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Paul Merrell

Reset The Net - Privacy Pack - 0 views

pack.resetthenet.org

surveillance state digital-privacy NSA-reform Reset-the-Net

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • This June 5th, I pledge to take strong steps to protect my freedom from government mass surveillance. I expect the services I use to do the same.
  • Fight for the Future and Center for Rights will contact you about future campaigns. Privacy Policy
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 14
     
    I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power | World news... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-year-nsa-surveillance-reform

surveillance-state NSA-reform legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • For two weeks in May, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades. The revisions took place in secret after two congressional committees had passed the bill. The NSA and its allies took creative advantage of a twilight legislative period permitting technical or cosmetic language changes.The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago today, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's histo
  • But exactly one year on, the NSA’s greatest wound so far has been its PR difficulties. The agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data. Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data.There are no other mandated reforms.
  • Some NSA critics look to the courts for a fuller tally of their victories in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Judges have begun to permit defendants to see evidence gathered against them that had its origins in NSA email or call intercepts, which could disrupt prosecutions or invalidate convictions. At least one such defendant, in Colorado, is seeking the exclusion of such evidence, arguing that its use in court is illegal.Still other cases challenging the surveillance efforts have gotten beyond the government’s longtime insistence that accusers cannot prove they were spied upon, as the Snowden trove demonstrated a dragnet that presumptively touched every American’s phone records. This week, an Idaho federal judge implored the supreme court to settle the question of the bulk surveillance's constitutionality."The litigation now is about the merits. It’s about the lawfulness of the surveillance program," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.
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  • The Freedom Act ultimately sped to passage in the House on May 22 by a bipartisan 303-121 vote. NSA advocates who had blasted its earlier version as hazardous to national security dropped their objections – largely because they had no more reason.Accordingly, the compromise language caused civil libertarians and technology groups not just to abandon the Freedom Act that they had long championed, but to question whether it actually banned bulk data collection. The government could acquire call-records data up to two degrees of separation from any "reasonable articulable suspicion" of wrongdoing, potentially representing hundreds or thousands of people on a single judicial order." That was not all.
  • "As the bill stands today, it could still permit the collection of email records from everyone who uses a particular email service," warned a Google legislative action alert after the bill passed the House. In a recent statement, cloud-storage firm Tresorit lamented that "there still has been no real progress in achieving truly effective security for consumer and corporate information."No one familiar with the negotiations alleges the NSA or its allies broke the law by amending the bill during the technical-fix period. But it is unusual for substantive changes to be introduced secretly after a bill has cleared committee and before its open debate by the full Senate or House."It is not out of order, but major changes in substance are rare, and appropriately so," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on congressional procedure at the American Enterprise Institute.Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said the rewrites to the bill were an "invitation to cynicism."
  • "There does seem to be a sort of gamesmanship to it. Why go through all the troubling of crafting legislation, enlisting support and co-sponsorship, and adopting compromises if the bill is just going to be rewritten behind closed doors anyway?" Aftergood said.
  • Civil libertarians and activists now hope to strengthen the bill in the Senate. Its chief sponsor, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, vowed to take it up this month, and to push for "meaningful reforms" he said he was "disappointed" the House excluded. Obama administration officials will testify in the Senate intelligence committee about the bill on Thursday afternoon, the first anniversary of the Guardian's disclosure of bulk domestic phone records collection. That same day, Reddit, Imgur and other large websites will stage an online "Reset The Net" protest of NSA bulk surveillance.But the way the bill "morphed behind the scenes," as Lofgren put it, points to the obstacles such efforts face. It also points to a continuing opportunity for the NSA to say that Congress has actually blessed widespread data collection – a claim made after the Snowden leaks, despite most members of Congress and the public not knowing that NSA and the Fisa court secretly reinterpreted the Patriot Act in order to collect all US phone records.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    Good Guardian article on how the American Freedom Act as reported out of House committees was gutted in secret meetings between key representatives and NSA (and other Executive Branch) officials. The House of Representatives kisses the feet of Dark Government. 
Paul Merrell

H to Jake to Malcolm to Maggie to Haim to Huma -- resetting the discourse on Israel in ... - 0 views

mondoweiss.net/...malcolm-resetting-discourse

Auction 2016 war & peace Netanyahu Obama Hillary

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The latest Clinton emails from Wikileaks tell a fascinating story about the time in 2015 that President Obama tried to reset the Israel relationship, and the New York Times and Hillary Clinton and the Israel lobby wouldn’t let him. You surely remember that back in March 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection in a surprise victory by making last-minute appeals to rightwing voters that he would never allow a Palestinian state, and that Arab voters were coming out to the polls “in droves.” And the White House objected strongly both to the racism and the frank abandonment of the holy grail, the two-state solution. Netanyahu walked back the two-state comment and the racism; but Obama wasn’t buying. And at a press availability on March 24 that will go down in history as the “Kumbaya” statement, an exasperated president expressed anger at the prime minister for his gyrations and hinted at consequences at the U.N.
  • I’ve said before and I’ll simply repeat:  Prime Minister Netanyahu, in the election run-up, stated that a Palestinian state would not occur while he was Prime Minister.  And I took him at his word that that’s what he meant, and I think that a lot of voters inside of Israel understood him to be saying that fairly unequivocally… But I am required to evaluate honestly how we manage Israeli-Palestinian relations over the next several years…. we can’t continue to premise our public diplomacy based on something that everybody knows is not going to happen at least in the next several years.  That is something that we have to, for the sake of our own credibility, I think we have to be able to be honest about that. Here’s the Kumbaya part. Obama said it wasn’t just a personal issue between himself and the Prime Minister: [T]here’s a tendency I think in the reporting here to frame this somehow as a personal issue between myself and Prime Minister Netanyahu.  And I understand why that’s done, because when you frame it in those terms, the notion is, well, if we all just get along and everybody cools down, then somehow the problem goes away…. [T]he issue is a very clear, substantive challenge.  We believe that two states is the best path forward… And Prime Minister Netanyahu has a different approach.  And so this can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow let’s all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
  • The sharp language alarmed New York Times correspondent Jodi Rudoren, who over four years in Jerusalem reliably conveyed the Israeli Jewish perspective back to the States. She wrote a piece titled, “Rebukes From White House Risk Buoying Netanyahu”– and trivialized Obama’s comments, as if he didn’t know what he was doing. Her story made it out to be personal between the two leaders. Many Israelis, she said, have been astonished by the unrelenting White House criticism that has helped sink relations between Washington and Jerusalem to a nadir not seen for more than 25 years… Mr. Obama showed no signs on Tuesday of softening his stance on Mr. Netanyahu’s momentary disavowal of the two-state solution that has long been the cornerstone of American policy. [Kumbaya moment followed] The article in turn alarmed Hillary Clinton.
Paul Merrell

Encouraging Words of Regret From Dean Baquet and Weasel Words From James Clapper - The ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...uet-weasel-words-james-clapper

surveillance-state NSA-reform encryption Clapper lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • One should not expect any change to come from the U.S. government itself (which includes Congress), whose strategy in such cases is to enact the pretext of “reform” so as to placate public anger, protect the system from any serious weakening, and allow President Obama to go before the country and the world and give a pretty speech about how the U.S. heard their anger and re-calibrated the balance between privacy and security. Any new law that comes from the radically corrupted political class in DC will either be largely empty, or worse. The purpose will be to shield the NSA from real reform. There are, though, numerous other avenues with the real potential to engender serious limits on the NSA’s surveillance powers, including the self-interested though genuine panic of the U.S. tech industry over how surveillance will impede their future business prospects, the efforts of other countries to undermine U.S. hegemony over the internet, the newfound emphasis on privacy protections from internet companies worldwide, and, most of all, the increasing use of encryption technology by users around the world that poses genuine obstacles to state surveillance. Those are all far, far more promising avenues than any bill Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss will let Congress cough up.
  • That national security state officials routinely mislead and deceive the public should never have even been in serious doubt in the first place – certainly not for journalists, and especially now after the experience of the Iraq War. That fact — that official pronouncements merit great skepticism rather than reverence — should be (but plainly is not) fundamental to how journalists view the world. More evidence for that is provided by a Washington Post column today by one of the national security state’s favorite outlets, David Ignatius. Ignatius interviewed the chronic deceiver, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who now “says it appears the impact [of Snowden's leaking] may be less than once feared because ‘it doesn’t look like he [Snowden] took as much’ as first thought.” Clapper specifically casts serious doubt on the U.S. government’s prior claim that Snowden ”had compromised the communications networks that make up the military’s command and control system”; instead, “officials now think that dire forecast may have been too extreme.” Ignatius — citing an anonymous “senior intelligence official” (who may or may not be Clapper) — also announces that the government has yet again revised its rank speculation about how many documents Snowden took: “This batch of probably downloaded material is about 1.5 million documents, the senior official said. That’s below an earlier estimate of 1.77 million documents.”
  • Most notable is Ignatius’ summary of the government’s attempt to claim Snowden seriously compromised the security of the U.S.: Pressed to explain what damage Snowden’s revelations had done, the official was guarded, saying that there was “damage in foreign relations” and that the leaks had “poisoned [NSA’s] relations with commercial providers.” He also said that terrorist groups had carefully studied the disclosures, turning more to anonymizers, encryption and use of couriers to shield communications. The senior official wouldn’t respond to repeated questions about whether the intelligence community has noted any changes in behavior by either the Russian or Chinese governments, in possible response to information they may have gleaned from Snowden’s revelations. In other words, the only specific damage they can point to is from the anger that other people around the world have about what the U.S. government has done and the fact that people will not want to buy U.S. tech products if they fear (for good reason) that those companies collaborate with the NSA. But, as usual, there is zero evidence provided (as opposed to bald, self-serving assertions) of any harm to genuine national security concerns (i.e., the ability to monitor anyone planning actual violent attacks).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • As is always the case, the stream of fear-mongering and alarmist warnings issued by the government to demonize a whistleblower proves to be false and without any basis, and the same is true for accusations made about the revelations themselves (“In January, [Mike] Rogers said that the report concluded that most of the documents Snowden had access to concerned ‘vital operations of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force’” – AP: Lawmakers: Snowden’s Leaks May Endanger US Troops“). But none of that has stopped countless U.S. journalists from mindlessly citing each one of the latest evidence-free official claims as sacred fact.
Paul Merrell

Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance | Business | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-allowing-state-surveillance

surveillance state non-U.S.-spy-agencies Vodafone

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a "nightmare scenario" that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.
  • Vodafone's group privacy officer, Stephen Deadman, said: "These pipes exist, the direct access model exists."We are making a call to end direct access as a means of government agencies obtaining people's communication data. Without an official warrant, there is no external visibility. If we receive a demand we can push back against the agency. The fact that a government has to issue a piece of paper is an important constraint on how powers are used."Vodafone is calling for all direct-access pipes to be disconnected, and for the laws that make them legal to be amended. It says governments should "discourage agencies and authorities from seeking direct access to an operator's communications infrastructure without a lawful mandate".
  • Peter Micek, policy counsel at the campaign group Access, said: "In a sector that has historically been quiet about how it facilitates government access to user data, Vodafone has for the first time shone a bright light on the challenges of a global telecom giant, giving users a greater understanding of the demands governments make of telcos. Vodafone's report also highlights how few governments issue any transparency reports, with little to no information about the number of wiretaps, cell site tower dumps, and other invasive surveillance practices."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In America, Verizon and AT&T have published data, but only on their domestic operations. Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Telstra in Australia have also broken ground at home. Vodafone is the first to produce a global survey.
  • Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, joined Google, Reddit, Mozilla and other tech firms and privacy groups on Thursday to call for a strengthening of privacy rights online in a "Reset the net" campaign.Twelve months after revelations about the scale of the US government's surveillance programs were first published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, Snowden said: "One year ago, we learned that the internet is under surveillance, and our activities are being monitored to create permanent records of our private lives – no matter how innocent or ordinary those lives might be. Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the US Congress fails to do the same."
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    The Vodafone disclosures will undoubtedly have a very large ripple effect. Note carefully that this is the first major telephone service in the world to break ranks with the others and come out swinging at secret government voyeur agencies. Will others follow. If you follow the links to the Vodafone report, you'll find a very handy big PDF providing an overview of the relevant laws in each of the customer nations. There's a cute Guardian table that shows the aggregate number of warrants for interception of content via Vodafone for each of those nations, broken down by content type. That table has white-on-black cells noting where disclosure of those types of surveillance statistics are prohibited by law. So it is far from a complete picture, but it's a heck of a good start.  But several of those customer nations are members of the E.U., where digital privacy rights are enshrined as human rights under an EU-wide treaty. So expect some heat to roll downhill on those nations from the European treaty organizations, particularly the European Court of Human Rights, staffed with civil libertarian judges, from which there is no appeal.     
Paul Merrell

Your Computer May Already be Hacked - NSA Inside? | Steve Blank - 1 views

steveblank.com/...y-already-be-hacked-nsa-inside

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets NSA-backdoors CPU-backdoors

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • But while the interviewer focused on the Skype revelation, I thought the most interesting part was the other claim, “that the National Security Agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.”  Say what??  They can see the plaintext on my computer before I encrypt it? That defeats any/all encryption methods. How could they do that? Bypass Encryption While most outside observers think the NSA’s job is cracking encrypted messages, as the Prism disclosures have shown, the actual mission is simply to read all communications. Cracking codes is a last resort.
  • The NSA has a history of figuring out how to get to messages before or after they are encrypted. Whether it was by putting keyloggers on keyboards and recording the keystrokes or detecting the images of the characters as they were being drawn on a CRT. Today every desktop and laptop computer has another way for the NSA to get inside. Intel Inside It’s inevitable that complex microprocessors have bugs in them when they ship. When the first microprocessors shipped the only thing you could hope is that the bug didn’t crash your computer. The only way the chip vendor could fix the problem was to physically revise the chip and put out a new version. But computer manufacturers and users were stuck if you had an old chip. After a particularly embarrassing math bug in 1994 that cost Intel $475 million, the company decided to fix the problem by allowing it’s microprocessors to load fixes automatically when your computer starts.
  • Starting in 1996 with the Intel P6 (Pentium Pro) to today’s P7 chips (Core i7) these processors contain instructions that are reprogrammable in what is called microcode. Intel can fix bugs on the chips by reprogramming a microprocessors microcode with a patch. This patch, called a microcode update, can be loaded into a processor by using special CPU instructions reserved for this purpose. These updates are not permanent, which means each time you turn the computer on, its microprocessor is reset to its built-in microcode, and the update needs to be applied again (through a computer’s BIOS.). Since 2000, Intel has put out 29 microcode updates to their processors. The microcode is distributed by 1) Intel or by 2) Microsoft integrated into a BIOS or 3) as part of a Windows update. Unfortunately, the microcode update format is undocumented and the code is encrypted. This allows Intel to make sure that 3rd parties can’t make unauthorized add-ons to their chips. But it also means that no one can look inside to understand the microcode, which makes it is impossible to know whether anyone is loading a backdoor into your computer.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Or perhaps the NSA, working with Intel and/or Microsoft, have wittingly have put backdoors in the microcode updates. A backdoor is is a way of gaining illegal remote access to a computer by getting around the normal security built-in to the computer. Typically someone trying to sneak malicious software on to a computer would try to install a rootkit (software that tries to conceal the malicious code.) A rootkit tries to hide itself and its code, but security conscious sites can discover rootkits by tools that check kernel code and data for changes. But what if you could use the configuration and state of microprocessor hardware in order to hide? You’d be invisible to all rootkit detection techniques that checks the operating system. Or what if you can make the microprocessor random number generator (the basis of encryption) not so random for a particular machine? (The NSA’s biggest coup was inserting backdoors in crypto equipment the Swiss sold to other countries.) Rather than risk getting caught messing with everyone’s updates, my bet is that the NSA has compromised the microcode update signing keys  giving the NSA the ability to selectively target specific computers. (Your operating system ensures security of updates by checking downloaded update packages against the signing key.) The NSA then can send out backdoors disguised as a Windows update for “security.” (Ironic but possible.) That means you don’t need backdoors baked in the hardware, don’t need Intel’s buy-in, don’t have discoverable rootkits, and you can target specific systems without impacting the public at large.
  • A few months ago these kind of discussions would have been theory at best, if not paranoia.
  • The Prism disclosures prove otherwise – the National Security Agency has decided it needs the ability to capture all communications in all forms. Getting inside of a target computer and weakening its encryption or having access to the plaintext of encrypted communication seems likely. Given the technical sophistication of the other parts of their surveillance net, the surprise would be if they haven’t implemented a microcode backdoor. The downside is that 1) backdoors can be hijacked by others with even worse intent. So if NSA has a microcode backdoor – who else is using it? and 2) What other pieces of our infrastructure, (routers, smartphones, military computers, satellites, etc) use processors with uploadable microcode? —— And that may be why the Russian president is now using a typewriter rather than a personal computer.
Paul Merrell

On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago | Elect... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...illance-we-didnt-know-year-ago

surveillance state NSA NSA-disclosures research-resources

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • It’s been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago
  • here’s no question that the international relationships Obama pledged to repair, as well as the confidence of the American people in their privacy and constitutional rights, have been damaged by the NSAs dragnet surveillance. But one year later, both the United States and international governments have not taken the steps necessary to ensure that this surveillance ends. That’s why everyone must take action— contact your elected representative, join Reset the Net, and learn about how international law applies to U.S. surveillance today. 
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14
     
    EFF has a great list of the top NSA disclosures in the last year, with each of the 65 bullet points linked to source articles. 
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