Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 9

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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

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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.