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Gary Edwards

The Impact of NSA Domestic Spying - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-of-nsa-domestic-spying-2013-6

NSA Domestic-Spying

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • As an AT&T engineer, Klein discovered that a special NSA network actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T," emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution."
  • He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • Binney would know — he built the original software (i.e. ThinThread) that identified, in real time, networks of connections between individuals based on their electronic communications.
  • "I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time," Binney told documentarian Laura Poitras while she was investigating the NSA's $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. "This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had."
  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13
     
    Excellent coverage.  Follow the links, they are extraordinary. " Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act to secretly collect telephone records of millions of Americans. Although the revelation doesn't surprise privacy advocates, the fact that Greenwald obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems is the first concrete piece of evidence exposing dragnet domestic surveillance. "
Paul Merrell

Remaining Snowden docs will be released to avert 'unspecified US war' - ‪Cryp... - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/..._release_to_avert_war_cryptome

surveillance state Snoden-docs bulk-release Cryptome

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • All the remaining Snowden documents will be released next month, according t‪o‬ whistle-blowing site ‪Cryptome, which said in a tweet that the release of the info by unnamed third parties would be necessary to head off an unnamed "war".‬‪Cryptome‬ said it would "aid and abet" the release of "57K to 1.7M" new documents that had been "withheld for national security-public debate [sic]". <a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U7RchawQrMoAAHIac14AAAKH&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" target="_blank"> <img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U7RchawQrMoAAHIac14AAAKH&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" alt=""></a> The site clarified that will not be publishing the documents itself.Transparency activists would welcome such a release but such a move would be heavily criticised by inteligence agencies and military officials, who argue that Snowden's dump of secret documents has set US and allied (especially British) intelligence efforts back by years.
  • As things stand, the flow of Snowden disclosures is controlled by those who have access to the Sn‪o‬wden archive, which might possibly include Snowden confidants such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In some cases, even when these people release information to mainstream media organisations, it is then suppressed by these organisations after negotiation with the authorities. (In one such case, some key facts were later revealed by the Register.)"July is when war begins unless headed off by Snowden full release of crippling intel. After war begins not a chance of release," Cryptome tweeted on its official feed."Warmongerers are on a rampage. So, yes, citizens holding Snowden docs will do the right thing," it said.
  • "For more on Snowden docs release in July watch for Ellsberg, special guest and others at HOPE, July 18-20: http://www.hope.net/schedule.html," it added.HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a well-regarded and long-running hacking conference organised by 2600 magazine. Previous speakers at the event have included Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and Jello Biafra.In other developments, ‪Cryptome‬ has started a Kickstarter fund to release its entire archive in the form of a USB stick archive. It wants t‪o‬ raise $100,000 to help it achieve its goal. More than $14,000 has already been raised.The funding drive follows a dispute between ‪Cryptome‬ and its host Network Solutions, which is owned by web.com. Access to the site was bl‪o‬cked f‪o‬ll‪o‬wing a malware infection last week. ‪Cryptome‬ f‪o‬under J‪o‬hn Y‪o‬ung criticised the host, claiming it had ‪o‬ver-reacted and had been sl‪o‬w t‪o‬ rest‪o‬re access t‪o‬ the site, which ‪Cryptome‬ criticised as a form of cens‪o‬rship.In resp‪o‬nse, ‪Cryptome‬ plans to more widely distribute its content across multiple sites as well as releasing the planned USB stick archive. ®
Paul Merrell

From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ck-web-users-online-identities

surveillance state GCHQ Black-Hole

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
  • Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
  • The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant
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  • A huge volume of the Internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis. Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events” — a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records — with about 10 billion new entries added every day. As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held — 41 percent — was about people’s Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously.
  • Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data. By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
  • A document from the GCHQ target analysis center (GTAC) shows the Black Hole repository’s structure.
  • The data is searched by GCHQ analysts in a hunt for behavior online that could be connected to terrorism or other criminal activity. But it has also served a broader and more controversial purpose — helping the agency hack into European companies’ computer networks. In the lead up to its secret mission targeting Netherlands-based Gemalto, the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, GCHQ used MUTANT BROTH in an effort to identify the company’s employees so it could hack into their computers. The system helped the agency analyze intercepted Facebook cookies it believed were associated with Gemalto staff located at offices in France and Poland. GCHQ later successfully infiltrated Gemalto’s internal networks, stealing encryption keys produced by the company that protect the privacy of cell phone communications.
  • Similarly, MUTANT BROTH proved integral to GCHQ’s hack of Belgian telecommunications provider Belgacom. The agency entered IP addresses associated with Belgacom into MUTANT BROTH to uncover information about the company’s employees. Cookies associated with the IPs revealed the Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn accounts of three Belgacom engineers, whose computers were then targeted by the agency and infected with malware. The hacking operation resulted in GCHQ gaining deep access into the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s internal systems, granting British spies the ability to intercept communications passing through the company’s networks.
  • In March, a U.K. parliamentary committee published the findings of an 18-month review of GCHQ’s operations and called for an overhaul of the laws that regulate the spying. The committee raised concerns about the agency gathering what it described as “bulk personal datasets” being held about “a wide range of people.” However, it censored the section of the report describing what these “datasets” contained, despite acknowledging that they “may be highly intrusive.” The Snowden documents shine light on some of the core GCHQ bulk data-gathering programs that the committee was likely referring to — pulling back the veil of secrecy that has shielded some of the agency’s most controversial surveillance operations from public scrutiny. KARMA POLICE and MUTANT BROTH are among the key bulk collection systems. But they do not operate in isolation — and the scope of GCHQ’s spying extends far beyond them.
  • The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus “telephony” metadata about phone calls, cell phone locations, text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums. GCHQ has other programs that it uses to analyze the content of intercepted communications, such as the full written body of emails and the audio of phone calls. One of the most important content collection capabilities is TEMPORA, which mines vast amounts of emails, instant messages, voice calls and other communications and makes them accessible through a Google-style search tool named XKEYSCORE.
  • As of September 2012, TEMPORA was collecting “more than 40 billion pieces of content a day” and it was being used to spy on people across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, according to a top-secret memo outlining the scope of the program. The existence of TEMPORA was first revealed by The Guardian in June 2013. To analyze all of the communications it intercepts and to build a profile of the individuals it is monitoring, GCHQ uses a variety of different tools that can pull together all of the relevant information and make it accessible through a single interface. SAMUEL PEPYS is one such tool, built by the British spies to analyze both the content and metadata of emails, browsing sessions, and instant messages as they are being intercepted in real time. One screenshot of SAMUEL PEPYS in action shows the agency using it to monitor an individual in Sweden who visited a page about GCHQ on the U.S.-based anti-secrecy website Cryptome.
  • Partly due to the U.K.’s geographic location — situated between the United States and the western edge of continental Europe — a large amount of the world’s Internet traffic passes through its territory across international data cables. In 2010, GCHQ noted that what amounted to “25 percent of all Internet traffic” was transiting the U.K. through some 1,600 different cables. The agency said that it could “survey the majority of the 1,600” and “select the most valuable to switch into our processing systems.”
  • According to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, tapping into the cables allows GCHQ to monitor a large portion of foreign communications. But the cables also transport masses of wholly domestic British emails and online chats, because when anyone in the U.K. sends an email or visits a website, their computer will routinely send and receive data from servers that are located overseas. “I could send a message from my computer here [in England] to my wife’s computer in the next room and on its way it could go through the U.S., France, and other countries,” Wright says. “That’s just the way the Internet is designed.” In other words, Wright adds, that means “a lot” of British data and communications transit across international cables daily, and are liable to be swept into GCHQ’s databases.
  • A map from a classified GCHQ presentation about intercepting communications from undersea cables. GCHQ is authorized to conduct dragnet surveillance of the international data cables through so-called external warrants that are signed off by a government minister. The external warrants permit the agency to monitor communications in foreign countries as well as British citizens’ international calls and emails — for example, a call from Islamabad to London. They prohibit GCHQ from reading or listening to the content of “internal” U.K. to U.K. emails and phone calls, which are supposed to be filtered out from GCHQ’s systems if they are inadvertently intercepted unless additional authorization is granted to scrutinize them. However, the same rules do not apply to metadata. A little-known loophole in the law allows GCHQ to use external warrants to collect and analyze bulk metadata about the emails, phone calls, and Internet browsing activities of British people, citizens of closely allied countries, and others, regardless of whether the data is derived from domestic U.K. to U.K. communications and browsing sessions or otherwise. In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of their nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that the U.K. is part of alongside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputing a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number. Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
  • Intelligence GCHQ collects on British persons of interest is shared with domestic security agency MI5, which usually takes the lead on spying operations within the U.K. MI5 conducts its own extensive domestic surveillance as part of a program called DIGINT (digital intelligence).
  • GCHQ’s documents suggest that it typically retains metadata for periods of between 30 days to six months. It stores the content of communications for a shorter period of time, varying between three to 30 days. The retention periods can be extended if deemed necessary for “cyber defense.” One secret policy paper dated from January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata — including location data that could be used to track your movements, your email, instant messenger, and social networking “buddy lists,” logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email, the passwords you use to access “communications services” (such as an email account), and information about websites you have viewed.
  • Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata. In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences. For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive towards democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication. “Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
  • When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document that the U.K. has “a light oversight regime.” The more lax British spying regulations are reflected in secret internal rules that highlight greater restrictions on how NSA databases can be accessed. The NSA’s troves can be searched for data on British citizens, one document states, but they cannot be mined for information about Americans or other citizens from countries in the Five Eyes alliance. No such constraints are placed on GCHQ’s own databases, which can be sifted for records on the phone calls, emails, and Internet usage of Brits, Americans, and citizens from any other country. The scope of GCHQ’s surveillance powers explain in part why Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013 that U.K. surveillance is “worse than the U.S.” In an interview with Der Spiegel in July 2013, Snowden added that British Internet cables were “radioactive” and joked: “Even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”
  • In recent years, the biggest barrier to GCHQ’s mass collection of data does not appear to have come in the form of legal or policy restrictions. Rather, it is the increased use of encryption technology that protects the privacy of communications that has posed the biggest potential hindrance to the agency’s activities. “The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011. “Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”
Paul Merrell

NSA's Mideast spying 'intense' amid regional upheaval, say experts - Alarabiya.net Engl... - 0 views

english.alarabiya.net/...onal-upheaval-say-experts.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Mideast

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Leaked documents disclosed earlier this week revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted 125 billion phone calls and SMS messages in January 2013, many of them originating in the Middle East. The NSA’s attention on the Middle East and the surrounding region is far more “intense than anything comparable in Europe,” according to Matthew Aid, a Washington, DC-based intelligence historian and expert. Strained relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia over resolving the Syrian conflict could be a possible reason for the NSA’s particularly large targeting of Saudi Arabia - over 7.8 billion times in one month – said Aid. Saudi-U.S. tension may have also resulted in Obama’s administration being “quite curious” over the kingdom’s thoughts on Syria, as the countries have consistently disagreed on the issue.
  • Aid, who in 2009 published a history on the NSA entitled “The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency,” said that most of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have not focused on the agency’s surveillance in the Middle East. “We’re waiting for that shoe to drop, but it hasn’t,” Aid told Al Arabiya News, stating that leaks by Snowden’s associates have been largely focused “on those countries which will generate immediate reaction in the press and from the governments in question.” Saudi Arabia and Iraq witnessed 7.8 billion wiretapping incidents from the NSA each, while Egypt and Jordan saw 1.8 billion and 1.6 billion respectively, according to Cryptome, a digital library that publishes leaked documents. Additionally, over 1.7 billion wiretapping incidents were recorded in Iran.
  • Commenting on the leaked data, Wesley Wark, a Canada-based global intelligence expert and professor at the University of Ottawa, said that a great majority of the NSA’s vast collection of intercepted data in the region would go unheard.
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  • However, the likelihood of the NSA continuing to covertly mine such vast amounts of a possibly valueless data is low, according to Wark. He suspects that the NSA is beginning to confront a “moment of change,” due to internal political pressure in the United States, international outrage, and a possible conclusion drawn from all this that “building haystacks is not the way to find needles.”
  • Aid notes that leaks published on Cryptome do not contain any information on many countries in the Arab region, including Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. “We’re missing some important parts of the puzzle,” he said. According to Aid, Snowden’s leaks show to a fuller extent the level of U.S. spying in the region. “There’s a lot more to be said [concerning the NSA’s clandestine operations in the Middle East] contained in the Snowden papers, it just hasn’t come out,” he said.
Paul Merrell

Redaction error reveals FBI did target Lavabit to spy on Edward Snowden | Technology | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...dar-lavabit-spy-edward-snowden

surveillance state NSA Lavabit Snowden litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden. Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden. Levison was ordered to install a surveillance package on his company’s servers and later to turn over Lavabit’s encryption keys so that it would give the FBI the ability to read the most secure messages that the company offered. He was also ordered not to disclose the fact to third-parties. After 38 days of legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena, appeals and being found in contempt of court, Levison abruptly shuttered Lavabit citing government interference and stating that he would not become “complicit in crimes against the American people”.
  • We now know that reports of Snowden’s use of Lavabit for his secure communications were true and that, as most presumed, the reason the FBI drove Lavabit into closure was to surveil the leaker of the NSA files. Documents obtained from the federal court were published by transparency organisation Cryptome, as noted by Wired’s Kim Zetter, revealing that “Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com” was the intended target of the action against Lavabit. The documents were released after legal action from Levison, who has been fighting in an attempt to lift himself from his order of silence and reveal what really happened. A motion filed in December prompted the court to order the release of files within the case, specifically with the identity of the subscriber redacted. As the documents show, that didn’t happen. Snowden’s email address was left unredacted, and while Levison is still under order not to reveal who the FBI was after, the redaction error has confirmed Snowden as the target.
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: Digital Blackwater rules - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-03-110613.html

surveillance state digital surveillance Snowden extradition

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to how a 29-year old IT wizard with little formal education has been able to access a batch of ultra-sensitive secrets of the US intelligence-national security complex, that's a no-brainer; it's all about the gung-ho privatization of spying - referred to by a mountain of euphemisms of the "contractor reliance" kind. In fact the bulk of the hardware and software used by the dizzying network of 16 US intelligence agencies is privatized. A Washington Post investigation found out that US homeland security, counter-terror and spy agencies do business with over 1,900 companies. [2] An obvious consequence of this contractor tsunami - hordes of "knowledge" high-tech proletarians in taupe cubicles - is their indiscriminate access to ultra-sensitive security. A systems administrator like Snowden can have access to practically everything.
  • Since 1996, before the British handover to China, an extradition treaty applies between the tiger and the wolf. [4] The US Department of Justice is already surveying its options. It's important to remember that the Hong Kong judicial system is independent from China's - according to the Deng Xiaoping-conceptualized "one country, two systems". As much as Washington may go for extraditing Snowden, he may also apply for political asylum. In both cases he may stay in Hong Kong for months, in fact years. The Hong Kong government cannot extradite anyone claiming he will be persecuted in his country of origin. And crucially, article 6 of the treaty stipulates, "a fugitive offender shall not be surrendered if the offence of which that person is accused or was convicted is an offence of a political character." Another clause stipulates that a fugitive shall not be surrendered if that implicates "the defense, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy" of - guess who - the People's Republic of China.
  • So then we may have a case of Hong Kong and Beijing having to reach an agreement. Yet even if they decided to extradite Snowden, he could argue in court this was "an offence of a political character". The bottom line - this could drag on for years. And it's too early to tell how Beijing would play it for maximum leverage. A "win-win" situation from a Chinese point of view would be to balance its commitment to absolute non-interference in foreign domestic affairs, its desire not to rock the fragile bilateral relation boat, but also what non-pivoting move the US government would offer in return.
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  • What he stressed is how they all work under a false premise; "If a surveillance program produces information of value, it legitimizes it ... In one step, we've managed to justify the operation of the Panopticon". Oh yes, make no mistake; Snowden has carefully read his Michel Foucault (he also stressed his revulsion facing "the capabilities of this architecture of oppression"). Foucault's deconstruction of the Panopticon's architecture is now a classic (see it here in an excerpt of his 1975 masterpiece Discipline and Punish). The Panopticon was the ultimate surveillance system, designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The Panopticon - a tower surrounded by cells, a pre-Orwellian example of "architecture of oppression" - was not originally conceived for the surveillance of a prison, but of a factory crammed with landless peasants on forced labor. Oh, but those were rudimentary proto-capitalist days. Welcome to the (savagely privatized) future, where the NSA black hole, "Digital Blackwater", lords over all as the ultimate Panopticon.
Gary Edwards

Is The US Using Prism To Engage In Commercial Espionage Against Germany And Others? | T... - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/...e-against-germany-others.shtml

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 13
     
    Meanwhile, illegal NSA spying is expected to cost USA Cloud Computing companies $35 Billion in lost sales and services. "whistleblower Edward Snowden worked for the CIA, rather than the NSA. Here's the original text in the Guardian: By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents. That access, along with the almost three years he spent around CIA officers, led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw. He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment. In that quotation, there's the nugget of information that the CIA was not targeting terrorists on this occasion, at least not directly, but "attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information". That raises an interesting possibility for the heightened interest in Germany, as revealed by Boundless Informant. Given that the NSA is gathering information on a large scale -- even though we don't know exactly how large -- it's inevitable that some of that data will include sensitive information about business activities in foreign countries. That could be very handy for US companies seeking to gain a competitive advantage, and it's not hard to imagine the NSA passing it on in a suitably discreet way. Germany is known as the industrial and economic powerhouse of Europe, so it would make sense to keep a particularly close eye on what people are doing there -- especially if those people happen to work in companies that compete with US firms.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Aug 13
     
    Closely related: see http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq (,) an article on British telecom's collaboration with wiretapping by the UK's counterpart to the NSA, GCHQ. According to an inside source: "The source said analysts used four criteria for determining what was examined: security, terror, organised crime and Britain's economic wellbeing." I also recall that years ago during the furor over the Echelon system, an EU Parliament investigation had concluded that there were concrete instances of commercial intelligence being passed on by NSA to American companies. Specifically, I recall a finding that during development of the AirBus, details of its design had been intercepted by NSA and passed on to Boeing. There was testimony received that more generically discussed the types of economic surveillance conducted. http://cryptome.org/echelon-nh.htm (page search for "economic"). The same researcher stressed that in public statements: "Those targets like terrorism and weapons transport are used as a cover for the traditional areas of spying, the predominant areas of spying, which are political, diplomatic, economic and military."
Paul Merrell

Spies worry over doomsday cache stashed by ex-NSA contractor Snowden | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...doomsday-idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125

surveillance state NSA NSA-paranoia Snowden

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud. The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown.
  • One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden's "insurance policy" against arrest or physical harm.U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories."The worst is yet to come," said one former U.S. official who follows the investigation closely.Snowden, who is believed to have downloaded between 50,000 and 200,000 classified NSA and British government documents, is living in Russia under temporary asylum, where he fled after traveling to Hong Kong. He has been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act.Cryptome, a website which started publishing leaked secret documents years before the group WikiLeaks or Snowden surfaced, estimated that the total number of Snowden documents made public so far is over 500.
  • Snowden's revelations of government secrets have brought to light extensive and previously unknown surveillance of phone, email and social media communications by the NSA and allied agencies. That has sparked several diplomatic rows between Washington and its allies, along with civil liberties debates in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.Among the material which Snowden acquired from classified government computer servers, but which has not been published by media outlets known to have had access to it, are documents containing names and resumes of employees working for NSA's British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), sources familiar with the matter said.The sources said Snowden started downloading some of it from a classified GCHQ website, known as GC-Wiki, when he was employed by Dell and assigned to NSA in 2012.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Glenn Greenwald, who met with Snowden in Hong Kong and was among the first to report on the leaked documents for the Guardian newspaper, said the former NSA contractor had "taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.""If anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives," Greenwald said in a June interview with the Daily Beast website. He added: "I don't know for sure whether has more documents than the ones he has given me... I believe he does."In an email exchange with Reuters, Greenwald, who has said he remains in contact with Snowden, affirmed his statements about Snowden's "precautions" but said he had nothing to add.Officials believe that the "doomsday" cache is stored and encrypted separately from any material that Snowden has provided to media outlets.
  • Sources familiar with unpublished material Snowden downloaded said it also contains information about the CIA - possibly including personnel names - as well as other U.S. spy agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operate U.S. image-producing satellites and analyze their data.U.S. security officials have indicated in briefings they do not know what, if any, of the material is still in Snowden's personal possession. Snowden himself has been quoted as saying he took no such materials with him to Russia.
Paul Merrell

BFP Breaking News- Omidyar's PayPal Corporation Said To Be Implicated in Withheld NSA D... - 0 views

www.boilingfrogspost.com/...ated-in-withheld-nsa-documents

surveillance state NSA Greenwald Paypal bribery

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Update 2: Glenn Greenwald Goes on Record: “I Don’t Doubt PayPal Cooperates with NSA!”
  • The 50,000-pages of documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contain extensive documentation of PayPal Corporation’s partnership and cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA), according to three NSA veterans. To date, no information has been released as to the extent of the working relationship and cooperation between the two entities- NSA and PayPal Corporation. What’s more, the billionaire owner of PayPal Corporation has entered into a $250 Million business partnership with two journalists-Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a journalist duo who possess the entire cache of evidence provided by Edward Snowden. Despite earlier pledges by the journalists in question, only one percent (1%) of Snowden’s documents has been released. BFP was recently contacted by a retired NSA official who claims that the documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contain extensive documentation pertaining to NSA’s partnership with major U.S. financial institutions, including credit card companies and PayPal Corporation. The official, who requested anonymity, also alleges that a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved. Upon receiving this report BFP contacted three other high-level former NSA officials for additional information and comments.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 13
     
    Glenn Greenwald accused of accepting a bribe from NSA-affiliated PayPal  by respected whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds. 
Paul Merrell

NSA spied on the Vatican as cardinals elected Pope Francis | The Raw Story - 0 views

www.rawstory.com/...cardinals-elected-pope-francis

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Vatican

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • US secret services allegedly eavesdropped on cardinals before the conclave in March to elect a new pope, Italian weekly magazine Panorama claimed Wednesday. “The National Security Agency wiretapped the pope,” the magazine said, accusing the United States of listening in to telephone calls to and from the Vatican, including the accommodation housing cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was elected Pope Francis. The allegations follow a report on surveillance website Cryptome which said the United States intercepted 46 million telephone calls in Italy in December 2012 and early January 2013. Among those, “there are apparently also calls from and to the Vatican,” Panorama said. “It is feared that the great American ear continued to tap prelates’ conversations up to the eve of the conclave,” it said, adding that there were “suspicions that the conversations of the future pope may have been monitored”. Bergoglio “had been a person of interest to the American secret services since 2005, according to Wikileaks,” it said.
  • The bugged conversations were divided into four categories: “leadership intentions”, “threats to financial systems”, “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights,” it claimed. Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said “we have heard nothing of this and are not worried about it.” If true, the US spying would be an embarrassing blow to an institution famous for its secrecy. The goings-on of the conclave are particularly clock-and-dagger, with a system installed in the Sistine chapel where the cardinals meet in order to scramble any mobile phone communications and excommunication for those who spill the beans.
Paul Merrell

Whistleblowers File $100 Million Suit against NSA, FBI - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

whowhatwhy.org/...0-million-suit-against-nsa-fbi

surveillance state NSA whistleblower-retaliation litigation Drake Loomis Wiebe Binney Roark

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • In a $100 million lawsuit that has garnered virtually no public attention, five National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers are accusing the federal government of illegally retaliating against them for alerting the NSA and Congress to a waste of taxpayer funds that benefitted a well-connected contractor.The lawsuit tells the story of the infancy of the NSA’s efforts to surveil the Internet. Back then, there were two programs for the spying agency to choose from — and the first was called ThinThread. It had been developed internally, was comparatively inexpensive, had been tested and proven to be effective, and included safeguards preventing the spying on Americans without a court warrant. The other was called Trailblazer. It did not include such safeguards, had not yet been shown to be effective, and cost 1,000 times more than ThinThread. Instead of being developed internally, it was to be outsourced to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a politically connected contractor.The NSA chose Trailblazer.
  • In response, four NSA employees who had worked on ThinThread, as well as a congressional staffer, alerted Congress and the Office of the Inspector General of the NSA that the agency was wasting taxpayer funds. That is when their troubles began, according to the lawsuit.It alleges that the defendants, which include the NSA, FBI, and the Department of Justice, as well as individuals associated with them, “knowingly and intentionally fabricated” a claim that the plaintiffs leaked classified information to New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen.“[The defendants] used this fabricated claim for retaliation, illegal searches and seizures, physical invasion of their residences and places of business, temporary false imprisonment, the confiscation of their property, cancellation of security clearances leading to the loss of their jobs and employment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, harassment and intimidation,” the lawsuit alleges.It also states that the defendants should have known that the plaintiffs were not the leaks because the NSA “was tracking all domestic telephone calls for the supposed purpose of protecting national security.”
  • The plaintiffs are former NSA employees Thomas Drake, Ed Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, and former congressional staffer Diane Roark. They seek “punitive damages in excess of $100 million because of Defendants [sic] callous and reckless indifference and malicious acts …” as well as well as an additional $15 million for lost wages and to cover costs.Larry Klayman, the prominent conservative public interest attorney and founder of Judicial Watch, filed the suit on August 20th. However, it is expected to be amended this week, and it is possible that additional publicity for the case will be sought then.
Paul Merrell

Barrett Brown, Barack Obama, and Hugo Chavez: When Telling the Truth Becomes a Crime | ... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ez-telling-truth-becomes-crime

corruption leaks academic-cowardice

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • WikiLeaks is a treasure trove of information for academic research.  Yet, in a library search that I did three days ago, in preparation for a question from my Dissertation Committee on the status of my use of WikiLeaks sources, I found that only thirty-five articles had been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.  In those articles, not a single author had referenced a single WikiLeaks document, nor did any of those articles provide a URL for any WikiLeaks document.  At the time, I concluded that the academic community was an extension of The State rather than an extension of The People with a responsibility to oversee and question the activities, policies, and behavior of The State. 
  • Then, yesterday, I received a message containing the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news of the sentencing of Barrett Brown because he posted links online to the Stratfor e-mails that were posted on WikiLeaks.[1]  Brown did not hack Stratfor, but as an investigative journalist, reported on the content of the hack and provided links to his readers. There have been many news articles about the fact and the content of the Stratfor e-mails.[2]  As well, information pointing to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant being involved in the hacking of Stratfor, which raises a whole host of other questions about the continued unlawful conduct of the U.S. government.[3]  Despite several news articles containing sensational information on the Stratfor hack, again, a search of peer-reviewed journals that I conducted just now revealed only one article in a computer-related journal.  Therefore, whether the topic was WikiLeaks or Stratfor, the academic community is basically missing in action in examining and investigating this extremely important information.
  • A walk back in time shows the same reticence on the part of the academic community to use controversial, but declassified, government documents in its research.  In searches of the academic literature while I was studying the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the FBI as a part of my Ph.D. research, I found, with a few extremely important exceptions, that the most important COINTELPRO documents remain virtually by-passed by the academic community—even to this date.  With this in mind, I really shouldn’t be surprised to see a lack of the use of WikiLeaks documents, even though the information contained could lead to critical insights on U.S. public policy.  Most importantly for those of us who expect to create change in U.S. domestic police state and foreign military policy, it is the most controversial of such documents that deserve scrutiny from not only journalists, but also from the academic community.  The operation of the Deep State is real and must be exposed if the possibility of return to Constitutional rule and the Bill of Rights is possible.  Thus, not only are the young people who broke into an FBI office and found and publicized the COINTELPRO papers heroes, so too are our modern day sunshine activists at Cryptome, Narconews, Wayne Madsen Reports, and WikiLeaks.  Whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Jeffrey Sterling who are either already in jail or in exile until a new United States is created by the rest of us are modern-day profiles in courage.
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