSA revelations simply ignore the key facts that negate that claim, including the serious harm to the U.S. tech sector from these disclosures, driven by the newfound knowledge that U.S. companies are complicit in mass surveillance. Obviously, tech companies don’t care at all about privacy, but they care a lot about that.

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Increased individual encryption use is a serious impediment to NSA mass surveillance: far stronger than any laws the U.S. Congress might pass. Aside from the genuine difficulty the agency has in cracking well-used encryption products, increased usage presents its own serious problem. Right now, the NSA – based on the warped mindset that anyone who wants to hide what they’re saying from the NSA is probably a Bad Person – views “encryption usage” as one of its key factors in determining who is likely a terrorist. But that only works if 10,000 people around the world use encryption. Once that number increases to 1 million, and then to 10 million, and then to default usage, the NSA will no longer be able to use encryption usage as a sign of Bad People. Rather than being a red flag, encryption will simply be a brick wall: one that individuals have placed between the snooping governments and their online activities. That is a huge change, and it is coming.

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Smartphone encryption could lead to death of a child, government claims

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'Brits telecombedrijf was betrokken bij afluisterschandaal NSA'

Een groot telecombedrijf uit Groot-Brittannië heeft een belangrijke rol gespeeld in het afluisterschandaal rond de Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten NSA, dat werd onthuld door Edward Snowden.

Dat meldt het Britse Channel 4 News.

Het zou gaan om een bedrijf dat in juli 2012 is overgenomen door Vodafone: Cable and Wireless.

De Britse tv-zender zou door Snowden gelekte documenten hebben ingezien. Daaruit blijkt dat het bedrijf onderdeel was van een geheim project, waarvoor bedrijven grote hoeveelheden internetverkeer verzamelden: een kwart van dat verkeer loopt door het Verenigd Koninkrijk.

De Britse inlichtingendienst GCHQ zou volgens Channel 4 News met particuliere bedrijven zoals Cable and Wireless een soort geheime vennootschappen hebben ontwikkeld. De bedrijven werden vermeld onder codenamen. Zo heette Cable and Wireless 'Gerontic'.

Het bedrijf zou de GCHQ onder andere hebben geholpen bij het testen van afluisterapparatuur. Cable and Wireless zou zelfs een medewerker van de Britse inlichtingendienst in voltijd-dienst hebben.

Ook zou het bedrijf ervoor hebben gezorgd dat Britse spionnen de privé-communicatie van miljoenen internetgebruikers over de hele wereld konden verzamelen.

Vodafone

In een reactie benadrukte Vodafone dat de GCHQ nooit directe toegang tot haar netwerk is verleend. Volgens het telecombedrijf had de inlichtingendienst enkel toegang tot de klantengegevens kunnen krijgen met toestemming van Vodafone zelf. Dat zou ook gelden voor andere telecombedrijven.

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Plasterk: diensten moeten kabelgebonden data kunnen onderscheppen

Het kabinet wil de bevoegdheden van de inlichtingendiensten verruimen. Ook communicatie via de kabel zou in de toekomst massaler mogen worden onderschept. Wel moet dat doelgericht en stapsgewijs gebeuren.

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Met het langverwachte voorstel geeft het kabinet gevolg aan de commissie-Dessens, die in december vorig jaar concludeerde dat de huidige spionagewet achterhaald is. Daarin wordt onderscheid gemaakt tussen kabelgebonden en draadloze communicatie. Nu mag het verkeer alleen in het laatste geval (als het via satellieten of portofoons verloopt) in 'bulk' worden onderschept. Dit terwijl 90 procent van de communicatie tegenwoordig via de kabel gaat (denk aan communicatie via internet en smartphone). Dat onderscheid zal straks verdwijnen.

NSA

De verruiming zal door privacyvoorvechters met argusogen worden bekeken. Hiermee krijgen de Nederlandse diensten AIVD en MIVD wettelijke mogelijkheden die enigszins lijken op de praktijken van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA, die zijn sleepnetten ongebreideld over de wereld kon uitwerpen.

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'Geen bewijs voor aftappen telefoon Merkel'

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In juni begon een commissie een onderzoek naar de praktijken. 'De uitkomst is nul. Het is hete lucht. Er zijn geen feiten', aldus de bron binnen Openbaar Ministerie.

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Edward Snowden: state surveillance in Britain has no limits

Whistleblower and former NSA analyst says UK regulation allows GCHQ snooping to go beyond anything seen in US

The UK authorities are operating a surveillance system where “anything goes” and their interceptions are more intrusive to people’s privacy than has been seen in the US, Edward Snowden said.

Speaking via Skype at the Observer Ideas festival, held in central London, the whistleblower and former National Security Agency specialist, said there were “really no limits” to the GCHQ’s surveillance capabilities.

He said: “In the UK … is the system of regulation where anything goes. They collect everything that might be interesting. It’s up to the government to justify why it needs this. It’s not up to you to justify why it doesn’t … This is where the danger is, when we think about … evidence being gathered against us but we don’t have the opportunity to challenge that in courts. It undermines the entire system of justice.”

He also said he thought that the lack of coverage by the UK papers of the story, or the hostile coverage of it, other than by the Guardian, “did a disservice to the public”.

His appearance at the festival on Sunday marked the end of a weekend of almost frenetic social activity by his highly reclusive standards: he appeared at two public events and was the absent star of Laura Poitras’ documentary, Citizenfour, which premiered in New York on Friday.

Collectively, the events revealed a more rounded, human, portrait of the former NSA analyst than had been seen before, and offered a few telling glimpses of what his life was now like in Moscow.

The coverage revealed that Snowden does not drink alcohol, has never been drunk, and that he misses his “old beat-up car”. He also revealed that he has got a job, working on “a very significant grant for a foundation” on a project “for the benefit of the press and journalists working in threatened areas”.

Poitras’ documentary included the revelation that his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, had joined him in Moscow, and at the New Yorker festival on Saturday he was asked by a member of the audience if “she had been mad” at him given that he had left without warning to find a refuge.

She was not “entirely pleased” he said. “But at the same time it was an incredible reunion because she understood and that meant a lot to me. Although she had a very, very, challenging year. and I leave it to her to discuss that when and if she is ever ready. It was a meeting I’ll never forget.”

A member of the audience at Observer Ideas pointed out that he had been living in paradise with a dancer for a girlfriend and asked, are you mad? He laughed and talked about all the things that he had given up: his job, his home, his family. “And I can’t return to the home country and that’s a lot to give up.”

But, he said: “What kind of world do we want to live in? Do you want to live in a world in which governments make decisions behind closed doors? And when you ask me, I say no.”

He also issued his strongest warning yet about how Silicon Valley firms were compromising the privacy of the public. Google and Facebook, he said, were “dangerous services”. His strongest condemnation was against Dropbox and urged erasure of it from computers. It encrypted your data, he told the audience, but kept the key and would give that to any government which asked.

The irony of the fact that he was appearing via Google Hangout and Skype was not lost on the audience. Later, he said: “No kidding, right? I’m about to disconnect this machine and toss it into a fire, though.”

His more serious point was that he said he believed the battle against the intrusions of big corporations into privacy was a much harder battle to win than the governments’.

He said later: “The unexplored elephant is the corporations – so privileged, so powerful in access, so unregulated – [and] are then tapped by the government.[…] I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that major corporations have a hand in setting government policy today. Certainly in the US, given our campaign finance issues.”

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Ecuadorean President Correa’s computers hacked, blamed on US spy agencies

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Hackers targeted and hacked Ecuador President Rafael Correa’s computers and internet systems on 20th November. Telesur, the official Ecuadorian press agency said that the attacks were carried out through out the day on 2oth November. Meanwhile President Correa has alleged that American spy agencies are behind the attacks.

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He accused the US of “systematic, high-tech” cyber-attacks on his private internet accounts and computers which according to him were was traced back to American servers.

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Though President Correa gave very few details in the Twitter posts except the fact that they were systematic attacks with high technology and very huge resources, the Latin media was more forthcoming on this issue. Telesur said that the attacks carried on throughout all of last Thursday, November 20, and that they are an American effort. Another paper which carries President weekly broadcast called Citizen Link no.399 stated,

twitter:

koenrh twitterde op zondag 23-11-2014 om 21:41:58 Q&A with Laura Poitras, Sarah Harrison, Jacob Appelbaum after the Dutch premiere of Citizenfour. #IDFA http://t.co/1qcppLVOwO reageer retweet

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Latest Snowden leak shows UK, US behind Regin malware, attacked European Union

Blame the British and American spy agencies for the latest state-sponsored malware attack, say reporters at The Intercept.

The publication, which in the wake of Glenn Greenwald's departure from The Guardian continued to publish documents leaked by Edward Snowden, said on Monday the recently discovered malware, known as Regin, was used against targets in the European Union.

One of those targets included Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom, which had its networks broken into by the British spy agency the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Regin was first publicly talked about over the weekend after Symantec discovered the "sophisticated" malware, though is understood to have been in circulation since 2008.

Compared to Stuxnet, the state-sponsored malware whose creators have never been confirmed, the recently-discovered trojan steals data from machines and networks it infects, disguised as Microsoft software.

Some began to point the finger at Russia and China, but these were quickly discounted by industry experts. Others suspected the U.S. and Israel — a deal already exists that allows the Middle Eastern allied state to access raw and "unchecked" U.S. collected intelligence.

They weren't far off. According to Monday's report, the U.S. working in conjunction with Britain, a European member state (though perhaps not for much longer) attacked Belgacom using the Regin malware.

Though the Belgacom hack was disclosed by Snowden's leaks, the malware used had never been revealed.

The new details from The Intercept show how GCHQ embarked upon its "hacking mission," known as Operation Socialist, by accessing Belgacom's networks in 2010. By targeting engineers through a faked LinkedIn page, GCHQ was able to get deep inside the Internet provider to steal data.

One of Belgacom's main clients was the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council of member state leaders.

Exactly how member states of the European Union — there are 28 of them including the U.K. — will react to one of its own member states launching a successful hacking attack against their executive body, remains unknown.

But while members of the Parliament and Commission staff have, over the years, seen the U.S. as one of the greatest threats to the region's data protection and privacy policies, they should have been looking a little closer to home.

twitter:

e3i5 twitterde op dinsdag 25-11-2014 om 15:15:43 Wow. Full list of undersea fibre optic cables GCHQ is accessing has been published. http://t.co/hsMtCcMHiC http://t.co/ZqpJpkXpqA reageer retweet

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Snowden-Leaks: How Vodafone-Subsidiary Cable & Wireless Aided GCHQ’s Spying Efforts

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Previously unpublished documents show how the UK telecom firm Cable & Wireless, acquired by Vodafone in 2012, played a key role in establishing one of the Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) most controversial surveillance programs.

A joint investigation by NDR, WDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Channel 4 based on documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveals that Cable & Wireless actively shaped and provided the most data to GCHQ mass surveillance programs, and received millions of pounds in compensation. The documents also suggest that Cable & Wireless assisted GCHQ in breaking into a competitor’s network.

In response to these allegations, Vodafone said that an internal investigation found no evidence of unlawful conduct, but the company would not deny it happened.

"What we have in the UK is a system based on warrants, where we receive a lawful instruction from an agency or authority to allow them to have access to communications data on our network. We have to comply with that warrant and we do and there are processes for us to do that which we’re not allowed to talk about because the law constrains us from revealing these things. We don’t go beyond what the law requires” a Vodafone spokesperson told Channel 4.

In August 2013 Süddeutsche Zeitung and NDR first named Vodafone as one of the companies assisting the GCHQ. Reports that Vodafone secretly provided customer data to intelligence agencies damaged the company’s relation to German customers. Few months later Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose cell phone was on a Vodafone contract.

This could be a coincidence. No evidence suggests that Vodafone was involved in the “Merkelphone” scandal. But unlike Facebook, Yahoo, or other companies forced to cooperate with the intelligence services, Vodafone has yet to challenge the GCHQ publicly. Konstantin von Notz, a German member of the Bundestag for the Green Party, urges Vodafone to take legal action: „A company such as Vodafone, which has responsibility for so many customers, has to take a clear stand against these data grabs.“

Similarly, Vodafone has provided no explanation as to why GCHQ discussed “potential new deployment risks identified by GERONTIC” in June 2008. According to the Snowden-documents “GERONTIC” was the GCHQ codename for Cable & Wireless, and after acquisition in 2012 (at least for a while) presumably for Vodafone.

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German loophole allows BND spy agency to snoop on own people

Intelligence agency can legally intercept calls and emails from Germans working abroad for foreign firms, MPs discover

German MPs examining the surveillance activities the US National Security Agency have found a legal loophole that allows the Berlin’s foreign intelligence agency to spy on its own citizens.

The agency, known by its German acronym BND, is not usually allowed to intercept communications made by Germans or German companies, but a former BND lawyer told parliament this week that citizens working abroad for foreign companies were not protected.

The German government confirmed on Saturday that work-related calls or emails were attributed to the employer. As a result, if the employer is foreign, the BND could legally intercept them.

Opposition politicians have accused Angela Merkel’s government of pretending to be outraged about alleged spying by the NSA while condoning illegal surveillance itself.

The revelation comes after a BND employee was arrested in July on suspicion of selling secret documents to a CIA contact. Rather than report the contact to their allied German counterparts, the US spy agency was reported to have paid the agent ¤25,000 (£20,000) for 218 documents classified as confidential or top secret.

The incident prompted Germany to consider stepping up its counter-espionage efforts. Possible measures include monitoring the intelligence activities of nominal Nato allies such as the US, Britain and France, and expelling US agents from Germany.

In June the BND officially revealed some of its worst-kept secrets by acknowledging that half a dozen facilities are in fact spy stations.

The agency had for decades maintained that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as the Ionosphere Institute, but amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them online.

At a ceremony in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, the agency’s chief, Gerhard Schindler, officially attached the BND’s logo to the entrance of a site previously called the Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Force.

The facility features several giant golf ball-shaped radio domes commonly used for eavesdropping on radio, data and phone traffic.

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UK Police Accidentally Sent Documents Admitting To Spying On Journalists To Newspaper, Asked Not To Publish

UK police in Cleveland accidentally sent documents revealing that it has used controversial anti-terror laws to spy on journalists who had not committed any crimes to an area newspaper.

The Cleveland Police “erroneously” sent information to industry paper the Press Gazette indicating that it had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to obtain telecommunications data while searching for a journalist’s source.

The publication reports that police asked them to delete the documents but says they were unwilling to do so because, “there is a strong public interest in disclosing it.”

RIPA, which regulates how authorities can intercept and monitor communications, is under increased scrutiny as it has emerged that at least four other U.K. police forces have used it to seize telecommunications data while hunting for journalists’ sources. The journalists affected have not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

Earlier this week it emerged that after the Metropolitan Police used RIPA to try and access the details of a single journalist in March after wireless carrier Vodafone accidentally provided the phone records of more than 1,500 users. Rather than deleting the data, the department analyzed it in a spreadsheet and stored it for seven months.”

In another incident, a local council used RIPA to follow and spy on a journalist meeting a source at a café as she investigated “allegations of wrongdoing within the council’s environmental services department,” ultimately “scuppering” her investigation.

Testifying before the Home Affairs Select Committee, the National Union of Journalists has also condemned police use of RIPA as “systemic,” arguing that it risks doing “irreparable damage.”

There is now an ongoing investigation into misuse of the Act by the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office (IOCCO), which is to be published in January 2015.

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Amazon’s frightening CIA partnership: Capitalism, corporations and our massive new surveillance state

When Internet retailer and would-be 21st century overlord Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks off its servers back in 2010, the decision was not precipitated by men in black suits knocking on the door of one of Jeff Bezos’ mansions at 3 a.m., nor were any company executives awoken by calls from gruff strangers suggesting they possessed certain information that certain individuals lying next to them asking “who is that?” would certainly like to know.

Corporations, like those who lead them, are amoral entities, legally bound to maximize quarterly profits. And rich people, oft-observed desiring to become richer, may often be fools, but when it comes to making money even the most foolish executive knows there’s more to be made serving the corporate state than giving a platform to those accused of undermining national security.

The whistle-blowing website is “putting innocent people in jeopardy,” Amazon said in a statement released 24 hours after WikiLeaks first signed up for its Web hosting service. And the company wasn’t about to let someone use their servers for “securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs,” even if much of that data, leaked by Army private Chelsea Manning, showed that its rightful possessors were covering up crimes, including the murder of innocent civilians from Yemen to Iraq.

The statement was over the top — try as it might, not even the government has been able to point to a single life lost due to Manning’s disclosures — but, nonetheless, Amazon’s capitalist apologists on the libertarian right claimed the big corporation had just been victimized by big bad government. David Henderson, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explained that those calling for a boycott of Amazon were out of line, as the real enemy was “megalomaniacal Senator Joe Lieberman,” who had earlier called on Amazon to drop WikiLeaks (and is, admittedly, a rock-solid choice for a villain).

“The simple fact is that we live in a society whose governments are so big, so powerful, so intrusive, and so arbitrary, that we have to be very careful in dealing with them,” Henderson wrote. That Amazon itself cited a purported violation of its terms of service to kick WikiLeaks off its cloud was “a lie,” according to Henderson, meant to further protect Amazon from state retribution. Did it make him happy? No, of course not. “But boycotting one of the government’s many victims? No way.”

But Amazon was no victim. Henderson, like many a libertarian, fundamentally misreads the relationship between corporations and the state, creating a distinction between the two that doesn’t really exist outside of an intro-to-economics textbook. The state draws up the charter that gives corporations life, granting them the same rights as people — more rights, in fact, as a corporate person can do what would land an actual person in prison with impunity or close to it, as when Big Banana was caught paying labor organizer-killing, right-wing death squads in Colombia and got off with a fine.

Corporations are more properly understood not as victims of the state, but its for-profit accomplices. Indeed, Amazon was eager to help the U.S. government’s campaign against a website that — thanks almost entirely to Chelsea Manning — had exposed many embarrassing acts of U.S. criminality across the globe: the condoning of torture by U.S. allies in Iraq; the sexual abuse of young boys by U.S. contractors in Afghanistan; the cover-up of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, including one that killed 41 civilians, 21 of them children. The decision to boot WikiLeaks was, in fact, one that was made internally, no pressure from the deep state required.

“I consulted people I knew fairly high up in the State Department off the record, and they said that they did not have to put pressure … on Amazon for that to happen,” said Robert McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, in an appearance on “Democracy Now!.” “It was not a difficult sell.”

And it paid off. A little more than a year later, Amazon was awarded a generous $600 million contract from the CIA to build a cloud computing service that will reportedly “provide all 17 [U.S.] intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services.” As The Atlantic noted, and as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, these same agencies collect “billions and perhaps trillions of pieces of metadata, phone and Internet records, and other various bits of information on an annual basis.”

That is to say: On Amazon’s servers will be information on millions of people that the intelligence community has no right to possess — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper initially denied the intelligence community was collecting such data for a reason — which is used to facilitate corporate espionage and drone strikes that don’t just jeopardize innocent lives, but have demonstrably ended hundreds of them.

Instead of helping expose U.S. war crimes, then, Amazon’s cloud service could be used to facilitate them, for which it will be paid handsomely — which was, in all likelihood, the whole point of the company proving itself a good corporate citizen by disassociating itself from an organization that sought to expose its future clients in the intelligence community.

“We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA,” Amazon said in a 2013 statement after winning that long-sought contract (following a protracted battle for it with a similarly eager tech giant, IBM).

If it were more honest, Amazon might have said “We look forward to a successful relationship with the [coup d’état-promoting, drone-striking, blood-stained] CIA.”

And if it were more honest, Amazon could have said the same thing in 2010.

So long as there are giant piles of money to be made by systematically violating the privacy of the public (the CIA and NSA together enjoy a budget of over $25 billion), corporations will gladly lie in the same bed as those who created them, which is, yes, gross. Protecting consumer privacy is at best an advertising slogan, not a motivating principle for entities whose sole responsibility to shareholders is to maximize quarterly profits. This isn’t an admission of defeat — and when companies fear state-sanctioned invasions of privacy will cost them customers in the private sector or contracts with foreign states, they do sometimes roll back their participation — but a call to recognize the true villain: If we desire more than just an iPhone with encryption, we must acknowledge the issue is not just a few individual megalomaniacs we call senators, but a system called capitalism that systemically encourages this behavior.

In the 1970s, following the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Church Committee exposed rampant spying on dissidents that was illegal even according to the loose legal standards of the time. Speeches were made, reforms were demanded and new laws were passed. The abuses, it was claimed, were relegated to history. What happened next? Look around: The total surveillance we enjoy today, enabled by high-tech military contractors including AT&T and Google and Verizon and every other nominally private tech company that capitalism encourages to value profits over privacy — a public-private partnership that grants those in power a means of spying on the powerless beyond the wildest dreams of any 20th century totalitarian. Sure, ostensibly communist states can of course be quite awful too, but the difference is that, in capitalist nations, the citizens actually place the eavesdropping devices in their own homes.

Now, whether the reforms of the 1970s were inadequate or were just plain ignored by those who were to be reformed is sort of beside the point; the status quo is what it is and, at least if one values privacy and the ability to organize and engage in political discussion and search the Internet without fear a spy agency or one of its contractors is monitoring it all in real-time, it sure isn’t good. So when groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and progressive magazines such as The Nation call for “another Church Committee,” the question we ought to ask them is: “Fucking really?”

Abolishing capitalism is indeed a utopian goal, but when corporations routinely go above and beyond their legal duties to serve the state — granting police and intelligence agencies access to their customers’ data without so much as a judge’s rubberstamp on a warrant — expecting meaningful change from a few hearings or legislative reforms will only leave the reformers disappointed to find their efforts have just led to dystopia. So long as there’s money to be made serving the corporate state, that is what corporations will do; there’s no need to resort to conspiracy for it’s right there in their corporate. And that’s not to be defeatist, but to suggest we ought to try a different approach: we ought to be organizing to put a stop to public-private partnerships altogether.

Right-wing libertarians and other defenders of capitalism are absolutely right when they say that the profit motive is a mighty motive indeed — and that’s precisely why we should seek to remove it; to take away even just the prospect of a federal contract. If the demands of privacy advocates are limited by myopic concerns of what’s politically possible here and now, all they will have to show for their advocacy will be a false sense of achievement. The problem isn’t, as some imagine it, a state spying without appropriate limits, but the fact that capitalism erases the distinction between public and private, making it so non-state actors gleefully act as the state’s eyes and ears. This isn’t about just Google or the government, but both: the capitalist state. And until we start recognizing that and saying as much, the result of our efforts will be more of the same.

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Snowden geëerd met alternatieve Nobelprijs

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De Amerikaanse klokkenluider Edward Snowden is maandag in Stockholm geëerd met de alternatieve Nobelprijs, de Right Livelihood Award 2014. Snowden, die politiek asiel in Rusland heeft gekregen, was bij de ceremonie niet aanwezig.

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Operation Auroragold

How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide

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In March 2011, two weeks before the Western intervention in Libya, a secret message was delivered to the National Security Agency. An intelligence unit within the U.S. military’s Africa Command needed help to hack into Libya’s cellphone networks and monitor text messages.

For the NSA, the task was easy. The agency had already obtained technical information about the cellphone carriers’ internal systems by spying on documents sent among company employees, and these details would provide the perfect blueprint to help the military break into the networks.

The NSA’s assistance in the Libya operation, however, was not an isolated case. It was part of a much larger surveillance program—global in its scope and ramifications—targeted not just at hostile countries.

According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.

The documents also reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers.

Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.

One high-profile surveillance target is the GSM Association, an influential U.K.-headquartered trade group that works closely with large U.S.-based firms including Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, and Cisco, and is currently being funded by the U.S. government to develop privacy-enhancing technologies.

Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer who was consulted by The Intercept about details contained in the AURORAGOLD documents, said that the broad scope of information swept up in the operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible.

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Witness: German intelligence helped NSA to tap Internet hub

A German parliamentary inquiry has been told that German intelligence fed America's NSA filtered data from an Internet hub in Frankfurt, after clearance from Berlin. The "Eikonal" project ended in 2008.

A witness told a German parliamentary inquiry on Thursday that America's NSA was fed filtered data from an internet exchange point in Frankfurt, after an OK from the Chancellery in Berlin.

The Eikonal project leader within Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency - identified only as S.L. - said the exchange's own operator had legal doubts, but was convinced once confirmation came from the-then chancellery.

Germany's federal intelligence service (BND) delivered filtered information from 2004 until 2008, when the "Americans saw that we could not extract anything more for them," said the witness, who was quoted by Germany's main news agency DPA.

Over that period, Germany was first governed by a center-left coalition headed by Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and from October 2005 by Chancellor Angela's first grand coalition cabinet.

Anchored in Germany's constitution are strict data privacy laws in reaction to the Hitler dictatorship and Stasi eavesdropping in former communist East Germany.

The project leader said the BND used NSA equipment and know-how to tap the hub's lines, including telephone calls, for data which passed through multiple "cascade" filters and then to a BND/NSA facility at Bad Aibling near Munich.

Several hundred items were eventually forwarded each year to the NSA after checking by staff to make sure data about Germans had been removed

In October, the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in an investigative report said these filters had not worked sufficiently to filter out all data on Germans.

Mass NSA monitoring of mobile phone operators

The website The Intercept claimed on Thursday that papers from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the NSA spied on hundreds of mobile phone operators.

In an operation codenamed "AURORAGOLD," the NSA kept watch on 1200 email accounts of operators, looking for security weaknesses in their systems, gleaned especially when they exchanged advice on roaming for customers abroad.

During 2012, information was gathered in this way from more than 70 percent of the mobile operators worldwide, The Intercept said, adding the newly known factor was the mass scale of the observation.

Last year, it emerged that the NSA - deciphering the widely used GSM wireless standard - had tapped into one of Merkel's mobile phones.

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Anonymous Releases Video, Claims It Shows Warrantless Wiretapping By Police

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Stingray Warrentless Wiretap by CPD on Activists

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A video released by hacker collective Anonymous purports to show evidence of warrantless wiretapping in Chicago during a #blacklivesmatter protest. According to the video, a vehicle moved through the streets during protests, listening in on conversations.

The video (shared in its entirety below) opens with a scene of President Barack Obama addressing the nation. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he assures viewers. It goes on to show specific promises and assurances, quotes from the NSA, stating that no one will be subject to wiretapping without a warrant.

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Op donderdag 31 juli 2014 22:02 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Oh ja, de CIA en dat rapport over martelen:

[..]

[..]

Het artikel gaat verder.

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House chair warns violence abroad would follow Senate torture report release

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The chairman of the House intelligence committee said on Sunday the release of a Senate report examining the use of torture by the CIA a decade ago will cause violence and deaths abroad.

Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, is regularly briefed on intelligence analyses. He told CNN that the US intelligence community had assessed that the release of the report would be used by extremists to incite violence.

The Senate intelligence committee is poised to release the first public accounting of the CIA’s use of torture on al-Qaida detainees held in secret facilities in Europe and Asia in the years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It will come in the form of a 480-page executive summary of the 6,200-page report by Democrats on the committee, who spent six years reviewing millions of secret CIA documents.

On Friday, secretary of state John Kerry urged the senator in charge of the report to consider the timing of its release.

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Judge: Give NSA unlimited access to digital data

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The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.

“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”

Congress should limit the NSA’s use of the data it collects—for example, not giving information about minor crimes to law enforcement agencies—but it shouldn’t limit what information the NSA sweeps up and searches, Posner said. “If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.

In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state—very dangerous.”

twitter:

ggreenwald twitterde op maandag 08-12-2014 om 13:41:07 Why isn't Judge Richard Posner putting all his emails and call transcripts online? What warped acts is he hiding?? https://t.co/NQYaml9jzk reageer retweet

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Lone US senator attempts to block bill challenging government secrecy

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New legislation designed to challenge the ingrained secrecy of the US government and open up federal agencies to greater public scrutiny is on the verge of collapse after a single Democratic senator, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, effectively blocked its passage.

The Foia Improvement Act of 2014 has cleared all its major procedural hurdles with unanimous support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate judiciary committee. Its overwhelming bipartisan backing has offered a rare glimmer of hope in an otherwise gridlocked Congress.

But unless Rockefeller agrees to drop his last-minute objections to the legislation by the end of Monday, its chances of coming to a vote by the end of this Congress are all but dead. The bill, which has been two years in the making, is backed by more than 70 good governance organisations and is seen as a critical step towards a more open and accountable flow of public information.

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Mass surveillance exposed by Snowden ‘not justified by fight against terrorism’

Report by Nils Mui¸nieks, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, says ‘secret, massive and indiscriminate’ intelligence work is contrary to rule of law

The “secret, massive and indiscriminate” surveillance conducted by intelligence services and disclosed by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism, the most senior human rights official in Europe has warned.

In a direct challenge to the United Kingdom and other states, Nils Mui¸nieks, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, calls for greater transparency and stronger democratic oversight of the way security agencies monitor the internet. He also said that so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing treaty between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be published.

“Suspicionless mass retention of communications data is fundamentally contrary to the rule of law … and ineffective,” the Latvian official argues in a 120-page report, The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World. “Member states should not resort to it or impose compulsory retention of data by third parties.”

As human rights commissioner, Mui¸nieks has the power to intervene as a third party in cases sent to the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. His report is published the week after the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that the legal regime governing mass surveillance of the internet by the monitoring agency GCHQ is “human rights compliant”.

In his report, Mui¸nieks wrote: “In connection with the debate on the practices of intelligence and security services prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations, it is becoming increasingly clear that secret, massive and indiscriminate surveillance programmes are not in conformity with European human rights law and cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism or other important threats to national security. Such interferences can only be accepted if they are strictly necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim.”

The civil liberties organisations which brought the claim in the IPT case are planning to appeal against the ruling to the ECHR - a case in which the commissioner could participate.

Mui¸nieks told the Guardian: ”I’m interested in weighing in on such cases about surveillance. Surveillance has gone beyond the bounds of the rule of law and democratic oversight needs to be more robust.

“We have seen examples where there’s a clear lack of oversight of security: the first was black sites, torture and rendition; the second was the revelations about mass surveillance. I want to influence the working of the court and its thinking.

“These recommendations [in the report] are my interpretation of basic human rights principles. The court often refers to my work in their judgments. There’s no substantial case law in internet-related issues so far.

“The UK is a country we are watching closely on these issues. It has a huge influence on whether or not the rule of law will prevail in the digital environment. All of these data sharing agreements should be as transparent as possible so we can assess the extent to which they are abiding by the law. Our right to privacy has been compromised on a regular basis and on a mass scale. I find that very worrying.”

Mui¸nieks said he expects to visit the UK next year and examine the UK’s record on surveillance. Asked about the IPT ruling, he commented: “I would note that very few complaints to this tribunal have been upheld in the last few years which raises many questions for me.”

He supported calls for publication of the so-called Five Eyes treaty that authorises intelligence sharing between the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand as a contribution to greater transparency. A case requesting its release has already been lodged at the ECHR.

His report contained a number of recommendations including:

• No states … European or otherwise, should access data stored in another country without the express consent of the other country or countries involved unless there is a clear, explicit and sufficiently circumscribed legal basis in international law for such access.

• Member states should ensure that their law-enforcement agencies do not obtain data from servers and infrastructure in another country under informal arrangements.

• [Countries] should stop relying on private companies that control the internet and the wider digital environment to impose restrictions that are in violation of the state’s human rights obligations.

• The activities of national security and intelligence agencies [should be brought within] an overarching legal framework. Until there is increased transparency on the rules under which these services operate their activities cannot be assumed to be in accordance with the rule of law.

• States should ensure that effective democratic oversight over national security services is in place. For effective democratic oversight, a culture of respect for human rights and the rule of law should be promoted, in particular among security service officers.

The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states including the UK, Russia and Turkey, is the body that oversees the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.

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Philip Hammond ‘confused’ about extent of UK surveillance powers

Foreign secretary accused by campaigners of not understanding warrants he has been signing into force

Philip Hammond has been criticised for not understanding the legislation surrounding government powers to sweep up and analyse huge volumes of electronic communications such as email.

Eric King, from rights group Privacy International, said the foreign secretary appeared “confused” while giving evidence to parliament’s intelligence and security committee. The committee is reviewing the need for new legislation to regulate the UK’s electronic espionage agency, GCHQ, in light of revelations on bulk data collection by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for US intelligence.

The accusation follows a judgment on Friday that ruled the Tempora programme, for which Hammond signed the warrants, was legal, despite widespread concern from human rights groups.

“It is clear that he [Hammond] is unfortunately confused about the effect of the warrants he is signing into force, how they deal with British communications and the difference between so-called internal communications and external communications,” said King. “This is one of the huge problems with having ministers sign warrants.”

Campaigners say that in testimony to the intelligence and security committee in October, Hammond appeared not to understand the details of how the warrants he was signing worked – including whether or not they allowed the interception of communications of UK residents.

During the session, Hammond – who oversees the work of GCHQ and the foreign intelligence agency MI6 – initially appeared to say that any email exchange in which either the sender or recipient was based in the UK was treated as an internal communication and therefore any government agency wanting to access it was subject to stricter controls under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).

Later he said that if either sender or recipient were outside the UK it was an external communication and therefore subject to a different warrant, which allows the foreign secretary to authorise much broader examination by the intelligence agencies than is the case with UK-based communications.

King queried the detail of Hammond’s evidence: “If you listened to him on what Ripa does, it seems the article 8, section 4 warrants don’t ever collect UK communications and instead are exclusively for foreign to foreign communications. However, that is false on two grounds: article 8, section 4 warrants, while targeting external communications, expressly include UK to foreign, or foreign to UK and as such UK communications routinely get swept up as part of them,” he said.

“Secondly, the idea you need a more targeted article 8, section 1 warrant to intercept information about someone in the UK has not been true for a long time, and plainly wrong in the face of GCHQ programs like Tempora that are automatically intercepting, filtering and analysing a huge number of our communications on a daily basis.”

The issue of what can be intercepted under such “one-end foreign” warrants is a complicated one in the online era. If, for example, two people living in the UK send each other an email using Gmail, that may clearly seem to be a domestic communication which would need an individual warrant. However, if the intelligence services define it as each person communicating with Google’s servers in Ireland, the communication can be defined as one-end foreign, and mass-intercepted.

Privacy and civil rights groups have argued that, in light of the Snowden revelations, all electronic surveillance warrants should go before a judge to ensure the huge power available to government as a result of modern surveillance technology should be subject to some form of judicial constraint.

King said: “Hammond’s clear confusion is the predictable outcome of a legal framework that depends upon secret interpretations and that obscures the reality of the powers it grants. The fact that those signing the Ripa warrants do not understand how it works underlines the need for a new law governing surveillance powers, a law which provides for a judicial process to ensure these warrants are being issued lawfully, with proper consideration and due understanding.”

During the session, Hammond said judges would assess surveillance warrant requests primarily from a legal standpoint and that only an elected official could properly apply political judgment on the necessity and proportionality of an eavesdropping operation.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “The UK has one of the strongest legal and regulatory frameworks in the world for intelligence. Legislation around the use of warrants is naturally a technical area. That is why the foreign secretary went to great lengths to explain their use to the committee.”

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Operation Socialist

The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco

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When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies.

It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data.

Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, The Intercept revealed that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it “Regin.”

The full story about GCHQ’s infiltration of Belgacom, however, has never been told. Key details about the attack have remained shrouded in mystery—and the scope of the attack unclear.

Now, in partnership with Dutch and Belgian newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard, The Intercept has pieced together the first full reconstruction of events that took place before, during, and after the secret GCHQ hacking operation.

Based on new documents from the Snowden archive and interviews with sources familiar with the malware investigation at Belgacom’s networks, The Intercept and its partners have established that the attack on Belgacom was more aggressive and far-reaching than previously thought. It occurred in stages between 2010 and 2011, each time penetrating deeper into Belgacom’s systems, eventually compromising the very core of the company’s networks.

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Sophia in ‘t Veld, a Dutch politician who chaired the European Parliament’s recent inquiry into mass surveillance exposed by Snowden, told The Intercept that she believes the British government should face sanctions if the latest disclosures are proven.

“Compensating Belgacom should be the very least it should do,” int’ Veld said. “But I am more concerned about accountability for breaking the law, violating fundamental rights, and eroding our democratic systems.”

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Last month, The Intercept confirmed Regin as the malware found on Belgacom’s systems during the clean-up operation.

The spy bug was described by security researchers as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever discovered, and was found to have been targeting a host of telecommunications networks, governments, and research organizations, in countries such as Germany, Iran, Brazil, Russia, and Syria, as well as Belgium.

GCHQ has refused to comment on Regin, as has the NSA, and Belgacom. But Snowden documents contain strong evidence, which has not been reported before, that directly links British spies to the malware.

Aside from showing extensive details about how the British spies infiltrated the company and planted malware to successfully steal data, GCHQ documents in the Snowden archive contain codenames that also appear in samples of the Regin malware found on Belgacom’s systems, such as “Legspin” and “Hopscotch.”

One GCHQ document about the use of hacking methods references the use of “Legspin” to exploit computers. Another document describes “Hopscotch” as part of a system GCHQ uses to analyze data collected through surveillance.

Ronald Prins, director of the computer security company Fox-IT, has studied the malware, and played a key role in the analysis of Belgacom’s infected networks.

“Documents from Snowden and what I’ve seen from the malware can only lead to one conclusion,” Prins told The Intercept. “This was used by GCHQ.”

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A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

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Techbedrijven sluiten monsterverbond in privacyrechtszaak VS

De Amerikaanse softwaregigant Microsoft eist met machtige bondgenoten als Apple, Amazon en Cisco dat de Amerikaanse overheid geen toegang krijgt tot e-mails van Europese klanten van het bedrijf. De technologiebedrijven hebben het gerechtshof in New York verzocht om de gegevens uit de handen van de Amerikaanse regering te houden.

Ook bekende nieuwsaanbieders als Fox News, CNN en de The Washington Post hebben hun steun voor Microsoft uitgesproken. De softwaregigant heeft inmiddels meer dan twintig grote bedrijven aan zijn zijde, bericht persbureau Reuters.

De rechtszaak in New York gaat over de vraag of Microsoft de Amerikaanse overheid toegang moet verlenen tot e-mails van een aantal Europese klanten, die op servers in Ierland zijn opgeslagen. De regering eist toegang tot de e-mails omdat ze informatie zouden opleveren voor een drugszaak. Microsoft weigert dit. In Ierland opgeslagen gegevens vallen onder Europese wetgeving, aldus het bedrijf, en die data kunnen alleen worden bemachtigd met tussenkomst van de lokale autoriteiten.

De Amerikaanse overheid vindt een dergelijke tussenkomst niet nodig, omdat Microsoft-werknemers in Amerika de gegevens zo kunnen opvragen zonder daarvoor naar Ierland te hoeven. Een lagere rechtbank heeft de regering eerder dit jaar in het gelijk gesteld, waarna Microsoft bij het hof in beroep is gegaan.

Weglopende klanten

Voor Microsoft en andere techbedrijven is hun winstgevendheid in het geding. Sinds de onthullingen van klokkenluider Edward Snowden maken meer mensen zich zorgen over de bescherming van hun gegevens. Zowel private als zakelijke klanten van Microsoft en Apple zouden weleens kunnen weglopen als ze weten dat de Amerikaanse overheid hun bestanden zomaar kan inzien.

Grote ict-bedrijven bieden steeds meer clouddiensten aan waarbij niet alleen e-mails maar ook foto's en andere bestanden op bedrijfsservers worden opgeslagen. Ook tot deze gegevens kan de Amerikaanse regering toegang eisen.

De mediabedrijven die Microsoft steunen zijn vooral bang dat de nieuwsgierigheid van de regering de nieuwsgaring in gevaar brengt. Bronnen zullen zich wel twee keer achter de oren krabben voordat ze informatie door durven te spelen, zo is de gedachte, als ze weten dat de overheid bij alle e-mails van de journalisten kan.

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Snowden bekritiseert nieuwe Nederlandse wet