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In fact, the pedophile allegation has little to do with Assange’s plight that has kept him in the embassy in London, which involves incidents in Stockholm in the summer of 2010.

Rather, it is a bizarre tale involving a Houston-based dating website and its global and well-funded efforts to discredit Assange around the globe. The byzantine saga involves disconnected telephones and mystery websites. The website, toddandclare.com, launched and ramped up its efforts against Assange during the U.S. presidential campaign, as WikiLeaks released hacked emails related to the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange’s lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada’s prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas.The dating site’s campaign sought to thwart WikiLeaks’ efforts and discredit Assange, who played a role in a presidential campaign season that deeply divided the U.S. electorate and illuminated Russia as a major cyber adversary of the U.S. government.One part of toddandclare’s two-pronged campaign put a megaphone to unproven charges that Assange made contact with a young Canadian girl in the Bahamas through the internet with the intention of molesting her. The second part sought to entangle him in a plan to receive $1 million from the Russian government.

WikiLeaks claims the dating site is “a highly suspicious and likely fabricated” company. In turn, the company has lashed out at Assange and “his despicable activities against American national security,” and warned journalists to “check with your libel lawyers first before printing anything that could impact or endanger innocent people’s lives.”For nearly two months after the October allegations, toddandclare.com went off line. But it recently reappeared, repeating charges about the 8-year-old Canadian girl. The website did not immediately respond Thursday to a new query from McClatchy, and no respondent in the past has given a name or allowed telephone contact.The online company paints itself as all-American. Online material says its founders, Todd and Clare Hammond, “are an average American couple from Michigan, who met in the eighth grade.” In 2011, the company says, the Christian couple started an email dating service, and “have married 3,000 couples to date.” Their online network began in 2015, and a statement it filed to a U.N. body says it has “100,000+ female singles” in six countries. The company’s operating address is a warehouse loading dock in Houston. Its mail goes to a Houston drop box. Its phone numbers no longer work. WikiLeaks says Texas officials tell it the entity is not registered there either under toddandclare.com or a parent company, T&C Network Solutions.A person who answered emails to the website in November declined to identify him or herself.

A federal court is denying the State Department’s efforts for judges to coordinate on the roughly three-dozen pending lawsuits related to former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails.The decision from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a setback for the department, which had complained that the multiple legal fronts were draining its limited resources.ADVERTISEMENTBut the multiple cases were at such different points in their development, Chief Judge Richard Roberts wrote in an order released Thursday, it made little sense to combine them.“Many of the underlying cases have been pending for several years and a significant number of scheduling orders have already been entered,” Roberts wrote.The decision to deny the State Department’s request was unanimous, Roberts added.

However, he noted that individual judges have “committed to informal coordination so as to avoid unnecessary inefficiencies and confusion.”The State Department has complained about the multiple public records lawsuits, which seek to force into the light various documents from Clinton’s personal server during her time at State.Last month, the government filed a request seeking to have a single judge coordinate responses to 32 of them. That would cut down on the “confusion, inefficiencies and advantages given to some requesters at the expense of others,” the department claimed.“It will put some order to what has been a chaotic situation,” government lawyer Elizabeth Shapiro said at the time. In denying the government's motion, the individual cases will continue to move along on a relatively scattershot basis. Any one of the 17 judges involved in the cases has the power to order the State Department to release certain documents or, if they so chose, order new searches on Clinton’s private server.Organizations suing the government called the court’s decision a win.

The government's request was a “desperate effort to buy time for itself and Hillary Clinton,” Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, said in a statement. Judicial Watch has filed a total of 18 lawsuits involving Clinton’s emails.“With this obstruction out of the way, we are one step closer to the legal reckoning for Mrs. Clinton’s and the State Department’s contempt for the rule of law.”A State Department spokesman declined to comment.  

Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines. NSA’s retention of encrypted communications deserves further consideration today, now that these retention guidelines have been written into law. It has become increasingly clear over the last year that surveillance reform will be driven by technological change—specifically by the growing use of encryption technologies. Therefore, any legislation touching on encryption should receive close scrutiny.

Section 309 of the intel authorization bill describes “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communications.” It establishes retention guidelines for surveillance programs that are “reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of [telephone or electronic communications] to or from a United States person.” Communications to or from a United States person are ‘incidentally’ collected because the U.S. person is not the actual target of the collection. Section 309 states that these incidentally collected communications must be deleted after five years unless they meet a number of exceptions. One of these exceptions is that “the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning.” This exception appears to be directly lifted from NSA’s minimization procedures for data collected under Section 702 of FISA, which were declassified in 2013. 

While Section 309 specifically applies to collection taking place under E.O. 12333, not FISA, several of the exceptions described in Section 309 closely match exceptions in the FISA minimization procedures. That includes the exception for “enciphered” communications. Those minimization procedures almost certainly served as a model for these retention guidelines and will likely shape how this new language is interpreted by the Executive Branch. Section 309 also asks the heads of each relevant member of the intelligence community to develop procedures to ensure compliance with new retention requirements. I expect those procedures to look a lot like the FISA minimization guidelines.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance in 2013, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. Despite heavy competition, Clapper's "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" sealed his receipt of the dubious achievement award, which cites the vastly excessive secrecy of the entire U.S. surveillance establishment. The Rosemary Award citation leads with what Clapper later called the "least untruthful" answer possible to congressional questions about the secret bulk collection of Americans' phone call data. It further cites other Clapper claims later proved false, such as his 2012 statement that "we don't hold data on U.S. citizens." But the Award also recognizes Clapper's fellow secrecy fetishists and enablers, including:

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, for multiple Rose Mary Woods-type stretches, such as (1) claiming that the secret bulk collection prevented 54 terrorist plots against the U.S. when the actual number, according to the congressionally-established Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) investigation (pp. 145-153), is zero; (2) his 2009 declaration to the wiretap court that multiple NSA violations of the court's orders arose from differences over "terminology," an explanation which the chief judge said "strains credulity;" and (3) public statements by the NSA about its programs that had to be taken down from its website for inaccuracies (see Documents 78, 85, 87 in The Snowden Affair), along with public statements by other top NSA officials now known to be untrue (see "Remarks of Rajesh De," NSA General Counsel, Document 53 in The Snowden Affair).

Robert Mueller, former FBI director, for suggesting (as have Gen. Alexander and many others) that the secret bulk collection program might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, when the 9/11 Commission found explicitly the problem was not lack of data points, but failing to connect the many dots the intelligence community already had about the would-be hijackers living in San Diego. The National Security Division lawyers at the Justice Department, for misleading their own Solicitor General (Donald Verrilli) who then misled (inadvertently) the U.S. Supreme Court over whether Justice let defendants know that bulk collection had contributed to their prosecutions. The same National Security Division lawyers who swore under oath in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for a key wiretap court opinion that the entire text of the opinion was appropriately classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (release of which would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security). Only after the Edward Snowden leaks and the embarrassed governmental declassification of the opinion did we find that one key part of the opinion's text simply reproduced the actual language of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the only "grave damage" was to the government's false claims.

President Barack Obama sought Wednesday to reassure Europeans outraged over U.S. surveillance programs that his government isn't sifting through their emails or eavesdropping on their telephone calls. He acknowledged that the programs haven't always worked as intended, saying "we had to tighten them up." Obama said once-secret U.S. surveillance programs that became public knowledge after a government contractor leaked details about them are meant to improve America's understanding of what is happening around the world. He sought to allay the concerns of Europeans upset by the thought that their personal communications may have been swept up in the U.S. government's massive data collection operations. "I can give assurances to the publics in Europe and around the world that we're not going around snooping at people's emails or listening to their phone calls," Obama said at a news conference with Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on his first visit as president to Sweden. "What we try to do is to target very specifically areas of concern." Leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. surveillance programs sparked outrage overseas, particularly among Europeans who place a premium on personal privacy and civil liberties and recall life under governments that routinely spied on them. The NSA program was the first question he received from the Swedish press.

Obama said additional changes to the programs may be required because of advances in technology. He said his national security team along with an independent board is reviewing everything to strike the right balance between the government's surveillance needs and civil liberties. "There may be situations in which we're gathering information just because we can that doesn't help us with our national security, but does raise questions in terms of whether we're tipping over into being too intrusive with respect to the ... the interactions of other governments," Obama said. "We are consulting with the (European Union) in this process; we are consulting with other countries in this process and finding out from them what are their areas of specific concern and trying to align what we do in a way that, I think, alleviates some of the public concerns that people may have."

The Obama administration is now accusing Russia of cyber-crime and trying to disrupt the US presidential election. The claim is so far-fetched, it is hardly credible. More credible is that the US is reeling from Putin’s stunning humiliation earlier this week. Since June, US media and supporters of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton have been blaming Russian state-sponsored hackers for breaking into the Democratic party’s database. It is further alleged that Moscow is stealthily trying to influence the outcome of the election, by releasing damaging information on Clinton, which might favor Republican candidate Donald Trump. Russia has vehemently denied any connection to the cyber-crime charges, or trying to disrupt the November poll. Now the Obama administration has stepped into the fray by openly accusing Russia. «US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections», reported the Washington Post. This takes the row to a whole new level. No longer are the insinuations a matter of private, partisan opinion. The US government is officially labelling the Russian state for cyber-crime and political subversion.

Predictably, following the latest allegations, there are calls among American lawmakers for ramping up more economic sanctions against Russia. While US intelligence figures are urging for retaliatory cyber-attacks on Russian government facilities. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov derided the US claims as «rubbish». He noted that the Kremlin’s computer system incurs hundreds of hacking attempts every day, many of which can be traced to American origin, but Moscow doesn’t turn around and blame the US government for such cyber-attacks. There are several signs that the latest brouhaha out of Washington is a bogus diversion. As with previous Russian-hacker claims by the Democrats and US media, there is no evidence presented by the Obama administration to support its grave allegations against the Russian government. Assertion without facts does not meet a minimal standard of proof. When reports emerged in June – again through the Washington Post – that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian agents, the allegation relied on investigations by a private cyber security firm by the name of CrowdStrike. The firm is linked by personnel to the NATO-affiliated, anti-Russian think tank Atlantic Council. Again no verifiable evidence was presented then, just the word of a dubious partisan source.

Back then the Russian scare story, for that’s what it was, served as a useful diversion from far more important issues. Such as the 19,000 emails released from the DNC database showing that the party chiefs had preordained Clinton’s presidential nomination over her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders. Much-vaunted «US democracy» was exposed as a fraud, and so the Washington establishment quickly went into damage-limitation mode by smearing Russia. It was the whistleblower site Wikileaks, run by Australian journalist Julian Assange, that released the embarrassing emails. It had nothing to do with Russia. Assange has since hinted that his source was within the Democrat party itself. This is where it gets really explosive. Assange has vowed to release more emails that will prove that Clinton as Secretary of State back in 2011-2012 masterminded the supply of weapons and money to Islamist terror networks in Libya and Syria for the objective of regime change. Furthermore, Assange says that the emails prove that Clinton lied under oath to Congress when she denied in 2013 that she was had any involvement in facilitating arms to the jihadists. Assange has said that Wikileaks is going to publish the incriminating emails on Clinton’s alleged gun-running to terrorists this month. If the evidence stands up, Clinton could be prosecuted for perjury as well as treason in aiding and abetting official terrorist enemies of the US.

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments. President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google. The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month’s scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner. Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government’s reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.

“The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank. “This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe.” While Brazil isn’t proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians’ Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping. The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet’s open, interconnected structure.

The effort by Latin America’s biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say. In December, countries advocating greater “cyber-sovereignty” pushed for such control at an International Telecommunications Union meeting in Dubai, with Western democracies led by the United States and the European Union in opposition.

When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies. It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data. Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, The Intercept revealed that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it “Regin.”

The full story about GCHQ’s infiltration of Belgacom, however, has never been told. Key details about the attack have remained shrouded in mystery—and the scope of the attack unclear. Now, in partnership with Dutch and Belgian newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard, The Intercept has pieced together the first full reconstruction of events that took place before, during, and after the secret GCHQ hacking operation. Based on new documents from the Snowden archive and interviews with sources familiar with the malware investigation at Belgacom, The Intercept and its partners have established that the attack on Belgacom was more aggressive and far-reaching than previously thought. It occurred in stages between 2010 and 2011, each time penetrating deeper into Belgacom’s systems, eventually compromising the very core of the company’s networks.

When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British government spies. It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data. Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, The Intercept revealed that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it “Regin.”

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.

Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points. These are just a few of the suspicious signs that the Transportation Security Administration directs its officers to look out for — and score — in airport travelers, according to a confidential TSA document obtained exclusively by The Intercept. The checklist is part of TSA’s controversial program to identify potential terrorists based on behaviors that it thinks indicate stress or deception — known as the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. The program employs specially trained officers, known as Behavior Detection Officers, to watch and interact with passengers going through screening. The document listing the criteria, known as the “Spot Referral Report,” is not classified, but it has been closely held by TSA and has not been previously released. A copy was provided to The Intercept by a source concerned about the quality of the program.

Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points. These are just a few of the suspicious signs that the Transportation Security Administration directs its officers to look out for — and score — in airport travelers, according to a confidential TSA document obtained exclusively by The Intercept. The checklist is part of TSA’s controversial program to identify potential terrorists based on behaviors that it thinks indicate stress or deception — known as the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. The program employs specially trained officers, known as Behavior Detection Officers, to watch and interact with passengers going through screening.

The document listing the criteria, known as the “Spot Referral Report,” is not classified, but it has been closely held by TSA and has not been previously released. A copy was provided to The Intercept by a source concerned about the quality of the program. The checklist ranges from the mind-numbingly obvious, like “appears to be in disguise,” which is worth three points, to the downright dubious, like a bobbing Adam’s apple. Many indicators, like “trembling” and “arriving late for flight,” appear to confirm allegations that the program picks out signs and emotions that are common to many people who fly.

Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy. The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism. While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations. “NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted.

“Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.” In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well.

The court had required the NSA to comply with a longstanding internal procedure for protecting Americans’ sensitive information prior to sharing the data internally within NSA, known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) and also declassified on Monday night; and additionally required a senior NSA official to determine that any material shared outside the powerful surveillance agency was related to counter-terrorism. Yet in a separate Fisa court document, the current presiding judge, Reggie Walton, blasted the government’s secret declaration that it followed USSID 18 “rather than specifically requiring that the narrower dissemination provision set forth in the Court’s orders in this matter be strictly adhered to”. Walton wrote: “The court understands this to mean that the NSA likely has disseminated US person information derived from the [email and internet bulk] metadata outside NSA without a prior determination from the NSA official designated in the court’s orders that the information is related to counter-terrorism information and is necessary to understand the counter-terrorism information or assess its importance.”

Hillary Clinton’s email problem is a “drip,drip,drip” that just won’t stop. On Monday, it turned into a steady trickle. As the Democratic front-runner tried to shift attention to policy issues and the retail politics of Iowa, a series of developments in court and on Capitol Hill showed that Clinton’s email saga is unlikely to end soon. Story Continued Below A federal judge on Monday scheduled a hearing for later this week to discuss whether the State Department has ensured the retrieval of all official records Clinton, the former secretary of state, and her top aides held on personal email accounts or devices. This came after a lawyer for the technology firm that maintained Clinton’s private server after she left office held out the prospect that at least some of the data is likely preserved on a backup server. New figures emerged in a court filing about the number of potentially classified messages held in Clinton’s private account, now up to 305. And a Republican senator pressed Clinton’s personal lawyer for answers on how the emails were stored and whether he had the security clearance to retain a thumb drive of potentially sensitive data.

Four days before a sweeping government surveillance law was set to expire last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, took to the Senate floor. She touted the law’s value by listing some of the terrorist attacks it had helped thwart, including “a plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar” that fall. “So I believe the FISA Amendments Act is important,” the California Democrat said before a vote to extend the 2008 law, “and these cases show the program has worked.”Today, however, the government is refusing to say whether that law was used to develop evidence to charge Adel Daoud, a 19-year-old Chicago man accused of the bomb plot.And Daoud’s lawyers said in a motion filed Friday that the reason is simple. The government, they said, wants to avoid a constitutional challenge to the law, which governs a National Security Agency surveillance program that has once again become the focus of national debate over its reach into Americans’ private communications.“Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly,” lawyers Thomas Durkin and Joshua Herman wrote in their motion. “When a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets.”

Four days before a sweeping government surveillance law was set to expire last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, took to the Senate floor. She touted the law’s value by listing some of the terrorist attacks it had helped thwart, including “a plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar” that fall. “So I believe the FISA Amendments Act is important,” the California Democrat said before a vote to extend the 2008 law, “and these cases show the program has worked.”Today, however, the government is refusing to say whether that law was used to develop evidence to charge Adel Daoud, a 19-year-old Chicago man accused of the bomb plot.And Daoud’s lawyers said in a motion filed Friday that the reason is simple. The government, they said, wants to avoid a constitutional challenge to the law, which governs a National Security Agency surveillance program that has once again become the focus of national debate over its reach into Americans’ private communications.“Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly,” lawyers Thomas Durkin and Joshua Herman wrote in their motion. “When a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets.”

If the government acknowledged that it had used evidence derived from the FISA Amendments Act, Daoud would have standing to challenge the law’s constitutionality. Specifically, Daoud’s lawyers would be able to take on a provision known as Section 702. The law permits the interception of foreign targets’ ­e-mails and phone calls without an individual warrant, including when the foreigners are in communication with Americans or legal residents.The U.S. Supreme Court in February rejected a constitutional challenge to Section 702 by a group of journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates, saying they had no standing to sue because they had not proved that their communications had been intercepted.But the court also said that if the government intends to use information derived from the Section 702 surveillance in a prosecution “it must provide advance notice of its intent,” and a defendant may challenge the lawfulness of the surveillance. The government assured the court that it would give such notice to criminal defendants.In a filing this month in Chicago, U.S. Attorney Gary S. Shapiro refused to say whether the evidence was obtained under Section 702. Instead, he said, the government told Daoud the evidence was acquired pursuant to a traditional FISA court order, rather than under the expanded surveillance program authorized in 2008. A traditional order requires the government to go to a FISA judge and show probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power.Daoud’s attorneys say in their pleading that the government is being disingenuous. “We believe it is clear that the evidence . . . came from Section 702,” Durkin said in an interview. “Either Senator Feinstein’s information was correct in December 2012, or she was given wrong information. The government has never disputed what she said.”

NoScript NoScript is a free extension for Mozilla-based web browsers, including Firefox. It blocks executable web content by default. This blocking includes JavaScript, Java, Flash and Silverlight. You can whitelist sites if you want to use such content on a site-by-site basis. Or, if you choose, you can make all sites active by default and choose to blacklist sites you think might be dangerous. A visual button tells you if active content has been blocked on the current site.

The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.

The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”

The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)

The Justice Department has released a newly declassified version of a May 2004 legal memo approving the National Security Agency’s Stellarwind program, a set of warrantless surveillance and data collection activities that President George W. Bush secretly authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But questions about the program remain.A more heavily redacted version of the memo had been released in 2011 as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The new version includes previously censored references to the existence of the data collection related to Americans’ phone calls and emails.

The Obama administration voluntarily reprocessed the memo from Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in light of the fact that it had declassified the existence of the bulk phone and email data programs last year after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.The fuller release adds to the public record of an important historical episode. However, the government continued to redact crucial portions of the memo that would answer a primary remaining question about the history of Stellarwind: What prompted the Justice Department to conclude in early 2004 that one aspect of the program, which collected records about Americans’ emails in bulk, was illegal — even though it permitted other aspects, like warrantless wiretapping and the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, to continue?“They have continued to keep redacted something very significant,” said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.

The Justice Department’s conclusion that the email metadata program was illegal led to a March 2004 confrontation between White House and department officials in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, after which nearly the entire top leadership of the department threatened to resign, prompting President Bush to agree to changes.

On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were released. One of them confirms – an email dated April 2, 2011 to Clinton from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal – that: Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. *** This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French. franc (CFA).

(Source Comment [This is in the original declassified email, and is not a comment added by us]: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues: A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production, Increase French influence in North Africa, Improve his internal political situation in France, Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world, Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa) This may confirm what some of us have been saying for years.

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process. The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks. The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records, the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants. But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands. To penetrate foreign computer networks and monitor communications that it did not have access to through other means, the NSA wanted to go beyond the limits of traditional signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the agency’s term for the interception of electronic communications. Instead, it sought to broaden “active” surveillance methods – tactics designed to directly infiltrate a target’s computers or network devices. In the documents, the agency describes such techniques as “a more aggressive approach to SIGINT” and says that the TAO unit’s mission is to “aggressively scale” these operations. But the NSA recognized that managing a massive network of implants is too big a job for humans alone.

“One of the greatest challenges for active SIGINT/attack is scale,” explains the top-secret presentation from 2009. “Human ‘drivers’ limit ability for large-scale exploitation (humans tend to operate within their own environment, not taking into account the bigger picture).” The agency’s solution was TURBINE. Developed as part of TAO unit, it is described in the leaked documents as an “intelligent command and control capability” that enables “industrial-scale exploitation.”

Although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows.In 2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system, which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such accounts belonged to Americans.

Then, in October 2009, the F.B.I. started retaining copies of unprocessed communications gathered without a warrant to analyze for its own purposes. And in April 2012, the bureau began nominating new email accounts and phone numbers belonging to foreigners for collection, including through the N.S.A.’s “upstream” system, which collects communications transiting network switches.That information is in a 231-page study by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the F.B.I.’s activities under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorized the surveillance program. The report was entirely classified when completed in September 2012. But the government has now made a semi-redacted version of the report public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The New York Times.

The report also filled in a gap about the evolving legality of the warrantless wiretapping program, which traces back to a decision by President George W. Bush in October 2001 to direct the N.S.A. to collect Americans’ international phone calls and emails, from network locations on domestic soil, without the individual warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times revealed that program in December 2005.After the article appeared, telecommunications providers that had voluntarily participated in the program were sued, and a Federal District Court judge in Detroit ruled that the program was illegal, although that decision was later vacated. The Bush administration sought to put the program on more solid legal footing by gaining orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approving it.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story In January 2007, the Bush administration persuaded the court’s Judge Malcolm Howard to issue an order to telephone and network companies requiring them to let the security agency target foreigners’ accounts for collection without individual warrants. But in April 2007, when the order came up for renewal before Judge Roger Vinson, he said that it was illegal.

Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations. But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

I never thought I'd see this day: The founder of Lawfare has finally declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there's been a serious abuse. The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler, and every other anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they insist that Snowden is a narcissistic criminal and possible traitor, they have no choice but to admit that the NSA collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and chats belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them so poorly that a ne'er-do-well could copy them onto thumb drives. 

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical. Here's the reality. The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect and store it.