Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 9

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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.

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Secret ‘BADASS’ Intelligence Program Spied on Smartphones

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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.

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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.

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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?"

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Paus en Snowden maken kans op Nobelprijs voor Vrede

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Western Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise

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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.

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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."

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Nieuw kabinetsvoorstel 'heel schadelijk' voor digitale infrastructuur

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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.'

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

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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:

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CBP maakt gehakt van wetsvoorstel bewaarplicht

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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.

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

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NSA hackte in Nederland gevestigd bedrijf

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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.

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The Great SIM Heist

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

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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

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Plasterk: Nederland acccepteert geen inbraak door buitenlandse diensten

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'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'.

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The Government Refuses to Prove Snowden Damaged National Security

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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:

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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”.