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Newly released British documents contain a claim by an unnamed contact that the Shin Bet security service collaborated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to hijack the June 1976 flight from Israel that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, the BBC reported Friday. Israel's rescue of the dozens of hostages taken in the hijacking of the Air France plane, popularly known as the Entebbe raid, is considered one of the most daring and successful operations in Israeli history. Elite Israel Defense Forces troops stormed the airport where the hostages, many of them Israeli, were held and overpowered the hijackers and Ugandan soldiers.

"The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans," the BBC report said British diplomat D.H. Colvin wrote in the document, citing his source. "My contact said the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis," Colvin reportedly wrote. "According to his information, the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Beit."

The German intelligence "double agent" who allegedly sold hundreds of top secret documents to the Americans was caught by his own country's counter espionage agents while trying to broker an additional spying deal with the Russian secret services, according to intelligence sources in Berlin.

(Reuters) - U.S. military advisors have secretly operated in Somalia since around 2007 and Washington plans to deepen its security assistance to help the country fend off threats by Islamist militant group al Shabaab, U.S. officials said. The comments are the first detailed public acknowledgement of a U.S. military presence in Somalia dating back since the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and add to other signs of a deepening U.S. commitment to Somalia's government, which the Obama administration recognized last year.The deployments, consisting of up to 120 troops on the ground, go beyond the Pentagon's January announcement that it had sent a handful of advisors in October. That was seen at the time as the first assignment of U.S. troops to Somalia since 1993 when two U.S. helicopters were shot down and 18 American troops killed in the "Black Hawk Down" disaster.

Germany may step up its counter-espionage efforts after an employee of its intelligence service was arrested on suspicion of spying for the US.Measures being considered in response to scandal include monitoring the intelligence activities of nominal Nato allies such as America, Britain and France, as well as expelling US agents from Germany.

The BND staffer, a technical support worker employed in a unit dealing mainly with the protection of German soldiers abroad, is alleged to have established contact with the American secret service by contacting the US embassy. Rather than report the contact to their allied German counterparts, the CIA is reported to have paid the agent €25,000 (£20,000) for 218 documents classified as confidential or top secret .

Security concerns are complicating the release of a controversial report on “enhanced interrogations techniques,” with officials fearing the document could inflame the Arab Street and put Americans in danger.The White House and the CIA are working on final redactions to a 481-page executive summary of the investigation, which was conducted by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee but boycotted by Republicans, who dispute its findings.ADVERTISEMENTA congressional staffer said the report wouldn’t be ready for a “couple of weeks,” while the CIA said the declassification process should be finished by August 29th. 

In a June 20 court document, the CIA said it would need time before the report is released for the “implementation of security measures to ensure the safety of U.S. personnel and facilities overseas.” The White House said it is looking to get the report out as “expeditiously as possible” but would be assessing the security situation.

The State Department reportedly warned the White House last year that the release of the report could strain diplomatic relations and put lives at risk. State was particularly fearful that the committee would expose which countries hosted the secret “black sites” where the CIA took prisoners for interrogations, according to The Daily Beast.

‘How can Israel have peace if it’s unwilling to delineate a border, end the occupation?’ asks White House Mideast chief, Phillip Gordon, in blistering Tel Aviv speech

srael’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is wrong and leads to regional instability and dehumanization of Palestinians, a top American government official said Tuesday in Tel Aviv, hinting that the current Israeli government is not committed to peace.

In an unusually harsh major foreign policy address, Philip Gordon, a special assistant to US President Barack Obama and the White House coordinator for the Middle East, appealed to Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make the compromises needed to reach a permanent peace agreement. Jerusalem “should not take for granted the opportunity to negotiate” such a treaty with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has proven to be a reliable partner, Gordon said. “Israel confronts an undeniable reality: It cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. Doing so is not only wrong but a recipe for resentment and recurring instability,” Gordon said. “It will embolden extremists on both sides, tear at Israel’s democratic fabric and feed mutual dehumanization.”

Top experts say there could be a new person leaking details about the National Security Agency, in addition to former contractor Edward Snowden.Glenn Greenwald, the journalist most closely associated to Snowden, said he suspects someone else has been involved in leaking out new documents, and other experts have backed up the claim.ADVERTISEMENTThe existence of a second leaker “seems clear at this point,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter over the weekend. “The lack of sourcing to Snowden on this & that last [Der Spiegel] article seems petty telling,” he added, after German broadcasters reported that the NSA was tracking people searching for details about privacy software. 

Neither the Der Spiegel article from December nor last week’s story, both of which were partly written by privacy advocate and security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, specifically mentioned that the information emanated from leaks by Snowden.“That's particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents - including der Spiegel - specifically identified him as the source,” Greenwald said in an email to The Hill on Monday.Other people who have seen Snowden’s trove of documents have agreed that the documents revealed by German outlets seem to indicate a second source.

Bruce Schneier, a cryptologist and cybersecurity expert who has helped the Guardian review Snowden’s disclosures, said he did “not believe that this came from the Snowden documents.”“I think there’s a second leaker out there,” he wrote in a blog post last week. If true, it could add another headache for the NSA, which has struggled for more than a year to contain the fallout from Snowden’s revelations. Defenders of the NSA say that the disclosures have hurt U.S. security and empowered terrorists and other enemies abroad.Among other internal reforms, the spy agency has beefed up its clearance procedures to prevent another employee from passing along secret documents to journalists or governments in Beijing and Moscow.

On Monday of last week, June 30, Reuters ran a story that began:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas on Monday of involvement, for the first time since a Gaza war in [November] 2012, in rocket attacks on Israel and threatened to step up military action to stop the strikes. So even by Israel’s own reckoning, Hamas had not fired any rockets in the year-and-a-half since “Operation Pillar of Defense” ended in a ceasefire. (Hamas denied firing even those mentioned by Netanyahu last week; it wasn’t until Monday of this week that it acknowledged launching any rockets at Israel since the 2012 ceasefire.) So how did we get from there to here, here being Operation Protective Edge, which officially began Tuesday with 20 Gazans dead, both militants and civilians, scores of others badly  wounded and much destruction, alongside about 150 rockets flying all over Israel (but no serious injuries or property damage by Wednesday afternoon)? We got here because Benjamin Netanyahu brought us here. He’s being credited in Israel for showing great restraint in the days leading up to the big op, answering Gaza’s rockets with nothing more than warning shots and offering “quiet for quiet.” But in fact it was his antagonism toward all Palestinians – toward Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority no less than toward Hamas – that started and steadily provoked the chain reaction that led to the current misery.

And nobody knows this, or should know it, better than the Obama administration, which is now standing up for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” It was Netanyahu and his government that killed the peace talks with Abbas that were shepherded by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry; the Americans won’t exactly spell this out on-the-record, but they will off-the record. So a week before those negotiations’ April 29 deadline, Abbas, seeing he wasn’t getting anywhere playing ball with Israel and the United States, decided to shore things up at home, to end the split between the West Bank and Gaza, and he signed the Fatah-Hamas unity deal – with himself as president and Fatah clearly the senior partner. The world – even Washington – welcomed the deal, if warily so, saying unity between the West Bank and Gaza was a good thing for the peace process, and holding out the hope that the deal would compel Hamas to moderate its political stance. Netanyahu, however, saw red. Warning that the unity government would “strengthen terror,” he broke off talks with Abbas and tried to convince the West to refuse to recognize the emerging new Palestinian government – but he failed. He didn’t stop trying, though. At a time when Hamas was seen to be weak, broke, throttled by the new-old Egyptian regime, unpopular with Gazans, and acting as Israel’s cop in the Strip by not only holding its own fire but curbing that of Islamic Jihad and others, Netanyahu became obsessed with Hamas – and obsessed with tying it around Abbas’ neck. Netanyahu’s purpose, clearly enough, was to shift the blame for the failure of the U.S.-sponsored peace talks from himself and his government to Abbas and the Palestinians.

But Netanyahu used the kidnappings to go after Hamas in the West Bank. The target, as one Israeli security official said, was “anything green.” The army raided, destroyed, confiscated and arrested anybody and anything having to do with Hamas, killed some Palestinian protesters and rearrested some 60 Hamasniks who had been freed in the Gilad Shalit deal, throwing them back in prison. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel had already escalated matters on June 11, the day before the kidnappings, by killing not only a wanted man riding on a bicycle, but a 10-year-old child riding with him. Between that, the kidnappings a day later and the crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank that immediately followed, Gaza and Israel started going at it pretty fierce – with all the casualties and destruction, once again, on Gaza’s side only.

Russia considers the detention of the Russian citizen Roman Seleznyov by US secret services as Washington's unfriendly step, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. “As it became known, July 5, Russian citizen Roman Seleznyov was detained in the international airport of the city of Male, the capital of Maldives,” the ministry recalled. “On the same day, he was forced by agents of American secret service into a private jet and delivered to Guam Island. This fact has been already confirmed by the US Department of Homeland Security.” “We consider the incident as another Washington’s unfriendly step,” the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed.

“It is not the first time that the US kidnaps a Russian citizen ignoring the 1999 mutual legal assistance agreement,” the ministry said. “In particular, the same occurred with Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko, who were brought by force in the USA from third countries and convicted on questionable charges.” “Noteworthy that we are not informed about the claims lodged against our compatriots, furthermore, as in Seleznyov’s case, they don’t even inform Russia’s diplomatic agencies about their detention,” the ministry emphasized.

State Duma member representing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR)  Valery Seleznyov has confirmed his son Roman had been detained by US secret service in the Maldives. “I am now in negotiations with the Russian Foreign Ministry. Kidnapping is a crime,” he told ITAR-TASS on Tuesday. “The country must protect its citizens, and Roman should go back to Russia.” Earlier on Tuesday, Valery Seleznyov dubbed a provocation media reports saying that his son Roman was allegedly arrested in the USA on suspicion of a cyber attack, data theft and computer-related fraud.

The Maldives has said it acted alone to expel a Russian national suspected by the US of being one of the world’s most prolific traffickers of stolen credit cards. President Abdulla Yameen denied a claim by Moscow that the United States had abducted Roman Seleznev from the Maldives and taken him to the American territory of Guam. Yameen told reporters that Maldives police, acting on an Interpol arrest warrant, had moved against 30-year-old Seleznev during the weekend.

he US Justice Department said on Monday that Seleznev was arrested and taken to Guam, although the details of his seizure were not known. He is charged with hacking into retail computer systems and installing malicious software to steal credit card numbers in a scheme that operated between October 2009 and February 2011. Seleznev and his partners stole over 200,000 credit card numbers, with bank losses from the scheme estimated at over US$1.1 million, according to a 2011 indictment.

The Russian foreign ministry said Seleznev’s detention was a “hostile step”, adding that Russian diplomatic missions had not been notified of his arrest.

The German government ordered the CIA’s top officer in Berlin to leave the country Thursday in an extraordinary escalation of a conflict between the two allies over American espionage. The move amounts to a high-profile expression of German anger over alleged CIA operations uncovered by German investigators in recent weeks, as well as continued public outrage over the exposure last year of widespread U.S. surveillance programs whose targets included Chancellor Angela Merkel. A spokesman for the German government, Steffen Seibert, confirmed the expulsion of the CIA station chief in a statement that made clear Berlin regards U.S. espionage efforts as a breach of trust.

The decision means that the United States will be forced to withdraw an officer who oversees U.S. spying programs in Germany but also serves as the main point of contact with German intelligence services — exchanging information on subjects ranging from terrorist plots to Iranian nuclear ambitions. In ordering the CIA station chief to leave, Germany resorted to a form of retaliation that is occasionally employed by determined espionage adversaries — such as the United States and Russia — but rarely by such a close ally.

Before ordering him out, Germany “had to make a calculation of what they were going to lose — they get a substantial amount of intelligence from us,” said a senior former U.S. intelligence official who worked closely with Berlin and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “There will be people in the [U.S.] intelligence community who will want to say, ‘That’s it.’ ” Former U.S. officials said the agency pulled back on certain spying operations last year amid concern about the fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks. At the same time, the former officials said, the latest arrest and raids indicate that Germany has stepped up its defenses and efforts to root out U.S. spies. Even before the expulsion, U.S. officials said espionage-related frictions with Germany had hurt diplomatic relations with an ally the United States has relied on for support in a series of security matters, including efforts to contain Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently introduced the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014. It’s the fourth time in four years that Congress has tried to pass "cybersecurity" legislation. Unfortunately, the newest Senate bill is one of the worst yet. Cybersecurity bills aim to facilitate information sharing between companies and the government, but they always seem to come with broad immunity clauses for companies, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers. Given such calculated violence to users' privacy rights, it’s no surprise that these bills fail every year. What is a surprise is that the bills keep coming back from the dead. Last year, President Obama signed Executive Order 13636 (EO 13636) directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expand current information sharing programs that are far more privacy protective than anything seen in recent cybersecurity bills. Despite this, members of Congress like Rep. Mike Rogers and Senator Dianne Feinstein keep on introducing bills that would destroy these privacy protections and grant new spying powers to companies.

Aside from its redundancy, the Senate's bill grants two new authorities to companies. First, the bill authorizes companies to launch countermeasures for a "cybersecurity purpose" against a "cybersecurity threat." "Cybersecurity purpose" is so broadly defined that it means almost anything related to protecting (including physically protecting) an information system, which can be a computer or software. The same goes for a "cybersecurity threat," which includes anything that "may result" in an unauthorized effort to impact the availability of the information system. Combined, the two definitions could be read by companies to permit attacks on machines that unwittingly contribute to network congestion. The countermeasures clause will increasingly militarize the Internet—a prospect that may appeal to some "active defense" (aka offensive) cybersecurity companies, but does not favor the everyday user. Second, the bill adds a new authority for companies to monitor information systems to protect an entity's rights or property. Here again, the broad definitions could be used in conjunction with the monitoring clause to spy on users engaged in potentially innocuous activity. Once collected, companies can then share the information, which is also called “cyber threat indicators,” freely with government agencies like the NSA.

Such sharing will occur because under this bill, DHS would no longer be the lead agency making decisions about the cybersecurity information received, retained, or shared to companies or within the government. Its new role in the bill mandates DHS send information to agencies like the NSA—"in real-time and simultaneous[ly]." DHS is even barred from "delay[ing]" or "interfer[ing]" with the information, which ensures that DHS's current privacy protections won’t be applied to the information. The provision is ripe for improper and over-expansive information sharing. This leads to a question: What stops your sensitive personal information from being shared by companies to the government? Almost nothing. Companies must only remove personally identifiable information if the information is known to be US person information and not directly related to the threat. Such a willful blindness approach is inappropriate. Further, the bill does not even impose this weak minimization requirement on information shared by, and within, the government (including federal, state, local, and tribal governments) thereby allowing the government to share information containing personally identifiable information. The bill should require deletion of all information not directly related to a threat.

The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA. Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.  The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".

Three authors of this investigation have personal and professional ties to the Tor Project, an American company mentioned within the following investigation.

Teil 1: NSA targets the privacy-conscious Teil 2: The Tor Project - anathema to the NSA Teil 3: Servers in Germany targeted Teil 4: Simple web searches are suspicious Teil 5: NSA: In strict accordance with the rule of law

US secret services have recruited more than a dozen officials in various German government ministries to work as spies, with some of them working for the CIA for many years, a German tabloid reported on Sunday. Following previous espionage scandals in Germany, with several suspected US agents exposed in July, a report of more spies infiltrating German ministries was published by Bild am Sonntag, Germany's largest-selling national Sunday paper. The alleged spies work within the country's defense, development, economic, and interior ministries, reported the paper, referring to unnamed sources in the US intelligence community. Due to the current diplomacy tensions between Washington and Berlin, caused by espionage concerns, the spies are reportedly not meeting with their US handlers at the moment, according to Bild. Several inquiries into the activities of American embassies in Prague and Warsaw have been initiated, as US intelligence agencies are reportedly considering basing their recruitment activities there.

An internal CIA investigation confirmed allegations that agency personnel improperly intruded into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff to compile a scathing report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program, prompting bipartisan outrage and at least two calls for spy chief John Brennan to resign.“This is very, very serious, and I will tell you, as a member of the committee, someone who has great respect for the CIA, I am extremely disappointed in the actions of the agents of the CIA who carried out this breach of the committee’s computers,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the committee’s vice chairman.

The rare display of bipartisan fury followed a three-hour private briefing by Inspector General David Buckley. His investigation revealed that five CIA employees, two lawyers and three information technology specialists improperly accessed or “caused access” to a database that only committee staff were permitted to use.Buckley’s inquiry also determined that a CIA crimes report to the Justice Department alleging that the panel staff removed classified documents from a top-secret facility without authorization was based on “inaccurate information,” according to a summary of the findings prepared for the Senate and House intelligence committees and released by the CIA.In other conclusions, Buckley found that CIA security officers conducted keyword searches of the emails of staffers of the committee’s Democratic majority _ and reviewed some of them _ and that the three CIA information technology specialists showed “a lack of candor” in interviews with Buckley’s office.

The inspector general’s summary did not say who may have ordered the intrusion or when senior CIA officials learned of it.Following the briefing, some senators struggled to maintain their composure over what they saw as a violation of the constitutional separation of powers between an executive branch agency and its congressional overseers.“We’re the only people watching these organizations, and if we can’t rely on the information that we’re given as being accurate, then it makes a mockery of the entire oversight function,” said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats.The findings confirmed charges by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the database that by agreement was to be used by her staffers compiling the report on the harsh interrogation methods used by the agency on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons under the George W. Bush administration.The findings also contradicted Brennan’s denials of Feinstein’s allegations, prompting two panel members, Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to demand that the spy chief resign.

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant. The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years. Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

US Senate report may confirm that Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition after 9/11

The government stands accused of seeking to conceal Britain's role in extraordinary rendition, ahead of the release of a declassified intelligence report that exposes the use of torture at US secret prisons around the world.

Now, in a letter to the human rights group Reprieve, former foreign secretary William Hague has confirmed that the UK government has held discussions with the US about what it intends to reveal in the report which, according to al-Jazeera, acknowledges that the British territory of Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition."We have made representations to seek assurances that ordinary procedures for clearance of UK material will be followed in the event that UK material provide[d] to the Senate committee were to be disclosed," Hague wrote.Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve, accused the UK government of seeking to redact embarrassing information: "This shows that the UK government is attempting to censor the US Senate's torture report. In plain English, it is a request to the US to keep Britain's role in rendition out of the public domain."

Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon Johnson White House, on the domestic side — mostly on education and other aspects of the Great Society, as deputy to Douglass Cater, one of the giants of the trade. I was 24, though with two years of foreign policy under my belt, as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics. I cite my tyro status only as partial exculpation for not foretelling the tragedy that was about to ensue for the United States as it became more deeply embroiled in a conflict, to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, “in a far-away country between peoples of whom we know nothing.” A half-century ago, I read in my White House office the press release just put out by the White House that spoke of an attack by North Vietnam on two US destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in a place called the Tonkin Gulf. From that point on, to use a common but in retrospect bitter phrase, “we were off to the races.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution — technically the Southeast Asia Resolution — followed, and the US became mired in a conflict the purposes of which are still being debated. But as a White House staff person with top-secret security clearance, I had an advantage over the average American. Rummaging through the files after I joined the staff in July 1964, I came across a draft that had been sitting there for some time which, with emendations, became — you guessed it — the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Ready to be used, just waiting for an “incident” to set it in motion.

It is now generally understood that the “attack” on the two US destroyers was likely a radar blip and the “fog-of-not-quite-war,” and that, in any event, the US had been engaged in provocative naval actions against North Vietnam.

With the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine turning a local civil war into a U.S. confrontation with Russia, U.S. intelligence veterans urge President Obama to release what evidence he has about the tragedy and silence the hyperbole. MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Intelligence on Shoot-Down of Malaysian Plane Executive Summary

U.S.–Russian tensions are building in a precarious way over Ukraine, and we are far from certain that your advisers fully appreciate the danger of escalation. The New York Times and other media outlets are treating sensitive issues in dispute as flat-fact, taking their cue from U.S. government sources. Twelve days after the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, your administration still has issued no coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible – much less to convincingly support repeated claims that the plane was downed by a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of Ukrainian separatists.

We, the undersigned former intelligence officers want to share with you our concern about the evidence adduced so far to blame Russia for the July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. We are retired from government service and none of us is on the payroll of CNN, Fox News, or any other outlet. We intend this memorandum to provide a fresh, different perspective.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU today published a terrific report documenting the chilling effect on journalists and lawyers from the NSA's surveillance programs entitled: "With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and American Democracy." The report, which is chock full of evidence about the very real harms caused by the NSA's surveillance programs, is the result of interviews of 92 lawyers and journalists, plus several senior government officials.  This report adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA's surveillance programs are causing real harm.  It also links these harms to key parts of both U.S. constitutional and international law, including the right to counsel, the right of access to information, the right of association and the free press. It is a welcome addition to the PEN report detailing the effects on authors, called Chilling Effects: How NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor and the declarations of 22 of EFF's clients in our First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA case. 

The HRW and ACLU report documents the increasing treatment of journalists and lawyers as legitimate surveillance targets and surveys how they are responding. Brian Ross of ABC says: There’s something about using elaborate evasion and security techniques that’s offensive to me—that I should have to operate as like a criminal, like a spy. The report also notes that the government increasingly likens journalists to criminals. As Scott Shane of the New York Times explains: To compare the exchange of information about sensitive programs between officials and the media, which has gone on for decades, to burglary seems to miss the point. Burglary is not part of a larger set of activities protected by the Constitution, and at the heart of our democracy. Unfortunately, that mindset is sort of the problem. Especially striking in the report is the disconnect between the real stories of chilling effects from reporters and lawyers and the skeptical, but undocumented, rejections from senior government officials.  The reporters explain difficulties in building trust with their sources and the attorneys echo that with stories about the difficulties building client trust.  The senior government officials, in contrast, just say that they don't believe the journalists and appear to have thought little, if at all about the issues facing lawyers.