Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 9

quote:

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.

quote:

Anonymous Releases Video, Claims It Shows Warrantless Wiretapping By Police

quote:

Stingray Warrentless Wiretap by CPD on Activists

quote:

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.

quote:

Op donderdag 31 juli 2014 22:02 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Oh ja, de CIA en dat rapport over martelen:

[..]

[..]

Het artikel gaat verder.

quote:

House chair warns violence abroad would follow Senate torture report release

quote:

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.

quote:

Judge: Give NSA unlimited access to digital data

quote:

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

quote:

Lone US senator attempts to block bill challenging government secrecy

quote:

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.

quote:

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.

quote:

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.”

quote:

Operation Socialist

The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco

quote:

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.

quote:

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.”

quote:

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.”

quote:

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.

quote:

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.

quote:

Snowden bekritiseert nieuwe Nederlandse wet

quote:

De Amerikaanse klokkenluider Edward Snowden heeft vanuit Moskou een gloedvol pleidooi gehouden tegen de uitbreiding van surveillancebevoegdheden van de Nederlandse veiligheidsdiensten. Hij deed dat middels een videoverbinding tijdens de uitreiking van de Big Brother Awards in de Amsterdamse Stadsschouwburg.

quote:

ACLU accuses NSA of using holiday lull to ‘minimise impact’ of documents

Released on Christmas Eve, the documents are heavily redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board

The National Security Agency used the holiday lull to “minimise the impact” of a tranche of documents by releasing them on Christmas Eve, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday.

The documents, which were released in response to a legal challenge by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily – in some places totally –redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2007.

A court ordered the documents released this past summer, and a 22 December deadline for that release was agreed upon, according to Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s national security project, because the NSA said it needed “six or seven months” to complete its review and redaction process.

A spokesperson for the NSA said that the 22 December deadline, “which was agreed to by all parties,” was met.

But according to Toomey, the ACLU didn’t receive the documents until “late in the day on the 23rd” – the NSA sent them by FedEx late on the 22nd – and the NSA didn’t publicly release them until Christmas Eve. “I certainly think the NSA would prefer to have the documents released right ahead of the holidays in order to have less public attention on what they contain,” Toomey said.

The redactions on the document are extreme, and their omissions tantalising. One entry, from the 4th quarter of 2008, reads: “On [redacted] [redacted] used the US SIGINT System (USSS) to locate [redacted] believed to be kidnapped [redacted] The selectors were tasked before authorization was obtained from NSA. After the NSA Office of General Counsel (OGC) denied the authorization request, [redacted] was found. He had not been kidnapped.”

Another reads: “On [redacted] during an experimental collection and processing effort, NSA analysts collected [several lines of text redacted.] The messages were deleted [redacted] when the error was identified.”

Many entries are erased entirely, which means the documents reveal very little about how individuals who misuse the data were disciplined by the NSA, or how quickly errors were resolved.

But, according to Toomey, they speak to a total picture of a “large number of different compliance violations. We don’t know how many.”

He said the documents deepen the picture of the nature and extent of compliance violations by analysts working for the NSA.

“There are certain portions of the documents that really vindicate some of the things [Edward] Snowden said when he first described the NSA surveillance in terms of the ability of analysts to conduct queries – without authorisation – of raw internet traffic,” Toomey said.

Among the items redacted are sections detailing the total number of violations reported, with many ending up like this entry from 2013 “On [redacted] occasions during the fourth quarter, selectors were incorrectly tasked because of typographical errors.”

This makes the scale of the problem difficult to gauge. Toomey said the ACLU would continue to sue for the release of those numbers.

“More generally,” Toomey said, “just the range of different compliance violations makes it clear that at every step of the NSA’s collection of information there are vulnerabilities that leave the privacy of Americans at risk.”

A spokesperson for the NSA declined to answer the question of why Christmas Eve was chosen as a release date. A statement on the agency’s website which accompanied the documents’ release said: “These materials show, over a sustained period of time, the depth and rigor of NSA’s commitment to compliance.”

“By emphasizing accountability across all levels of the enterprise, and transparently reporting errors and violations to outside oversight authorities,” the statement concluded, “NSA protects privacy and civil liberties while safeguarding the nation and our allies.”

quote:

How the NSA Attacks Tor/Firefox Users With QUANTUM and FOXACID

quote:

The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world.

According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identifies Tor users on the Internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser.

The NSA refers to these capabilities as CNE, or computer network exploitation.

The first step of this process is finding Tor users. To accomplish this, the NSA relies on its vast capability to monitor large parts of the Internet. This is done via the agency's partnership with US telecoms firms under programs codenamed Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar and Blarney.

The NSA creates "fingerprints" that detect HTTP requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool that NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the Internet.

Using powerful data analysis tools with codenames such as Turbulence, Turmoil and Tumult, the NSA automatically sifts through the enormous amount of Internet traffic that it sees, looking for Tor connections.

Last month, Brazilian TV news show Fantastico showed screenshots of an NSA tool that had the ability to identify Tor users by monitoring Internet traffic.

The very feature that makes Tor a powerful anonymity service, and the fact that all Tor users look alike on the Internet, makes it easy to differentiate Tor users from other web users. On the other hand, the anonymity provided by Tor makes it impossible for the NSA to know who the user is, or whether or not the user is in the US.

After identifying an individual Tor user on the Internet, the NSA uses its network of secret Internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret Internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems.

Once the computer is successfully attacked, it secretly calls back to a FoxAcid server, which then performs additional attacks on the target computer to ensure that it remains compromised long-term, and continues to provide eavesdropping information back to the NSA.

quote:

David Cameron seeks cooperation of US president over encryption crackdown

quote:

David Cameron is to urge Barack Obama to pressure internet firms such as Twitter and Facebook to do more to cooperate with Britain’s intelligence agencies as they seek to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.

As he becomes the first European leader to meet the president after the multiple shootings in Paris last week, the prime minister will seek to win Obama’s support for his plans to secure a new legal framework to deny terrorists a “safe space”.

The prime minister arrives after he proposed earlier this week that British intelligence agencies have the power to break the encrypted communications of suspected terrorists and insisting that the likes of Twitter and Facebook do more to cooperate with Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre.

Cameron will demand that US internet companies store – and then be prepared to hand over – data and content needed by the intelligence agencies “to keep us safe” when he meets the president for talks in the Oval Office on Friday morning.

A government source said: “The prime minister’s objective here is to get the US companies to cooperate with us more, to make sure that our intelligence agencies get the information they need to keep us safe. That will be his approach in the discussion with President Obama – how can we work together to get them to cooperate more, what is the best approach to encourage them to do more.”

quote:

Theresa May: police need greater access to communications data - video

quote:

Theresa May says UK police and intelligence agencies should have greater access to communications data in order to locate terror suspects. The home secretary criticises her coalition colleagues for blocking the communications data bill in 2012. She says the counter-terrorist investigation in Paris following the massacre at Charlie Hebdo likely involved the use of communications data

quote:

Secret US cybersecurity report: encryption vital to protect private data

Newly uncovered Snowden document contrasts with British PM’s vow to crack down on encrypted messaging after Paris attacks

A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.

The advice, in a newly uncovered five-year forecast written in 2009, contrasts with the pledge made by David Cameron this week to crack down on encryption use by technology companies.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the prime minister said on Monday there should be “no means of communication” that British authorities could not access. Cameron will use his visit to the US, which started on Thursday , to urge Barack Obama to apply more pressure to tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, who have been expanding encrypted messaging for their millions of users since the revelations of mass NSA surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document from the US National Intelligence Council, which reports directly to the US director of national intelligence, made clear that encryption was the “best defence” for computer users to protect private data.

Part of the cache given to the Guardian by Snowden, the paper was published in 2009 and gives a five-year forecast on the “global cyber threat to the US information infrastructure”. It covers communications, commercial and financial networks, and government and critical infrastructure systems. It was shared with GCHQ and made available to the agency’s staff through its intranet.

One of the biggest issues in protecting businesses and citizens from espionage, sabotage and crime – hacking attacks are estimated to cost the global economy up to $400bn a year – was a clear imbalance between the development of offensive versus defensive capabilities, “due to the slower than expected adoption … of encryption and other technologies”, it said.

An unclassified table accompanying the report states that encryption is the “[b]est defense to protect data”, especially if made particularly strong through “multi-factor authentication” – similar to two-step verification used by Google and others for email – or biometrics. These measures remain all but impossible to crack, even for GCHQ and the NSA.

The report warned: “Almost all current and potential adversaries – nations, criminal groups, terrorists, and individual hackers – now have the capability to exploit, and in some cases attack, unclassified access-controlled US and allied information systems.”

It further noted that the “scale of detected compromises indicates organisations should assume that any controlled but unclassified networks of intelligence, operational or commercial value directly accessible from the internet are already potentially compromised by foreign adversaries”.

The primary adversaries included Russia, whose “robust” operations teams had “proven access and tradecraft”, it said. By 2009, China was “the most active foreign sponsor of computer network intrusion activity discovered against US networks”, but lacked the sophistication or range of capabilities of Russia. “Cyber criminals” were another of the major threats, having “capabilities significantly beyond those of all but a few nation states”.

The report had some cause for optimism, especially in the light of Google and other US tech giants having in the months prior greatly increased their use of encryption efforts. “We assess with high confidence that security best practices applied to target networks would prevent the vast majority of intrusions,” it concluded.

Official UK government security advice still recommends encryption among a range of other tools for effective network and information defence. However, end-to-end encryption – which means only the two people communicating with each other, and not the company carrying the message, can decode it – is problematic for intelligence agencies as it makes even warranted collection considerably more difficult.

The latest versions of Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems are encrypted by default, while other popular messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, also use encryption. This has prompted calls for action against such strong encryption from ministers and officials.

Speaking on Monday, Cameron asked: “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”

The previous week, a day after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, the MI5 chief, Andrew Parker, called for new powers and warned that new technologies were making it harder to track extremists.

In November, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, said US social media giants had become the “networks of choice” for terrorists.

Chris Soghoian, principal senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said attempts by the British government to force US companies to weaken encryption faced many hurdles.

“The trouble is these services are already being used by hundreds of millions of people. I guess you could try to force tech companies to be less secure but then they would be less secure against attacks for anyone,” he said. “I guess they could ban the iPhone or say you can’t use Google’s services in the UK but that wouldn’t go down well.”

GCHQ and the NSA are responsible for cybersecurity in the UK and US respectively. This includes working with technology companies to audit software and hardware for use by governments and critical infrastructure sectors.

Such audits uncover numerous vulnerabilities which are then shared privately with technology companies to fix issues that could otherwise have caused serious damage to users and networks. However, both agencies also have intelligence-gathering responsibilities under which they exploit vulnerabilities in technology to monitor targets. As a result of these dual missions, they are faced with weighing up whether to exploit or fix a vulnerability when a product is used both by targets and innocent users.

The Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica have previously reported the intelligence agencies’ broad efforts to undermine encryption and exploit rather than reveal vulnerabilities. This prompted Obama’s NSA review panel to warn that the agency’s conflicting missions caused problems, and so recommend that its cyber-security responsibilities be removed to prevent future issues.

Another newly discovered document shows GCHQ acting in a similarly conflicted manner, despite the agencies’ private acknowledgement that encryption is an essential part of protecting citizens against cyber-attacks.

The 2008 memo was addressed to the then foreign secretary, David Miliband, and classified with one of the UK’s very highest restrictive markings: “TOP SECRET STRAP 2 EYES ONLY”. It is unclear why such a document was posted to the agency’s intranet, which is available to all agency staff, NSA workers, and even outside contractors.

The memo requested a renewal of the legal warrant allowing GCHQ to “modify” commercial software in violation of licensing agreements. The document cites examples of software the agency had hacked, including commonly used software to run web forums, and website administration tools. Such software are widely used by companies and individuals around the world.

The document also said the agency had developed “capability against Cisco routers”, which would “allow us to re-route selected traffic across international links towards GCHQ’s passive collection systems”.

GCHQ had also been working to “exploit” the anti-virus software Kaspersky, the document said. The report contained no information on the nature of the vulnerabilities found by the agency.

Security experts regularly say that keeping software up to date and being aware of vulnerabilities is vital for businesses to protect themselves and their customers from being hacked. Failing to fix vulnerabilities leaves open the risk that other governments or criminal hackers will find the same security gaps and exploit them to damage systems or steal data, raising questions about whether GCHQ and the NSA neglected their duty to protect internet systems in their quest for more intelligence.

A GCHQ spokesman said: “It is long-standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

“All our operational processes rigorously support this position. In addition, the UK’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European convention on human rights.”

quote:

'Britse inlichtingendienst onderschept e-mails journalisten'

De Britse inlichtingendienst GCHQ heeft e-mails van journalisten bij belangrijke internationale media onderschept, bewaard en gepubliceerd.

Dat meldt The Guardian op basis van nieuwe documenten van klokkenluider Edward Snowden. De e-mails werden onderschept als onderdeel van een "testoefening" en op het intranet van de GCHQ geplaatst.

De GCHQ onderschepte e-mails van journalisten van onder andere de BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC en de Washington Post. De e-mails variëren van persberichten aan media tot onderlinge communicatie tussen journalisten over potentiële verhalen.

Volgens de documenten onderschepte de Britse geheime dienst op een dag in november van 2008 binnen 10 minuten zo'n 70.000 e-mails van journalisten. Dit lukte de GCHQ door het aftappen van de de onderzeese glasvezelkabels.

Ook worden onderzoeksjournalisten als "een bedreiging" voor de geheime diensten gezien, samen met terroristen en hackers, zo blijkt uit de documenten.

Cameron

Meer dan honderd journalisten, waaronder velen van de internationale media die door de GCHQ zijn afgetapt, hebben een open brief aan de Britse premier David Cameron gestuurd. In deze brief protesteren journalisten tegen het afluisteren van hun communicatie.

Na de aanslagen in Parijs wil Cameron het bij wet mogelijk maken om communicatie die niet door de Britse inlichtingendiensten kan worden uitgelezen aan banden te leggen. Volgens de journalisten gaat dit tegen de persvrijheid in.

quote:

Edward Snowden: AIVD en MIVD lopen aan de leiband NSA

Nederlandse inlichtingendiensten AIVD en MIVD lopen aan de leiband van de Amerikaanse NSA. Ze zijn 'uitermate volgzaam' en worden als 'ondergeschikten' gezien. Dat vertelt Edward Snowden, die voor zowel de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA als voor de CIA werkte, in een interview met de Volkskrant en Nieuwsuur.

Snowden: 'De Nederlanders werken voor de Amerikanen. Ze doen wat wij ze vertellen wat ze moeten doen. Ze worden niet gewaardeerd vanwege hun capaciteiten, maar vanwege de vrije doorgang die ze bieden. Daarvoor gebruikt de NSA ze.'

Morgen verschijnt in de Volkskrant en op Volkskrant.nl een uitgebreid interview met Edward Snowden, die in 2013 tienduizenden staatsgeheimen openbaarde van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA en momenteel in Moskou verblijft.

Nieuwsuur zal vanavond de beelden uitzenden. Edward Snowden spreekt onder meer over de nieuwe Nederlandse inlichtingenwet, de roep om nieuwe afluisterbevoegdheden na de aanslagen in Parijs en zijn persoonlijke situatie in Moskou.

quote:

UN needs agency for data protection, European commissioner tells Davos

Edward Snowden’s revelations about digital monitoring have pushed data security high up the agenda at Davos this year

A new UN agency for data protection and data security is needed to protect the confidential and personal information of citizens around the world, the European commissioner for digital economy told delegates at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.

Günther Oettinger said the recent Sony hack, which exposed swaths of confidential and personal information, had shown Europe the need to radically reshape the way data is used.

“We are in a digital revolution, and we need a data revolution in parallel,” Oettinger said in a panel alongside Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, and Yahoo’s boss, Marissa Mayer. He said the stream of revelations following Sony’s data breach had shown that Brussels must take a lead in restoring trust in tech companies.

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent to which government agencies have been intercepting their citizens’ digital communications have pushed data security high up the agenda at Davos this year.

Mayer told Davos that Yahoo had immediately changed the way it handled and encrypted data when the Snowden revelations came to light. Asked how Yahoo would handle a request for data access from an oppressive regime, she replied: “What we have seen from the Snowden allegations is that whether they’re coming through the official channels or not to access the data, they’re accessing the data.”

Berners-Lee said that the battle between privacy and security should not be a pendulum, swinging between giving agencies yet more or less access to data. At the moment, he warned, there is no way of testing what someone does with data if granted permission to obtain it through the courts.

“I want to break out of that pendulum,” he said. “So let’s go down the way of accountability, so we can say yes, you can have the data, but I’m going to talk to the people who are overseeing you about how you use it.”

Berners-Lee told delegates that the tech industry needed to pay more attention to whether its actions were actually good for users. He cited the example of applications that sprung up to let iPhone users turn on the flashlight. Many would then immediately request access to other applications to access data.

“Their whole model is to steal data, and build models, and not help you at all,” Berners-Lee said. But the man who created the first protocols that underpin the web more than 25 years ago warned that a new architecture would be needed to guarantee privacy.

Oettinger said the first priority was to ensure that companies and organisations in Europe were properly transparent, before then pushing on for a credible global common understanding on the issue. “We need a UN agency for data protection and data security,” he declared.

Oettinger outlined a two-pronged approach, where governments implement clear, pragmatic regulation, and the technology industry designs products that actually guarantee users’ privacy.

Michael Fries, the president and CEO of cable giant Liberty Global, questioned Oettinger’s vision for a new global deal on data.

“It is not possible in the near term. I think it’s going to take several years,” Fries warned.

Bosses of technology companies also asserted that there was a social good for technology. Sheryl Sandberg, the boss of Facebook, said technology “gives voice to someone who has traditionally not had that”. She said giving women access to technology in developing countries was more beneficial than men as they passed the knowledge on to their children.

“Women will not have the same opportunity to participate as men, it takes an active and different role than we’ve had before,” she said to applause. But, she said the only way to make access available was to make it cheaper. “Sixty percent of the internet today is not in English,” she said, which showed that it lacked diversity.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, said improving broadband, and making it more accessible, would solve “almost all of the problems we face”.

quote:

'Encryptie dwingt spionnen tot moreel onethisch gedrag'

Wanneer meer mensen hun berichten gaan versleutelen om afluisteraars en meelezers te dwarsbomen dwingt dat inlichtingendiensten in een 'moreel slechtere positie', zo zei een voormalig topman van de Britse spionagedienst GCHQ deze week.

Het is een opmerkelijk argument om het gebruik van encryptie terug te dringen. De redenering is vergelijkbaar met de waarschuwing dat inbrekers meer schade aanrichten als je de deur op slot doet.

En met de formulering dat spionnen zich straks wellicht slechter gaan gedragen erkende Sir David Omand, baas van de GCHQ in de jaren negentig, impliciet dat spionnen zich nu ook al slecht gedragen.

Encryptie

Encryptie is het belangrijkste middel om veilig berichten te versturen of veilig gesprekken te voeren. Letters en geluiden worden digitaal verhaspeld tot een onbegrijpelijke brij van tekens, die alleen met een speciale sleutel door de ontvanger te ontcijferen is. Vroeger was deze geheimtaal vooral iets voor militairen, maar sinds de onthullingen van Edward Snowden hebben ook bedrijven en burgers er veel belangstelling voor.

Whatsapp werkt ermee, Google en Apple werken ermee (zelf kunnen ze wel gewoon blijven meekijken), en er zijn handige programmaatjes waarmee iedereen zijn e-mail kan versleutelen. Ook nieuwe mobieltjes zoals de Blackphone gebruiken standaard encryptie.

Last

Eind vorig jaar bleek uit documenten van Edward Snowden dat de NSA en GCHQ veel last hebben van encryptie. Het populaire PGP (pretty good privacy), dat bijvoorbeeld gebruikt wordt om e-mail te versleutelen, hadden ze in elk geval twee jaar geleden nog niet gekraakt.

De 'oplossing' voor geheime diensten is om dan niet meer de communicatie te onderscheppen, maar de 'endpoints', de computers en telefoons te hacken van waaruit de berichten worden verstuurd.

Ouderwetse surveillance

'De inlichtingendiensten zullen het niet opgeven', zei Omand tijdens een debat bij de London School of Economics. 'Nu zullen ze dichter bij de slechteriken moeten zien te komen.'

Dat betekent enerzijds meer ouderwetse surveillance, zoals het schaduwen en afluisteren van huiskamers. Anderzijds betekent het ook meer zogeheten computer network exploitation: het binnendringen in de apparaten van de doelwitten. De NSA heeft al toegang tot zeker 50 duizend netwerken, bleek eind 2013 uit documenten van Snowden.

'Je kunt zeggen dat we dan gerichter zullen gaan werken, maar in termen van privacy - we zullen meer nevenschade aanrichten - zullen we waarschijnlijk in een moreel slechtere positie eindigen dan eerst.'

quote:

Mass surveillance is fundamental threat to human rights, says European report

Europe’s top rights body says scale of NSA spying is ‘stunning’ and suggests UK powers may be at odds with rights convention

Europe’s top rights body has said mass surveillance practices are a fundamental threat to human rights and violate the right to privacy enshrined in European law.

The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe says in a report that it is “deeply concerned” by the “far-reaching, technologically advanced systems” used by the US and UK to collect, store and analyse the data of private citizens. It describes the scale of spying by the US National Security Agency, revealed by Edward Snowden, as “stunning”.

The report also suggests that British laws that give the monitoring agency GCHQ wide-ranging powers are incompatible with the European convention on human rights. It argues that British surveillance may be at odds with article 8, the right to privacy, as well as article 10, which guarantees freedom of expression, and article 6, the right to a fair trial.

“These rights are cornerstones of democracy. Their infringement without adequate judicial control jeopardises the rule of law,” it says.

There is compelling evidence that US intelligence agencies and their allies are hoovering up data “on a massive scale”, the report says. US-UK operations encompass “numerous persons against whom there is no ground for suspicion of any wrongdoing,” it adds.

The assembly is made up of delegates from 47 member states, including European Union and former Soviet countries. It is due to debate the report’s recommendations on Tuesday.

Though the recommendations are not binding on governments, the European court of human rights looks to the assembly for broad inspiration, and occasionally cites it in its rulings.

Several British surveillance cases are currently before the Strasbourg court. Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Privacy International and Liberty all argue that GCHQ’s mass collection of data infringes European law. In December the UK’s investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) dismissed their complaint.

The 35-page assembly report, written by a Dutch MP, Pieter Omtzigt, begins with a quote from the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitysn: “Our freedom is built on what others do not know of our existences”. It says the knowledge that states do engage in mass surveillance has a “chilling effect” on the exercise of basic freedoms.

It says the assembly is deeply worried by the fact that intelligence agencies have deliberately weakened internet security by creating back doors and systematically exploiting weakness in security standards and implementation. Back doors can easily be exploited by “terrorists and cyber-terrorists or other criminals”, it says, calling for a greater use of encryption.

Another concern is the use of “secret laws, secret courts and secret interpretations of such laws” to justify mass surveillance. Typically, these laws “are very poorly scrutinised”.

The assembly acknowledges there is a need for “effective targeted surveillance of suspected terrorists and organised criminals”. But citing independent reviews carried out in the US, it says there is little evidence that mass surveillance has stopped terrorist attacks. It notes: “Instead, resources that might prevent attacks are diverted to mass surveillance, leaving potentially dangerous persons free to act.”

There is no mention of the recent attacks in Paris by three jihadist terrorists who shot dead 17 people. All three were known to the French authorities, who had them under surveillance but discontinued eavesdropping last summer. David Cameron has argued that the Paris attacks show that British spies need further surveillance powers. The report implicitly rejects this conclusion.

The assembly has been taking evidence on mass surveillance since last year. In April Snowden spoke to delegates via a video link from Moscow. He revealed that the NSA had specifically targeted non-governmental organisations and other civil groups, both in the US and internationally.

Snowden’s decision to leak documents to the Guardian and other media organisations in June 2013, was courageous, Omtzigt said, and had “triggered public debate on the protection of privacy”. American officials, meanwhile, turned down an invitation to address the assembly, the MP said.

The draft report will be debated in committee and by the full assembly later this year.

It calls for:

• Collection of personal data without consent only if court-ordered on the basis of reasonable suspicion.

• Stronger parliamentary/judicial control of the intelligence services.

• Credible protection for whistleblowers (like Snowden) who expose wrongdoing by spy agencies.

• An international “codex” of rules governing intelligence sharing that national agencies could opt into.

Governments are free to implement or ignore the recommendations. However, if they reject them they have to explain why. They usually reply within six months.

The report says that Europe’s intelligence services work closely with their American counterparts. It says the Netherlands, for example, intercepted vast amounts of Somali telephone traffic in order to combat piracy, and shared it with the NSA. Denmark has collaborated with the US on surveillance since the late 1990s.

The relationship between the NSA and the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has been “intimate” for the past 13 years. Revelations that the NSA spied on Angela Merkel’s mobile phone may have strained relations, but Germany still hosts several major NSA sites, including the NSA’s European headquarters in Stuttgart.

According to Omtzigt, surveillance powers have grown, and political oversight has diminished. Political leaders have lost control over their own intelligence agencies. The result is a “runaway surveillance machine”. Moreover, most politicians can no longer understand the immensely technical programmes involved, the report says.

The MP cites the case of James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, who in April 2013 told the Senate that the NSA didn’t “wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans. Clapper later apologised for giving an untrue answer. “I still do not want to believe that he lied,” Omtzigt writes, adding that much intelligence work has been outsourced to private companies.

The assembly sent a letter to the German, British and US authorities asking whether they colluded with each other – in other words, got round laws preventing domestic spying by getting a third party to do it for them. The Germans and British denied this; the US failed to reply.

The report concludes that the UK response was probably true, given extensive British laws that already allow practically unlimited spying. The new Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act – Drip, for short – passed in July, allows the wide-ranging collection of personal data, in particular metadata, the report says. “There seems to be little need for circumvention any more,” it concludes.

quote:

Secret ‘BADASS’ Intelligence Program Spied on Smartphones

quote:

British and Canadian spy agencies accumulated sensitive data on smartphone users, including location, app preferences, and unique device identifiers, by piggybacking on ubiquitous software from advertising and analytics companies, according to a document obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document, included in a trove of Snowden material released by Der Spiegel on January 17, outlines a secret program run by the intelligence agencies called BADASS. The German newsweekly did not write about the BADASS document, attaching it to a broader article on cyberwarfare. According to The Intercept‘s analysis of the document, intelligence agents applied BADASS software filters to streams of intercepted internet traffic, plucking from that traffic unencrypted uploads from smartphones to servers run by advertising and analytics companies.

Programmers frequently embed code from a handful of such companies into their smartphone apps because it helps them answer a variety of questions: How often does a particular user open the app, and at what time of day? Where does the user live? Where does the user work? Where is the user right now? What’s the phone’s unique identifier? What version of Android or iOS is the device running? What’s the user’s IP address? Answers to those questions guide app upgrades and help target advertisements, benefits that help explain why tracking users is not only routine in the tech industry but also considered a best practice.

For users, however, the smartphone data routinely provided to ad and analytics companies represents a major privacy threat. When combined together, the information fragments can be used to identify specific users, and when concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, they have proven to be irresistibly convenient targets for those engaged in mass surveillance. Although the BADASS presentation appears to be roughly four years old, at least one player in the mobile advertising and analytics space, Google, acknowledges that its servers still routinely receive unencrypted uploads from Google code embedded in apps.

For spy agencies, this smartphone monitoring data represented a new, convenient way of learning more about surveillance targets, including information about their physical movements and digital activities. It also would have made it possible to design more focused cyberattacks against those people, for example by exploiting a weakness in a particular app known to be used by a particular person. Such scenarios are strongly hinted at in a 2010 NSA presentation, provided by agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and published last year in The New York Times, Pro Publica, and The Guardian. That presentation stated that smartphone monitoring would be useful because it could lead to “additional exploitation” and the unearthing of “target knowledge/leads, location, [and] target technology.”

The 2010 presentation, along with additional documents from Britain’s intelligence service Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, showed that the intelligence agencies were aggressively ramping up their efforts to see into the world of mobile apps. But the specifics of how they might distill useful information from the torrent of internet packets to and from smartphones remained unclear.

quote:

Researchers Link Regin to Malware Disclosed in Recent Snowden Documents

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered shared code and functionality between the Regin malware platform and a similar platform described in a newly disclosed set of Edward Snowden documents 10 days ago by Germany’s Der Spiegel.

The link, found in a keylogger called QWERTY allegedly used by the so-called Five Eyes, leads them to conclude that the developers of each platform are either the same, or work closely together.

“Considering the extreme complexity of the Regin platform and little chance that it can be duplicated by somebody without having access to its source codes, we conclude the QWERTY malware developers and the Regin developers are the same or working together,” wrote Kaspersky Lab researchers Costin Raiu and Igor Soumenkov today in a published report on the Securelist blog.

The Der Spiegel article describes how the U.S National Security Agency, the U.K.’s GCHQ and the rest of the Five Eyes are allegedly developing offensive Internet-based capabilities to attack computer networks managing the critical infrastructure of its adversaries.

The new Snowden documents, disclosed by Laura Poitras and a collection of eight security and privacy technologists and experts, also include an overview of a malware platform called WARRIORPRIDE. Within WARRIORPRIDE is QWERTY, a module that logs keystrokes from compromised Windows machines; Der Spiegel said the malware is likely several years old and has likely already been replaced.

The magazine released QWERTY to the public upon publication of its article. It describes QWERTY’s structure as “simple” and said there is a core driver called QWERTYKM that interacts with the Windows keyboard manager, and a QWERTYLP library which logs and stores keystrokes for analysis. Der Spiegel said after its examination of binary files, various components and libraries it’s likely there’s a connection between WARRIORPRIDE and the Australian Signals Directorate, an Aussie government intelligence agency.

Kaspersky researchers Raiu and Soumenkov said after analysis that the QWERTY malware is identical in functionality to a particular Regin plugin.

Raiu and Soumenkov said researchers took apart the QWERTY module and found three binaries and configuration files. One binary called 20123.sys is a kernel mode component of the QWERTY keylogger that was built from source code also found in a Regin module, a plug-in called 50251.

In a report published today, side-by-side comparisons of the respective source code shows they are close to identical, sharing large chunks of code. The researchers said that one piece of code in particular references plug-ins from the Regin platform and is used in QWERTY and its Regin counterpart. It addresses a Regin plug-in, called 50225, that is responsible for kernel-mode hooking, the Kaspersky researchers said.

“This is solid proof that the QWERTY plugin can only operate as part of the Regin platform, leveraging the kernel hooking functions from plugin 50225,” Raiu and Soumenkov wrote.

“As an additional proof that both modules use the same software platform, we can take a look at functions exported by ordinal 1 of both modules,” they also wrote. “They contain the startup code that can be found in any other plugin of Regin, and include the actual plugin number that is registered within the platform to allow further addressing of the module. This only makes sense if the modules are used with the Regin platform orchestrator.”

The Regin malware platform was disclosed in late November by Kaspersky Lab and it was quickly labeled one of the most advanced espionage malware platforms ever studied, surpassing even Stuxnet and Flame in complexity. The platform is used to steal secrets from government agencies, research institutions, banks and can even be tweaked to attack GSM telecom network operators.

Last week, Kaspersky researchers published another Regin report, this one describing two standalone modules used for lateral movement and to establish a backdoor in order to move data off compromised machines. The modules, named Hopscotch and Legspin, have also likely been retired given they were developed perhaps more than a decade ago.

quote:

Snowden Files Show Canada Spy Agency Runs Global Internet Watch: CBC

OTTAWA — Canada's electronic spy agency has been intercepting and analyzing data on up to 15 million file downloads daily as part of a global surveillance program, according to a report published on Wednesday.

Critics said the revelations, made in 2012 documents obtained by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden and leaked to journalists, showed much more oversight was needed over Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE).

The documents are the first indication from the Snowden files showing Canada had its own globe-spanning Internet surveillance in a bid to counter extremists.

The covert dragnet, nicknamed Levitation, has covered allied countries and trading partners such as the United States, Britain, Brazil, Germany, Spain and Portugal, the report by CBC News and news website The Intercept said. The Intercept, which includes journalist Glenn Greenwald, obtained the documents from Snowden.

Brazil’s government, which fell out with Washington in 2013 over revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency, Snowden's former employer, had eavesdropped on President Dilma Roussef, criticized the reported Canadian spying.

“Brazil regrets and repudiates all unauthorized espionage on foreign officials by intelligence agencies,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Wednesday. It said Brazil has sought to enhance Internet privacy and security through international governance agreements.

A U.S. intelligence official declined to comment.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) report said the CSE nets what it said the agency calls 350 "interesting download events" each month.

CSE is a secretive body, which like the NSA, monitors electronic communication and helps protect national computer networks. It is not allowed to target Canadians or Canadian corporations.

In the past, CSE has faced allegations that it has improperly intercepted Canadians' phone conversations and emails. CSE says it has safeguards in place to protect any information about Canadians it might inadvertently collect.

An independent watchdog monitors CSE, but the watchdog's powers are limited. A spokesman said it is reviewing CSE's use of metadata but declined to say if it would include the latest reports in the process.

Opposition parties moved in Parliament last October to give the CSE watchdog a more robust role but were defeated by the governing Conservatives.

Among CSE's hauls, the eavesdropping program has discovered a German hostage video and an uploaded document that revealed the hostage strategy of an al-Qaeda wing in North Africa, the CBC said.

The agency did not confirm the report, saying in a statement that "CSE's foreign signals intelligence has played a vital role in uncovering foreign-based extremists' efforts to attract, radicalize, and train individuals to carry out attacks".

The Snowden documents show the agency has sifted through 10 million to 15 million uploads a day of videos, music documents and other files hosted by 102 file-sharing websites.

Canada is part of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, along with the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

In 2013, Brazil's Rousseff demanded an explanation from Canada after a media report, also based on Snowden documents, said CSE spied on the South American country's mines and energy ministry.

Canadian security expert Wesley Wark said Levitation might well be covered by CSE's foreign intelligence mandate, but questioned its effectiveness.

"Does this massive trawling of free download sites aimed at detecting terrorist communications or identities really deliver useful intelligence?" asked Wark, a University of Ottawa professor, noting CSE had talked of only two successes.

In 2013, the CBC cited other Snowden documents that it said showed Canada had allowed the NSA to conduct widespread surveillance during the 2010 Group of 20 summit in Toronto.

Last August, the government watchdog said CSE should tighten its procedures for handling the private calls and emails it intercepts.

"These are powerful capabilities in the hands of the state that in effect monitor all of our digital actions," said Ron Deibert, director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies. "They collect it all; are we confident that they are not going to abuse it?"

quote:

Paus en Snowden maken kans op Nobelprijs voor Vrede

quote:

Western Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise

quote:

The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.

In some cases, the surveillance agencies are obtaining the content of emails by monitoring hackers as they breach email accounts, often without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches. “Hackers are stealing the emails of some of our targets… by collecting the hackers’ ‘take,’ we . . . get access to the emails themselves,” reads one top secret 2010 National Security Agency document.

These and other revelations about the intelligence agencies’ reliance on hackers are contained in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents—which come from the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters agency and NSA—shed new light on the various means used by intelligence agencies to exploit hackers’ successes and learn from their skills, while also raising questions about whether governments have overstated the threat posed by some hackers.

quote:

Britse inlichtingendienst mocht Amerikaanse data NSA niet gebruiken

De Britse inlichtingendienst GCHQ heeft mensenrechtenwetgeving geschonden door gegevens te verwerken die werden verzameld door de Amerikaanse NSA.

Dat heeft het Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), een rechtbank die toezicht houdt op de Britse geheime diensten, vrijdag geoordeeld (pdf).

Het is voor het eerst in het vijftienjarige bestaan van het IPT dat ten nadele van een inlichtingendienst wordt geoordeeld, zo stelt Privacy International, een van de aanklagers in de zaak.

Vóór december 2014 was het gebruik van NSA-gegevens illegaal, omdat de regels rond de Britse toegang tot onder meer het Prism-programma van de VS geheim waren. Pas na onthullingen van klokkenluider Edward Snowden kwam dit in de openbaarheid.

Openbaar

Sinds december 2014 is het gebruik van NSA-gegevens door GCHQ wel toegestaan, oordeelde de rechtbank eerder. Sindsdien zijn de regels rond deze gegevensuitwisseling openbaar gemaakt.

De zaak draaide om gebruik van gegevens die worden verzameld via Prism en het spionageprogramma Upstream. Via Prism verzamelt de NSA gegevens van grote internetbedrijven als Google, Microsoft en Apple. Upstream verzamelt gegevens via internationale glasvezelkabels.

Door de geheimhouding rond deze spionageprogramma's werd een deel van de zaak in besloten sessies gehoord, zonder dat de betrokken privacyorganisaties hierbij aanwezig mochten zijn.

Privacy International zegt de rechtbank te zullen vragen om bevestiging dat communicatie voor december 2014 illegaal is verzameld, en te vragen om verwijdering van de gegevens.

Massasurveillance

"Het oordeel van vandaag bevestigt wat velen al lange tijd zeggen: in het afgelopen decennium hebben GCHQ en de NSA met een illegaal massasurveillanceprogramma een effect gehad op miljoenen mensen over de hele wereld", zegt Eric King, vice-directeur van Privacy International, in een verklaring.

"Maar er moet meer worden gedaan. De enige reden dat de deelrelatie tussen de NSA en GCHQ vandaag nog legaal is, is omdat de overheid zich op het laatste moment inzette om voorheen geheime 'regelingen' te openbaren. Dat is duidelijk niet genoeg om een blijvende, gigantische maas in de wet te repareren. We hopen dat het Europees Hof besluit om in het voordeel van privacy te oordelen, in plaats van voor ongecontroleerde staatsmacht."

Het Europees Hof heeft al aangekondigd GCHQ-zaken te willen behandelen die eerder door het IPT zijn afgehandeld.

Waarborgen

"Het IPT-oordeel van vandaag bevestigt opnieuw dat de processen en waarborgen rond het delen van inlichtingen volledig adequaat waren" stelt GCHQ in een reactie. "Het gaat enkel om de hoeveelheid details over die processen en waarborgen die in het publieke domein moeten zijn."

"Van nature moet veel van het werk van GCHQ geheim blijven. Maar we werken samen met de rest van de overheid om het publieke begrip over ons werk te verbeteren, evenals het sterke wettelijke en beleidsraamwerk dat ons werk onderbouwt."

quote:

Nieuw kabinetsvoorstel 'heel schadelijk' voor digitale infrastructuur

quote:

Het kabinet wil inlichtingendiensten AIVD en MIVD de mogelijkheid geven om ongericht informatie te verzamelen via internetkabels. Meer dan negentig procent van de telecommunicatie gaat inmiddels via kabels. Komende week debatteert de Tweede Kamer erover. Goslings: 'Dit voorstel is heel schadelijk voor de belangrijke internationale positie van AMS-IX en de Nederlandse digitale infrastructuur. Een positie waar de Nederlandse regering zelf op wil voortborduren: dit is tenslotte de sector waar de groei vandaan komt, ook in termen van hoogwaardige werkgelegenheid.'

quote:

Thank Snowden: Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner

quote:

We already wrote about the information sharing efforts coming out of the White House cybersecurity summit at Stanford today. That's supposedly the focus of the event. However, there's a much bigger issue happening as well: and it's the growing distrust between the tech industry and the intelligence community. As Bloomberg notes, the CEOs of Google, Yahoo and Facebook were all invited to join President Obama at the summit and all three declined. Apple's CEO Tim Cook will be there, but he appears to be delivering a message to the intelligence and law enforcement communities, if they think they're going to get him to drop the plan to encrypt iOS devices by default:

quote:

CBP maakt gehakt van wetsvoorstel bewaarplicht

quote:

Het College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens is zeer kritisch over een wetswijziging waarmee het kabinet wil blijven doorgaan met het bewaren van telecomgegevens. Volgens een vandaag uitgebracht advies zou minister Opstelten van Veiligheid en Justitie het wetsvoorstel niet moeten indienen.

quote:

'De opsporingsautoriteiten hebben jaren ervaring opgedaan, maar het is kennelijk niet mogelijk gebleken een systematische onderbouwing te leveren van de noodzaak van deze bewaarplicht.'

quote:

NSA hackte in Nederland gevestigd bedrijf

quote:

Voor het eerst is er bewijs dat de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA een in Nederland gevestigd bedrijf heeft gehackt. Met de buitgemaakte gegevens kunnen de Amerikanen buitenlands telefoonverkeer zonder medeweten van het betreffende land of de provider ontcijferen en afluisteren.

quote:

The Great SIM Heist

quote:

American Airlines Strands Luggage From Multiple Flights In Miami; Blames 'Technical Issue'

quote:

MIA may be the airport code for Miami International Airport, but it’s also the state of luggage for hundreds -- if not thousands -- of passengers flying on American Airlines out of Miami on Friday: missing in action.

An apparent “technical issue” with its baggage conveyor belts at Miami International Airport prevented American Airlines from loading any planes with checked luggage on Friday. For eight hours, the airline let its flights depart sans bags, but did not notify passengers of the issue. Instead, most passengers discovered when they reached their destinations that their luggage hadn’t.

Even then, American Airlines did not explicitly alert customers of the glitch, according to accounts from several passengers contacted by International Business Times. Travelers waited at luggage carousels in airports around the world, only to be greeted by empty belts where their bags should have been.

“The conveyor belt system in Miami had some kind of breakdown this morning,” American Airlines spokesman Joshua Freed told International Business Times. “It meant the passenger bags couldn’t move through the system for several hours.” Freed would not specify how many flights were affected.

In a later statement emailed to IBTimes, Freed wrote, “The system was back online this afternoon and we are working to reunite those bags with our passengers. Should a customer have a question about their delayed bag, they can work with the baggage service office at their destination or call 1-800-535-5225.”

When asked why American Airlines let flights depart from Miami without passengers’ checked luggage, Freed said, “What would you expect them to do? We had to get passengers to where they were going.”

But many passengers were frustrated with the lack of communication from American Airlines. Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped break the Edward Snowden story, was on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles that was affected by the baggage snafu. On Friday afternoon, he tweeted the news to his 471,000 followers.

twitter:

PiracyParty twitterde op maandag 23-02-2015 om 06:13:27 The #Oscars2015 winner Citizen Four full length movie. Thank you #Snowden <3 #PiracyParty http://t.co/Ig36YkgpB3 reageer retweet

quote:

Plasterk: Nederland acccepteert geen inbraak door buitenlandse diensten

quote:

'Voor Nederland is het niet acceptabel als buitenlandse diensten hier de wet overtreden. Als we dat aantreffen, nemen we maatregelen', zei minister Plasterk vandaag in de Kamer. D66-Kamerlid Gerard Schouw stelde vragen naar aanleiding van berichtgeving in de Volkskrant over een inbraak bij simkaartbedrijf Gemalto, dat ook Nederlandse simkaarten produceert. De Amerikaanse en Britse inlichtingendiensten NSA en GCHQ zouden via toegang tot die simkaarten Nederlandse telefoongesprekken kunnen afluisteren.

Plasterk kon het bericht 'bevestigen noch ontkennen'. Hij stelde dat reeds over deze zaak met de bevriende inlichtingendiensten contact is geweest, maar dat hij daar niet publiekelijk over kan spreken. Wel wil hij de Tweede Kamer daarover in vertrouwen informeren in de zogeheten 'commissie-stiekem'.

quote:

The Government Refuses to Prove Snowden Damaged National Security

quote:

Did Edward Snowden actually damage national security? There's no way in hell to tell from official documents released to the press—they've been thoroughly redacted to the point of uselessness.

Well, that's not true: They're useful in showing that the government isn't exactly eager to reveal concrete proof that the revelations about its surveillance abuses have harmed America.

The idea that Snowden has jeopardized national security and the lives of troops is the linchpin for arguments that the ex-NSA contractor is a treasonous villain, not a whistleblower. That's why Vice sought out proof of this jeopardy in government documents:

quote:

Conservative Audience Laughs as Former NSA Chief Refers to Himself as an ‘Unrelenting Libertarian’

quote:

For a second year in a row, the Conservative Action Political Conference hosted a debate on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

This morning, in a stinging rebuke similar to audience jeering of former Gov. Jim Gilmore’s seething criticism of Ed Snowden at last year’s CPAC, former NSA director Michael Hayden received an earful when he awkwardly declared that he is a libertarian.

Referring to his co-panelist Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano as an “an unrelenting libertarian,” Hayden continued, “So am I.”

As Mediaite pointed out, Hayden was quickly mocked by the audience with sustained booing and at least two people yelling, “no, you’re not!”

One person’s laughter was so loud that it is audible on C-SPAN’s video of the event.

Though Hayden went on to cast his defense of domestic spying as a his duty in the pursuit of liberty and homeland security, he also has a direct stake in the debate over surveillance — and it doesn’t make him any more disposed to the libertarian side of that debate.

Hayden is a principal with the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm for the multi-billion dollar cyber security and intelligence industry. He is also on the board of Alion Science and Technology, a military contractor that does intelligence and techical work. For that part-time gig he has been paid approximately $336,500 over the last four years, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

quote:

British refusal to cooperate with spy inquiry causes row in Germany

Committee under pressure to censor disclosures about UK activity after Downing Street threatens to break off intelligence-sharing with Berlin

Downing Street and the German chancellery are embroiled in a worsening dispute over intelligence-sharing and the covert counter-terrorism campaign because of conflicts arising from the surveillance scandals surrounding the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.

According to German newspaper reports citing government and intelligence officials in Berlin, the Bundestag’s inquiry into the NSA controversy is being jeopardised by Britain’s refusal to cooperate and its threats to break off all intelligence-sharing with Berlin should the committee reveal any UK secrets.

The weekly magazine Focus reported last month that a national security aide to David Cameron had written to Peter Altmaier, Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, refusing all requests for help in the inquiry and warning that Britain would cease supplying terrorism-related intelligence to the Germans unless Berlin yielded.

It emerged during the NSA revelations that the Americans had hacked into Merkel’s mobile phone, generating outrage in Germany and feeding growing anti-American sentiment.

Internationally, the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, is viewed as less than vigorous. In the secret war on terror, the Germans are said to be dependent on signals intelligence from the British and the Americans.

Gerhard Schindler, head of the BND, was recalled from holiday and has briefed senior government officials and parliamentary leaders on what Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung termed on Tuesday a burgeoning crisis.

“The British possibly want to cover up that they are spying on Germany, not only on countering terror,” the newspaper said. “[Merkel’s] chancellery is baffled as to why the British are being so stubborn … Why are the British so set on escalation?

“It’s particularly hot for the British because often it’s about straightforward spying, as well as terrorism hunting. This would definitely be against the European spirit on the continent, perhaps a breach of the European treaties.”

The letter from Downing Street to Berlin was sent at the end of January and triggered a row in Germany when it was leaked to the press. Schindler and aides to Merkel tried to talk MPs on the committee into censoring disclosures about UK activity. That displeased committee members even from the government ranks, and two Greens MPs are threatening to take the issue to Germany’s supreme court in Karlsruhe.

Information already available to the committee from German sources is said to reveal operational details of UK activities, encryption methods, codes and decoding techniques.

“The British are horrified that these things could become public via the committee,” a source, said to be a senior German government official, told Focus. An intelligence official was quoted as saying: “We would be blind without the signals intelligence from the Americans and the British. Virtually all important tips on countering terror in this country have come from the Anglo-American services.”

The Americans are said to be deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to collaborate with the German inquiry and whether to supply requested materials, while the British simply say no to all requests, the Süddeutsche reported, citing committee sources.

“We can’t just exclude Great Britain,” Patrick Sensburg, the Christian Democrat MP chairing the committee, told the newspaper. “Then the Americans will write a similar letter tomorrow and we will have to give up.”

Drawing on government sources, the newspaper said: “The federal government sees the cable from London as an unconcealed threat. Since the threatening letter arrived, it’s been one crisis meeting after another in the chancellery.”

quote:

China verdedigt 'NSA-achtige' plannen

China is woensdag in de verdediging geschoten na flinke kritiek op onderdelen van een nieuwe anti-terreurwet. Door die wet zouden buitenlandse techbedrijven hun encryptiesleutels moeten overhandigen aan de Chinese overheid.

China kondigde de nieuwe regels in januari al aan. Volgens het land zijn de nieuwe regels belangrijk om staats- en bedrijfsgeheimen te beveiligen.

Een Chinese overheidswoordvoerster stelt dat veel westerse landen, waaronder de VS, vergelijkbare zaken eisen van bedrijven. Dus ook van Chinese bedrijven die in die landen actief zijn.

De plannen zijn volgens het Chinese staatspersbureau Xinhua bovendien "anders dan wat de VS heeft gedaan: de geheime diensten geen strobreed in de weg leggen en terrorismebestrijding laten verworden tot paranoïde spionage".

De plannen konden eerder deze week rekenen op felle kritiek. De Amerikaanse president Barack Obama zei eerder deze week dat de nieuwe regels moeten buitenlandse bedrijven dwingen al hun gevoelige data moeten overhandigen, zodat de Chinese overheid de gebruikers van de diensten in de gaten kan houden.

Ook de Duitse ambassadeur in Peking waarschuwde dat bedrijven zich minder snel geneigd zouden voelen zich te vestigen in China.

quote:

New Zealand spying on Pacific allies for 'Five Eyes' and NSA, Snowden files show

Secret papers show NZ spy agency GCSB is collecting calls and internet traffic in bulk and sending it to the US National Security Agency

New Zealand is spying indiscriminately on its allies in the Pacific region and sharing the information with the US and the other “Five Eyes” alliance states, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The secret papers, published by the New Zealand Herald, show that the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) collects phone calls and internet communications in bulk in the region at its Waihopai Station intercept facility in the South Island.

Since a 2009 upgrade, Waihopai has been capable of “full take” collection of both content and metadata intercepted by satellite, the documents showed. The data is then channelled into the XKeyscore database run by the US National Security Agency, where it also becomes available to agencies in each of the “Five Eyes” countries: the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

A leaked NSA memo credits the GCSB with providing “valuable access not otherwise available to satisfy US intelligence requirement”.

The papers – published by the Herald as part of a joint reporting operation with New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager and the Intercept website co-edited by Glenn Greenwald – echo similar revelations from the earlier Snowden documents showing that Britain and the US had been spying on friendly neighbours in countries in the European Union and Latin America.

The regional surveillance conducted from the base covers Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. New Caledonia and French Polynesia, both French overseas territories, are also among the listed countries. Although Samoa, Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu are named, much of their data is now transmitted via undersea cable links that are not susceptible to Waihopai’s intercept satellites.

The revelations are particularly likely to test relations between New Zealand and Fiji, the island nation headed by Frank Bainimarama, the army chief-turned-prime minister. Following elections in Fiji in 2014, the countries have moved towards resuming full diplomatic links for the first time since the military coup led by Bainimarama in 2006.

Andrew Little, the leader of the NZ opposition Labour party, said that while he accepted the need for security agencies to protect national interests, he was “stunned at the breadth of the information that’s been collected”.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Little said: “It doesn’t seem to be targeted around particular threats, whether there just seems to be a hoovering of all this information and supplying it to the United States. I can’t see that that’s within the security mandate of the GCSB.”

The NZ prime minister, John Key, refused to comment on the specific revelations, saying via a spokesperson: “The Snowden documents were taken some time ago and many are old, out of date, and we can’t discount that some of what is being put forward may even be fabricated.”

Key later told reporters: “Some of the information is incorrect, some of it is out of date, and some of the assumptions are just plain wrong.

“We do have the GCSB and it is a foreign intelligence service, it does gather foreign intelligence that’s in the best interests of New Zealand and the protection of New Zealanders.”

He said successive governments had used the GCSB to gather foreign intelligence.

“Where we gather intelligence, particularly if a friend is involved, it isn’t to harm that country,” he said.

“It’s often to support or assist them.”

On Wednesday, before the publication of the documents, Key said it was a “bizarre time to be coming out making the case that New Zealand either gathers and shares information or gets information from other intelligence agencies”, adding: “Well, of course we do, and we do that to keep New Zealanders safe. We’re in the situation where we’ve got Isil reaching out to cause harm to New Zealanders, I think New Zealanders would expect me to share information.”

A GCSB spokesperson refused to comment on “speculation”, telling the Herald: “Everything we do is explicitly authorised and subject to independent oversight.”

The Samoan prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, said he was not worried about the information in the documents.

“I don’t have any strong feelings about the allegations of spying,” he said.

Hager told the Guardian the first stories contained “by no means the most dramatic revelations” from the New Zealand-related Snowden documents.

“We spent months digging into the Snowden archive, writing lots of stories from them … We’re going to be spacing out stories over the next while based on some really interesting information,” he said.

The first New-Zealand-specific documents from the Snowden files were revealed by Greenwald in September 2014, when the journalist visited New Zealand at the invitation of Kim Dotcom, the internet tycoon sought for extradition by the US over alleged copyright-related offences. Greenwald then said the documents proved New Zealand had embarked on a mass surveillance programme called Speargun, which centred on a tap into the undersea Southern Cross cable, New Zealand’s primary internet link with the rest of the world.

Key responded by declassifying documents that he said showed the government had considered a programme for “mass protection”, but rejected the proposal. Greenwald’s allegations were “simply wrong” and “based on incomplete information”.

“There is not, and never has been, mass surveillance of New Zealanders undertaken by the GCSB,” he said.

Key branded Greenwald “Dotcom’s little henchman” and “a loser”. Greenwald in turn called Key’s attacks “adolescent” and “reckless”.

Key later acknowledged, however, that Snowden’s claim that internet data from New Zealand was easily accessible via XKeyScore “may well be right”, saying: “I don’t run the NSA any more than I run any other foreign intelligence agency or any other country”.