Tag NSA

Anyone keen in owning a non-fungible token (NFT) of a private & signed collection of Edward Snowden photos with the Canadian lawyer Robert Tibbo who helped him escape Hong Kong and the NSA back in 2013?

These photos will be auctioned at 1400 hr New York time TODAY, 28 October 2021. Check these out:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-lawyer-auctioning-nft-of-previously-unpublished-edward-snowden-photos

https://tibbonft.com/

https://zora.co/collections/zora/5918

https://mobile.twitter.com/tibbosnowdenNFT

Unpublished and Signed NFT photos of Edward Snowden up for auction today

(Above) Photo Credit: The Intercept

Above photo: From left to right Duncan Campbell, Crispin Aubrey and John Berry in the ‘ABC’ case (Source: The Intercept – ANL/Re/REX Shutterstock)

The Register: Special Report Duncan Campbell has spent decades unmasking Britain’s super-secretive GCHQ, its spying programmes, and its cosy relationship with America’s NSA. Today, he retells his life’s work exposing the government’s over-reaching surveillance, and reveals documents from the leaked Snowden files confirming the history of the fearsome ECHELON intercept project. This story is also published simultaneously today by The Intercept, as is – at long last – Duncan’s Register Christmas Lecture from last year.

Find out more on this insightful article printed by The Intercept and The Register.

Check out the following Guardian article:

Spies helped build Silicon Valley. Now the tables are turning

David Cameron wants US tech sector companies to do more to fight terrorism. But they’ve grown too powerful to listen

Gordon Corera
Wednesday 29 July 2015

If you want to understand how modern British and American intelligence services operate, you could do worse than visit the new exhibition that opens at Bletchley Park this week. It tells the story of code-breaking in the first world war, which paved the way not just for the better-known success story of world war two, but also GCHQ and the NSA’s modern day bulk interception.

A century ago, just as today, intelligence services and network providers used to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Britain, for example, exploited its dominance of the telegraph system to spy after its companies had built an imperial web of cables that wrapped itself around the world. Britain’s first offensive act of the conflict was to cut Germany’s own undersea cables and install “secret censors” in British company offices around the world that looked out for enemy communications. A staggering 80m cable messages were subject to “censorship” during the war.

In recent decades the US has enjoyed a similar ability to spy on the world thanks to its role in building the internet – what the NSA called “home field advantage”. This worked via two channels. The first was fibre-optic cables passing through either American or British territory, allowing intelligence agencies to install the modern equivalent of secret censors: computerised black boxes that could filter data to look for emails based on “selectors”. The second channel was Silicon Valley – which had thrived thanks to massive Pentagon and NSA subsidies. People around the world sent their communications and stored their data with American companies, whose business model often involved collecting, analysing and monetising that data. This attracted spies like bears to honey. And so Prism was born – requiring the companies themselves to run selectors across their own data. 45,000 selectors were running in 2012. Put together with cable-tapping, this meant that nearly 90,000 people around the world were being spied on.

Building the internet allowed the US to export its values, import other countries’ information through spying and make a lot of money for American corporations along the way. But the relationships have fractured. The Snowden disclosures were one reason – exposure led tech companies to back away from quiet cooperation and make privacy a selling point (even competing with each other as seen in Apple’s CEO blast against Google recently).

At the same time, Isis’s use of social media has increased the state’s desire to get more from these companies, leading to growing tension. It was notable that David Cameron’s speech on extremism last week singled out tech companies for criticism. When their commercial models are built around tracking our likes and dislikes, why do they say it’s too difficult to help when it comes to the fight against terrorism, the prime minister asked.

A big problem for the spies is that during the first world war the cable companies that helped Britain knew who was boss. Today it is more complex. An angry Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told President Obama that his administration “blew it” when it tried to defend Prism by saying it was only used to spy on foreigners. After all, most of Facebook and Silicon Valley’s customers are foreigners.

The British government criticised Facebook for not spotting private messages from one of the men who went on to kill Lee Rigby. This is the kind of thing Cameron wants the companies to do more on. But whose job is it to spy? The companies are nervous of signing up to a system in which it is their job to scan their customers’ data and proactively report suspicious content, effectively outsourcing the act of spying (and not just the collection of data) to the private sector. Such a deal, tech companies fear, could set a dangerous precedent: if you help Britain when it comes to national security, what do you do when China or Russia come knocking?

On his first day as director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan launched a volley against Silicon Valley, accusing it of acting as “command and control” for groups like Isis. But since then, the tone has been more conciliatory. What Hannigan may have realised is that companies have the upper hand, partly because the data is with US companies that are subject to US laws. To avoid the Russia and China issue, they assert their co-operation is voluntary and there is not much the British state can do about it.

It was notable that in his speech, Cameron didn’t threaten new legislation. Why? Because he knows that power relations between governments and corporations have shifted since the first world war: modern tech firms are too big to be pushed around.

If they have a vulnerability, it’s their dependence on customers: verbal volleys from politicians and spies are a sign that the real battleground is now public opinion. Companies are gambling that focusing on privacy will win them the trust of the public, while governments in London and Washington are hoping that talking about terrorism will pressure companies to cooperate more. Who wins this tug of war may depend on events that neither party can control, including the prevalence of terrorist attacks. Whatever the case, the old alliance between Silicon Valley and the spies is no more.

Check out this article from The Star:

Secret deal between Canada’s spies and border guards raises concerns

A memorandum of understanding between the two agencies allowed info sharing, joint operations without political oversight.

By: Alex Boutilier Ottawa Bureau Reporter, Published on Thu Jul 02 2015

OTTAWA—A secret deal between Canada’s spies and border guards proposed more information sharing and joint operations without the need for political sign-off, the Star has learned.

A 2014 deal between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Canada Border Services Agency proposed the two agencies be allowed to share information and resources without the prior approval of their political masters.

“The Framework (Memorandum of Understanding) will also authorize (CSIS) to enter into more specific arrangements with CBSA, as required, without the necessity to seek your approval each time,” wrote CSIS director Michel Coulombe in a memo explaining the deal to Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney.

Blaney’s office won’t say whether or not the deal has been approved.

The deal, obtained under access to information law, would permit the two agencies to share “investigative techniques, the provision of equipment, the sharing of information, resources or personnel” to assist one another to meet shared objectives.

CSIS is allowed to enter into agreements with other departments and agencies, including foreign partners, and routinely does. But the rules governing the spy agency state that CSIS needs the express permission from the public safety minister to do so.

But Coulombe explicitly stated that, under the new deal, Blaney’s approval would not be required for further co-operation between the two agencies. Both would otherwise have to follow their respective mandates, the deal states.

The Star requested an interview with Blaney, and provided a detailed list of questions. That interview request was denied. Blaney’s office would not say if the minister approved the deal, and did not respond to the Star’s questions.

Jeremy Laurin, a spokesperson for the minister, instead provided a written statement referencing the threat of “jihadi terrorists” and the necessity for national security agencies to work together.

“In today’s global threat environment, national security is a team effort — which means that CSIS works with many domestic partners,” Laurin wrote. “CBSA is one of those partners.”

It’s not clear when the deal itself was drafted — the documents themselves are undated, but were released in a batch of briefing notes written last summer. That means the proposal would have crossed Blaney’s desk well before the Conservatives introduced controversial new terror laws that drastically expanded the agency’s mandate.

Bill C-51 allows CSIS to “disrupt” real or perceived threats to national security, rather than passing the intelligence they gather to an enforcement agency. The legislation, which recently became law, also greatly expands government agencies’ ability to share information deemed relevant to national security.

While the scope of the information sharing provisions alarmed security researchers and privacy experts, the majority Conservatives said they were necessary to ensure Canadians were kept safe. But The Canadian Press reported Wednesday that CSIS had told senior bureaucrats that improvements to their access to information could be achieved within the existing law.

Wesley Wark, a security researcher at the University of Ottawa, said it’s not uncommon for agencies to have formal agreements governing joint operations. But this deal in particular, Wark said, appears to diminish political accountability.

“It also shows a tendency on (the) part of the Harper government to allow for an erosion of ministerial accountability,” Wark wrote after reviewing the documents. “And it reminds us of one of the big holes in the fabric of accountability for security and intelligence — namely the absence of independent, external review of CBSA.”

Craig Forcese, also a University of Ottawa professor and vocal critic of Bill C-51, said the “stovepipe” nature of Canada’s intelligence review bodies is a major concern with these type of agreements.

The Security Intelligence Review Committee, for instance, can review actions taken by CSIS after the fact. But the committee has no ability to “follow the thread” of an operation when CSIS partners with another agency like CBSA, the RCMP, or Canada’s electronic spying agency, the Communications Security Establishment.

“If I had set out to intentionally design a system of accountability likely to break, it would look a lot like our current system of stovepiped review,” Forcese said.

“Add to that CBSA has no review body of its own — and, as best I know, is the only agency with a law enforcement or intelligence mandate in the country without some form of external, independent review or oversight.”

The Star requested the text of CSIS’s memorandums of understanding with other agencies. The agency declined to provide them, or to list which agencies it co-operates with, saying that the agency operates within its mandate, ministerial direction, and internal policy.

Before:

CSIS is permitted to enter into partnerships, both domestic and international, under Section 17 of the CSIS Act. The act requires the agency to get the go-ahead from the public safety minister beforehand.

After:

If the CSIS-CBSA deal was accepted, the two agencies could co-operate without bothering to get approval from politicians.

Under C-51:

The Conservatives’ controversial terror law allows for the free flow of information between 17 domestic law enforcement agencies and departments. Canada’s privacy commissioner has called the provision excessive.

“As more details emerge, it is becoming increasingly clear that representatives of the German government at best looked away as the Americans violated the law, and at worst supported them…”

“Journalists, who scrutinize and criticize those who govern, are an elementary part of the “checks and balances” — an American invention — aimed at ensuring both transparency and accountability. When it comes to intelligence issues, however, it appears this system has been out of balance for some time…”

“Everything the government said was a lie. As far back as 2013, the German government was in a position to suspect, if not to know outright, the obscene extent to which the United States was spying on an ally…”

See original Spiegel story below.

An Attack on Press Freedom: SPIEGEL Targeted by US Intelligence

By SPIEGEL Staff

Revelations from WikiLeaks published this week show how boundlessly and comprehensively American intelligence services spied on the German government. It has now emerged that the US also conducted surveillance against SPIEGEL.

Walks during working hours aren’t the kind of pastime one would normally expect from a leading official in the German Chancellery. Especially not from the head of Department Six, the official inside Angela Merkel’s office responsible for coordinating Germany’s intelligence services.

Walks during working hours aren’t the kind of pastime one would normally expect from a leading official in the German Chancellery. Especially not from the head of Department Six, the official inside Angela Merkel’s office responsible for coordinating Germany’s intelligence services.

But in the summer of 2011, Günter Heiss found himself stretching his legs for professional reasons. The CIA’s station chief in Berlin had requested a private conversation with Heiss. And he didn’t want to meet in an office or follow standard protocol. Instead, he opted for the kind of clandestine meeting you might see in a spy film.

Officially, the CIA man was accredited as a counsellor with the US Embassy, located next to Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate. Married to a European, he had already been stationed in Germany once before and knew how to communicate with German officials. At times he could be demanding and overbearing, but he could also be polite and courteous. During this summer walk he also had something tangible to offer Heiss.

The CIA staffer revealed that a high-ranking Chancellery official allegedly maintained close contacts with the media and was sharing official information with reporters with SPIEGEL.

The American provided the name of the staffer: Hans Josef Vorbeck, Heiss’ deputy in Department Six. The information must have made it clear to Heiss that the US was spying on the German government as well as the press that reports on it.

The central Berlin stroll remained a secret for almost four years. The Chancellery quietly transferred Vorbeck, who had until then been responsible for counterterrorism, to another, less important department responsible dealing with the history of the BND federal intelligence agency. Other than that, though, it did nothing.

Making a Farce of Rule of Law

Officials in the Chancellery weren’t interested in how the CIA had obtained its alleged information. They didn’t care to find out how, and to which degree, they were being spied on by the United States. Nor were they interested in learning about the degree to which SPIEGEL was being snooped on by the Americans. Chancellery officials didn’t contact any of the people in question. They didn’t contact members of the Bundestag federal parliament sitting on the Parliamentary Control Panel, the group responsible for oversight of the intelligence services. They didn’t inform members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the agency responsible for counterintelligence in Germany, either. And they didn’t contact a single public prosecutor. Angela Merkel’s office, it turns out, simply made a farce of the rule of law.

As a target of the surveillance, SPIEGEL has requested more information from the Chancellery. At the same time, the magazine filed a complaint on Friday with the Federal Public Prosecutor due to suspicion of intelligence agency activity.

Because now, in the course of the proceedings of the parliamentary investigative committee probing the NSA’s activities in Germany in the wake of revelations leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, details about the event that took place in the summer of 2011 are gradually leaking to the public. At the beginning of May, the mass-circulation tabloid Bild am Sonntag reported on a Chancellery official who had been sidelined “in the wake of evidence of alleged betrayal of secrets through US secret services.”

Research conducted by SPIEGEL has determined the existence of CIA and NSA files filled with a large number of memos pertaining to the work of the German newsmagazine. And three different government sources in Berlin and Washington have independently confirmed that the CIA station chief in Berlin was referring specifically to Vorbeck’s contacts with SPIEGEL.

An Operation Justified by Security Interests?

Obama administration sources with knowledge of the operation said that it was justified by American security interests. The sources said US intelligence services had determined the existence of intensive contacts between SPIEGEL reporters and the German government and decided to intervene because those communications were viewed as damaging to the United States’ interests. The fact that the CIA and NSA were prepared to reveal an ongoing surveillance operation to the Chancellery underlines the importance they attached to the leaks, say sources in Washington. The NSA, the sources say, were aware that the German government would know from then on that the US was spying in Berlin.

As more details emerge, it is becoming increasingly clear that representatives of the German government at best looked away as the Americans violated the law, and at worst supported them.

Just last Thursday, Günter Heiss and his former supervisor, Merkel’s former Chief of Staff Ronald Pofalla, were questioned by the parliamentary investigative committee and attempted to explain the egregious activity. Heiss confirmed that tips had been given, but claimed they hadn’t been “concrete enough” for measures to be taken. When asked if he had been familiar with the issue, Pofalla answered, “Of course.” He said that anything else he provided had to be “in context,” at which point a representative of the Chancellery chimed in and pointed out that could only take place in a meeting behind closed doors.

In that sense, the meeting of the investigative committee once again shed light on the extent to which the balance of power has shifted between the government and the Fourth Estate. Journalists, who scrutinize and criticize those who govern, are an elementary part of the “checks and balances” — an American invention — aimed at ensuring both transparency and accountability. When it comes to intelligence issues, however, it appears this system has been out of balance for some time.

Government Lies

When SPIEGEL first reported in Summer 2013 about the extent of NSA’s spying on Germany, German politicians first expressed shock and then a certain amount of indignation before quickly sliding back into their persona as a loyal ally. After only a short time and a complete lack of willingness on the part of the Americans to explain their actions, Pofalla declared that the “allegations are off the table.”

But a number of reports published in recent months prove that, whether out of fear, outrage or an alleged lack of knowledge, it was all untrue. Everything the government said was a lie. As far back as 2013, the German government was in a position to suspect, if not to know outright, the obscene extent to which the United States was spying on an ally. If there hadn’t already been sufficient evidence of the depth of the Americans’ interest in what was happening in Berlin, Wednesday’s revelations by WikiLeaks, in cooperation with Süddeutsche Zeitung, filled in the gaps.

SPIEGEL’s reporting has long been a thorn in the side of the US administration. In addition to its reporting on a number of other scandals, the magazine exposed the kidnapping of Murat Kurnaz, a man of Turkish origin raised in Bremen, Germany, and his rendition to Guantanamo. It exposed the story of Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who was taken to Syria, where he was tortured. The reports triggered the launch of a parliamentary investigative committee in Berlin to look also into the CIA’s practices.

When SPIEGEL reported extensively on the events surrounding the arrest of three Islamist terrorists in the so-called “Sauerland cell” in Germany, as well as the roles played by the CIA and the NSA in foiling the group, the US government complained several times about the magazine. In December 2007, US intelligence coordinator Mike McConnell personally raised the issue during a visit to Berlin. And when SPIEGEL reported during the summer of 2009, under the headline “Codename Domino,” that a group of al-Qaida supporters was believed to be heading for Europe, officials at the CIA seethed. The sourcing included a number of security agencies and even a piece of information supplied by the Americans. At the time, the station chief for Germany’s BND intelligence service stationed in Washington was summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The situation escalated in August 2010 after SPIEGEL, together with WikiLeaks, the Guardian and the New York Times, began exposing classified US Army reports from Afghanistan. That was followed three months later with the publication of the Iraq war logs based on US Army reports. And in November of that year, WikiLeaks, SPIEGEL and several international media reported how the US government thinks internally about the rest of the world on the basis of classified State Department cables. Pentagon officials at the time declared that WikiLeaks had “blood on its hands.” The Justice Department opened an investigation and seized data from Twitter accounts, e-mail exchanges and personal data from activists connected with the whistleblowing platform. The government then set up a Task Force with the involvement of the CIA and NSA.

Not even six months later, the CIA station chief requested to go on the walk in which he informed the intelligence coordinator about Vorbeck and harshly criticized SPIEGEL.

Digital Snooping

Not long later, a small circle inside the Chancellery began discussing how the CIA may have got ahold of the information. Essentially, two possibilities were conceivable: either through an informant or through surveillance of communications. But how likely is it that the CIA had managed to recruit a source in the Chancellery or on the editorial staff of SPIEGEL?

The more likely answer, members of the circle concluded, was that the information must have been the product of “SigInt,” signals intelligence — in other words, wiretapped communications. It seems fitting that during the summer of 2013, just prior to the scandal surrounding Edward Snowden and the documents he exposed pertaining to NSA spying, German government employees warned several SPIEGEL journalists that the Americans were eavesdropping on them.

At the end of June 2011, Heiss then flew to Washington. During a visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, the issue of the alleged contact with SPIEGEL was raised again. Chancellery staff noted the suspicion in a classified internal memo that explicitly names SPIEGEL.

One of the great ironies of the story is that contact with the media was one of Vorbeck’s job responsibilities. He often took part in background discussions with journalists and even represented the Chancellery at public events. “I had contact with journalists and made no secret about it,” Vorbeck told SPIEGEL. “I even received them in my office in the Chancellery. That was a known fact.” He has since hired a lawyer.

It remains unclear just who US intelligence originally had in its scopes. The question is also unlikely to be answered by the parliamentary investigative committee, because the US appears to have withheld this information from the Chancellery. Theoretically, at least, there are three possibilities: The Chancellery — at least in the person of Hans Josef Vorbeck. SPIEGEL journalists. Or blanket surveillance of Berlin’s entire government quarter. The NSA is capable of any of the three options. And it is important to note that each of these acts would represent a violation of German law.

Weak Arguments

So far, the Chancellery has barricaded itself behind the argument that the origin of the information had been too vague and abstract to act on. In addition, the tip had been given in confidentiality, meaning that neither Vorbeck nor SPIEGEL could be informed. But both are weak arguments, given that the CIA station chief’s allegations were directed precisely at SPIEGEL and Vorbeck and that the intelligence coordinator’s deputy would ultimately be sidelined as a result.

And even if you follow the logic that the tip wasn’t concrete enough, there is still one committee to whom the case should have been presented under German law: the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Control Panel, whose proceedings are classified and which is responsible for oversight of Germany’s intelligence services. The nine members of parliament on the panel are required to be informed about all intelligence events of “considerable importance.”

Members of parliament on the panel did indeed express considerable interest in the Vorbeck case. They learned in fall 2011 of his transfer, and wanted to know why “a reliable coordinator in the fight against terrorism would be shifted to a post like that, one who had delivered excellent work on the issue,” as then chairman of the panel, Social Demoratic Party politician Thomas Oppermann, criticized at the time.

But no word was mentioned about the reasons behind the transfer during a Nov. 9, 2011 meeting of the panel. Not a single word about the walk taken by the CIA chief of station. Not a word about the business trip to Washington taken by Günter Heiss afterward. And not a word about Vorbeck’s alleged contacts with SPIEGEL. Instead, the parliamentarians were told a myth — that the move had been made necessary by cutbacks. And also because he was needed to work on an historical appraisal of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND.

Deceiving Parliament

Officials in the Chancellery had decided to deceive parliament about the issue. And for a long time, it looked as though they would get away with it.

The appropriate way of dealing with the CIA’s incrimination would have been to transfer the case to the justice system. Public prosecutors would have been forced to follow up with two investigations: One to find out whether the CIA’s allegations against Vorbeck had been true — both to determine whether government secrets had been breached and out of the obligation to assist a longtime civil servant. It also would have had to probe suspicions that a foreign intelligence agency conducted espionage in the heart of the German capital.

That could, and should, have been the case. Instead, the Chancellery decided to go down the path of deception, scheming with an ally, all the while interpreting words like friendship and partnership in a highly arbitrary and scrupulous way.

Günter Heiss, who received the tip from the CIA station chief, is an experienced civil servant. In his earlier years, Heiss studied music. He would go on as a music instructor to teach a young Ursula von der Leyen (who is Germany’s defense minister today) how to play the piano. But then Heiss, a tall, slightly lanky man, switched professions and instead pursued a career in intelligence that would lead him to the top post in the Lower Saxony state branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Even back then, the Christian Democrat was already covering up the camera on his laptop screen with tape. At the very least “they” shouldn’t be able to see him, he said at the time, elaborating that the “they” he was referring to should not be interpreted as being the US intelligence services, but rather the other spies – “the Chinese” and, “in any case, the Russians.” For conservatives like Heiss, America, after all, is friendly territory.

‘Spying Among Friends Not Acceptable’

If there was suspicion in the summer of 2011 that the NSA was spying on a staff member at the Chancellery, it should have set off alarm bells within the German security apparatus. Both the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for counter-intelligence, and the Federal Office for Information Security should have been informed so that they could intervene. There also should have been discussions between the government ministers and the chancellor in order to raise government awareness about the issue. And, going by the maxim the chancellor would formulate two years later, Merkel should have had a word with the Americans along the lines of “Spying among friends is not acceptable.”

And against the media.

If it is true that a foreign intelligence agency spied on journalists as they conducted their reporting in Germany and then informed the Chancellery about it, then these actions would place a huge question mark over the notion of a free press in this country. Germany’s highest court ruled in 2007 that press freedom is a “constituent part of a free and democratic order.” The court held that reporting can no longer be considered free if it entails a risk that journalists will be spied on during their reporting and that the federal government will be informed of the people they speak to.

“Freedom of the press also offers protection from the intrusion of the state in the confidentiality of the editorial process as well as the relationship of confidentiality between the media and its informants,” the court wrote in its ruling. Freedom of the press also provides special protection to the “the secrecy of sources of information and the relationship of confidentiality between the press, including broadcasters, and the source.”

Criminalizing Journalism

But Karlsruhe isn’t Washington. And freedom of the press is not a value that gives American intelligence agencies pause. On the contrary, the Obama administration has gained a reputation for adamantly pursuing uncomfortable journalistic sources. It hasn’t even shied away from targeting American media giants.

In spring 2013, it became known that the US Department of Justice mandated the monitoring of 100 telephone numbers belonging to the news agency Associated Press. Based on the connections that had been tapped, AP was able to determine that the government likely was interested in determining the identity of an important informant. The source had revealed to AP reporters details of a CIA operation pertaining to an alleged plot to blow up a commercial jet.

The head of AP wasn’t the only one who found the mass surveillance of his employees to be an “unconstitutional act.” Even Republican Senators like John Boehner sharply criticized the government, pointing to press freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” he said.

But the Justice Department is unimpressed by such formulations. New York Times reporter James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was threatened with imprisonment for contempt of court in an effort to get him to turn over his sources — which he categorically refused to do for seven years. Ultimately, public pressure became too intense, leading Obama’s long-time Attorney General Eric Holder to announce last October that Risen would not be forced to testify.

The Justice Department was even more aggressive in its pursuit of James Rosen, the Washington bureau chief for TV broadcaster Fox. In May 2013, it was revealed that his telephone was bugged, his emails were read and his visits to the State Department were monitored. To obtain the necessary warrants, the Justice Department had labeled Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator.”

The strategy of criminalizing journalism has become something of a bad habit under Obama’s leadership, with his government pursuing non-traditional media, such as the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, with particular aggression.

Bradley Manning, who supplied WikiLeaks with perhaps its most important data dump, was placed in solitary confinement and tormented with torture-like methods, as the United Nations noted critically. Manning is currently undergoing a gender transition and now calls herself Chelsea. In 2013, a military court sentenced Manning, who, among other things, publicized war crimes committed by the US in Iraq, to 35 years in prison.

In addition, a criminal investigation has been underway for at least the last five years into the platform’s operators, first and foremost its founder Julian Assange. For the past several years, a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been working to determine if charges should be brought against the organization.

Clandestine Proceedings

The proceedings are hidden from the public, but the grand jury’s existence became apparent once it began to subpoena witnesses with connections to WikiLeaks and when the Justice Department sought to confiscate data belonging to people who worked with Assange. The US government, for example, demanded that Twitter hand over data pertaining to several people, including the Icelandic parliamentarian Brigitta Jonsdottir, who had worked with WikiLeaks on the production of a video. The short documentary is an exemplary piece of investigative journalism, showing how a group of civilians, including employees of the news agency Reuters, were shot and killed in Baghdad by an American Apache helicopter.

Computer security expert Jacob Appelbaum, who occasionally freelances for SPIEGEL, was also affected at the time. Furthermore, just last week he received material from Google showing that the company too had been forced by the US government to hand over information about him – for the time period from November 2009 until today. The order would seem to indicate that investigators were particularly interested in Appelbaum’s role in the publication of diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has referred to journalists who worked with material provided by Edward Snowden has his “accomplices.” In the US, there are efforts underway to pass a law pertaining to so-called “media leaks.” Australia already passed one last year. Pursuant to the law, anyone who reveals details about secret service operations may be punished, including journalists.

Worries over ‘Grave Loss of Trust’

The German government isn’t too far from such positions either. That has become clear with its handling of the strictly classified list of “selectors,” which is held in the Chancellery. The list includes search terms that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, used when monitoring telecommunications data on behalf of the NSA. The parliamentary investigative committee looking into NSA activity in Germany has thus far been denied access to the list. The Chancellery is concerned that allowing the committee to review the list could result in uncomfortable information making its way into the public.

That’s something Berlin would like to prevent. Despite an unending series of indignities visited upon Germany by US intelligence agencies, the German government continues to believe that it has a “special” relationship with its partners in America — and is apparently afraid of nothing so much as losing this partnership.

That, at least, seems to be the message of a five-page secret letter sent by Chancellery Chief of Staff Peter Altmaier, of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, to various parliamentary bodies charged with oversight. In the June 17 missive, Altmaier warns of a “grave loss of trust” should German lawmakers be given access to the list of NSA spying targets. Opposition parliamentarians have interpreted the letter as a “declaration of servility” to the US.

Altmaier refers in the letter to a declaration issued by the BND on April 30. It notes that the spying targets passed on by the NSA since 2005 include “European political personalities, agencies in EU member states, especially ministries and EU institutions, and representations of certain companies.” On the basis of this declaration, Altmaier writes, “the investigative committee can undertake its own analysis, even without knowing the individual selectors.”

Committee members have their doubts. They suspect that the BND already knew at the end of April what WikiLeaks has now released — with its revelations that the German Economics Ministry, Finance Ministry and Agriculture Ministry were all under the gaze of the NSA, among other targets. That would mean that the formulation in the BND declaration of April 30 was intentionally misleading. The Left Party and the Greens now intend to gain direct access to the selector list by way of a complaint to Germany’s Constitutional Court.

The government in Berlin would like to prevent exactly that. The fact that the US and German intelligence agencies shared selectors is “not a matter of course. Rather, it is a procedure that requires, and indicates, a special degree of trust,” Almaier writes. Should the government simply hand over the lists, Washington would see that as a “profound violation of confidentiality requirements.” One could expect, he writes, that the “US side would significantly restrict its cooperation on security issues, because it would no longer see its German partners as sufficiently trustworthy.”

Altmaier’s letter neglects to mention the myriad NSA violations committed against German interests, German citizens and German media.

Find out more from WikiLeaks’ latest on All The Chancellor’s Men and related media reports.

It was much worse than previously reported: more than 21 million people were “swept up in a colossal breach of government computer systems that was far more damaging than initially thought”. Find out more from the New York Times.

To celebrate the US Independence Day on 4 July, WikiLeaks, together with The Intercept, released its latest disclosure “Bugging Brazil“, “a top secret US National Security Agency target list of 29 key Brazilian government phone numbers that were selected for intensive interception”.

“The US targeted not only those closest to the President, but waged an economic espionage campaign against Brazil, spying on those responsible for managing Brazil’s economy, including the head of its Central Bank. The US also extensively targetted Brazil’s diplomacy, targeting the phones of its Foreign Minister and its ambassadors to Germany, France, the EU, the US and Geneva as well as its military chiefs,” according to WikiLeaks.

“Our publication today shows the US has a long way to go to prove its dragnet surveillance on ‘friendly’ governments is over. The US has not just being targetting President Rouseff but the key figures she talks to every day. Even if US assurances of ceasing its targetting of President Rousseff could be trusted, which they cannot, it is fanciful to imagine that President Rousseff can run Brazil by talking to herself all day. If President Rousseff wants to see more US investment in Brazil on the back of her recent trip as she claims, how can she assure Brazilian companies that their US counterparts will not have an advantage provided by this surveillance, until she can really guarantee the spying has stopped – not just on her, but on all Brazilian issues,” said WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.

Check out the full list of NSA high priority targets for Brazil here.

Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues at The Intercept has just released an extensive report on the NSA use of XKEYSCORE. And here’s a video on the same topic:

As I have said previously, it’s all a farce and now becoming a circus… And consider the timing, what kind of message is this for France given the recent WikiLeaks’ Espionnage Élysée exposé of NSA spying on not only 3 French Presidents but also French companies?

See the New York Times article below.

Surveillance Court Rules That N.S.A. Can Resume Bulk Data Collection

By CHARLIE SAVAGEJUNE 30, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.

But the American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday that it would ask the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had ruled that the surveillance program was illegal, to issue an injunction to halt the program, setting up a potential conflict between the two courts.

The program lapsed on June 1, when a law on which it was based, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, expired. Congress revived that provision on June 2 with a bill called the USA Freedom Act, which said the provision could not be used for bulk collection after six months.

The six-month period was intended to give intelligence agencies time to move to a new system in which the phone records — which include information like phone numbers and the duration of calls but not the contents of conversations — would stay in the hands of phone companies. Under those rules, the agency would still be able to gain access to the records to analyze links between callers and suspected terrorists.

But, complicating matters, in May the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled in a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. that Section 215 of the Patriot Act could not legitimately be interpreted as permitting bulk collection at all.

Congress did not include language in the Freedom Act contradicting the Second Circuit ruling or authorizing bulk collection even for the six-month transition. As a result, it was unclear whether the program had a lawful basis to resume in the interim.

After President Obama signed the Freedom Act on June 2, his administration applied to restart the program for six months. But a conservative and libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks, filed a motion in the surveillance court saying it had no legal authority to permit the program to resume, even for the interim period.

In a 26-page opinion made public on Tuesday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican. And Judge Mosman said the Second Circuit was wrong, too.

“Second Circuit rulings are not binding” on the surveillance court, he wrote, “and this court respectfully disagrees with that court’s analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the USA Freedom Act.”

When the Second Circuit issued its ruling that the program was illegal, it did not issue any injunction ordering the program halted, saying it would be prudent to see what Congress did as Section 215 neared its June 1 expiration. Jameel Jaffer, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, said on Tuesday that the group would now ask for one.

“Neither the statute nor the Constitution permits the government to subject millions of innocent people to this kind of intrusive surveillance,” Mr. Jaffer said. “We intend to ask the court to prohibit the surveillance and to order the N.S.A. to purge the records it’s already collected.”

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The bulk phone records program traces back to October 2001, when the Bush administration secretly authorized the N.S.A. to collect records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk as part of a broader set of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts.

The program began on the basis of presidential power alone. In 2006, the Bush administration persuaded the surveillance court to begin blessing it under of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which says the government may collect records that are “relevant” to a national security investigation.

The program was declassified in June 2013 after its existence was disclosed by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.

It remains unclear whether the Second Circuit still considers the surveillance program to be illegal during this six-month transition period. The basis for its ruling in May was that Congress had never intended for Section 215 to authorize bulk collection.

In his ruling, Judge Mosman said that because Congress knew how the surveillance court was interpreting Section 215 when it passed the Freedom Act, lawmakers implicitly authorized bulk collection to resume for the transition period.

“Congress could have prohibited bulk data collection” effective immediately, he wrote. “Instead, after lengthy public debate, and with crystal-clear knowledge of the fact of ongoing bulk collection of call detail records,” it chose to allow a 180-day transitional period during which such collection could continue, he wrote.

The surveillance court is subject to review by its own appeals panel, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Both the Second Circuit and the surveillance review court are in turn subject to the Supreme Court, which resolves conflicts between appeals courts.

Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a written statement that the Obama administration agreed with Judge Mosman.

Since the program was made public, plaintiffs have filed several lawsuits before regular courts, which hear arguments from each side before issuing rulings, unlike the surveillance court’s usual practice, which is to hear only from the government. Judge Mosman’s disagreement with the Second Circuit is the second time that the surveillance court has rejected a contrary ruling about the program by a judge in the regular court system.

In a lawsuit challenging the program that was brought by the conservative legal advocate Larry Klayman, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia ruled in December 2013 that the program most likely violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

But in March 2014, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, a Federal District Court judge who also sits on the secret surveillance court, rejected Judge Leon’s reasoning and permitted the program to keep going. The Obama administration has appealed Judge Leon’s decision to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The Freedom Act also contains a provision saying that whenever the surveillance court addresses a novel and significant legal issue, it must either appoint an outside “friend of the court” who can offer arguments contrary to what the government is saying, or explain why appointing one is not appropriate.

The first test of that reform came last month when another judge on the court, F. Dennis Saylor IV, addressed a separate issue raised by the passage of the Freedom Act. Judge Saylor acknowledged that it was novel and significant, but declined to appoint an outside advocate, saying the answer to the legal question was “sufficiently clear” to him without hearing from one.

A version of this article appears in print on July 1, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Surveillance Court Rules That N.S.A. Can Resume Bulk Data Collection.

(Above) photo credit: Focus

Assume this is no surprise to many? Following the recent WikiLeaks’ Espionnage Élysée exposé about the NSA spying on 3 French presidents, new WikiLeaks documents revealed how “the US has had a decade- long policy of economic espionage against France, including the interception of all French corporate contracts and negotiations valued at more than $200 million”.

“That covers not only all of France’s major companies, from BNP Paribas, AXA and Credit Agricole to Peugeot and Renault, Total and Orange, but it also affects the major French farming associations,” according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“Central within the cache of documents are two long-term spying orders (“collection requirements”) which define the kinds of intelligence the NSA is tasked with collecting in its surveillance operations against France. The documents make clear that the NSA has been tasked with obtaining intelligence on all aspects of the French economy, from government policy, diplomacy, banking and participation in international bodies to infrastructural development, business practices and trade activities,” according to WikiLeaks.

Here’s a related story from Techcrunch:

New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied On Top French Companies

by Romain Dillet (@romaindillet)

Following last week’s eavesdropping reports, WikiLeaks shared new documents with Libération and Mediapart. This time, the new documents reveal that the NSA was spying on France’s best performing companies for economic intelligence purposes.

In addition to eavesdropping French Economy Ministers François Baroin and Pierre Moscovici between 2004 and 2012, the NSA gathered as much data as possible on big French companies. In particular, the agency wanted to know more about the companies that signed expensive export contracts for industrial goods, such as nuclear power plants, planes, high speed trains, etc.

According to an economic espionage order, the NSA intercepted all French corporate contracts and negotiations valued at more than $200 million in many different industries, such as telecommunications, electrical generation, gas, oil, nuclear and renewable energy, and environmental and healthcare technologies.

A second economic espionage order called “France: Economic Developments” shows that information was then shared with other U.S. agencies and secretaries, including the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Commerce, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasury. Eventually, this data could have been used to help sign export deals.

According to France’s IT security agency Anssi, the NSA could have spied on at least a hundred French companies, including most public CAC40 companies. Airbus filed a complaint for intelligence gathering earlier today.

The second document also states that the NSA could share this information with its closest allies — the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. It’s unclear whether the NSA is still actively spying on French companies. Today’s news is particularly interesting as it proves that the NSA is not only a geopolitical intelligence agency. It also plays an important role when it comes to economic intelligence.

See the following CNN article for more details.

(Above) Photo credit: The Intercept

No surprise, that’s the ultimate official French reaction to the WikiLeaks’ Espionnage Élysée exposé on the NSA “unspeakable practice” earlier this week – check out The Intercept article below.

French Justice Minister Says Snowden and Assange Could Be Offered Asylum

By Jenna McLaughlin @JennaMC_Laugh

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira thinks National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange might be allowed to settle in France.

If France decides to offer them asylum, she would “absolutely not be surprised,” she told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday (translated from the French). She said it would be a “symbolic gesture.”

Taubira was asked about the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of three French presidents, disclosed by WikiLeaks this week, and called it an “unspeakable practice.”

Her comments echoed those in an editorial in France’s leftist newspaper Libération Thursday morning, which said giving Snowden asylum would be a “single gesture” that would send “a clear and useful message to Washington,” in response to the “contempt” the U.S. showed by spying on France’s president.

Snowden, who faces criminal espionage charges in the U.S., has found himself stranded in Moscow with temporary asylum as he awaits responses from two dozen countries where he’d like to live; and Assange is trapped inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden. (See correction below.)

Taubira, the chief of France’s Ministry of Justice, holds the equivalent position of the attorney general in the United States. She has been described in the press as a “maverick,” targeting issues such as poverty and same-sex marriage, often inspiring anger among French right-wingers.

Taubira doesn’t actually have the power to offer asylum herself, however. She said in the interview that such a decision would be up to the French president, prime minister and foreign minister. And Taubira just last week threatened to quit her job unless French President François Hollande implemented her juvenile justice reforms.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article improperly described the state of Assange’s case in Sweden and his reason for avoiding extradition. He has refused to go to Sweden, where he faces accusations of sexual assault, because he fears he could then be extradited to the United States.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Source for picture (above): WikiLeaks

Please refer to WikiLeaks for more details.

Edward Snowden Supports Apple’s Public Stance On Privacy

by Josh Constine (@joshconstine)

Edward Snowden says we should support Apple’s newly emphasized commitment to privacy rather than a business model driven by personal data collection, whether or not Tim Cook is being genuine. Snowden spoke over video conference during the Challenge.rs conference in Barcelona today.

I asked Snowden his thoughts on Cook’s recent acceptance speech for an Electronic Privacy Information Center award, saying:

“CEO Tim Cook recently took a stand on privacy and Apple’s business, saying “some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Do you think Cook’s perspective genuine and honest, and how do you think it will play out long-term with regards to it hurting or helping Apple’s business, or whether Apple will keep this promise to privacy?”

Snowden responded:

“I think in the current situation, it doesn’t matter if he’s being honest or dishonest. What really matters is that he’s obviously got a commercial incentive to differentiate himself from competitors like Google. But if he does that, if he directs Apple’s business model to be different, to say “we’re not in the business of collecting and selling information. We’re in the business of creating and selling devices that are superior”, then that’s a good thing for privacy. That’s a good thing for customers.

And if that position comes to be reversed in the future, I think that should be a much bigger hammer that comes against Apple because then that’s a betrayal of trust, that’s a betrayal of a promise to its customers. But I would like to think that based on the leadership that Tim Cook has shown on this position so far, he’s spoken very passionately about private issues, that we’re going to see that continue and he’ll keep those promises.

It’s reasonable to wonder how much of Cook’s chest-beating on privacy is philosophy and how much is marketing. Since the iCloud celebrity photo hack last year, we’ve written about how Apple needs to be more transparent about security and privacy. Snowden seems to agree it could benefit the company as well as society.

Apple’s steps in that direction through press releases and public appearances by Cook have been positively received. They resonate especially well with the public in contrast to other tech giants like Google and Facebook that are aggressively collecting private personal data, and the widespread security breaches of big brands.

Yet while people frequently say privacy is important to them, their unwillingness to stray from products that rely on mining their data seems to suggest otherwise. We’re just at the start of the age of personalized computing, and those that embrace it may get an advantage in the market.

Apple is experimenting with ways to personalize with privacy in mind. Its new Proactive update to Siri scans your email to remind you about events, but only does this on your device rather than copying your data to its servers for processing. To keep up while remaining true to its ideals, Apple will need more creative solutions like this to deliver convenience without being creepy.

The latest news on Snowden’s encrypted files being decoded by Russian and Chinese spies would surely do no good for the former NSA contractor but conspiracy theorists would certainly question not just the validity of these claims but the timing – consider recent attempts to restore NSA surveillance and let’s not forget how closely the the NSA works with its British counterparts GCHQ, or MI6 for that matter.

(Above) photo credit: MARC VALLÉE

Check out the NYT article below.

Hackers May Have Obtained Names of Chinese With Ties to U.S. Government

By DAVID E. SANGER and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISJUNE 10, 2015

WASHINGTON — Investigators say that the Chinese hackers who attacked the databases of the Office of Personnel Management may have obtained the names of Chinese relatives, friends and frequent associates of American diplomats and other government officials, information that Beijing could use for blackmail or retaliation.

Federal employees who handle national security information are required to list some or all of their foreign contacts, depending on the agency, to receive high-level clearances. Investigators say that the hackers obtained many of the lists, and they are trying to determine how many of those thousands of names were compromised.

In classified briefings to members of Congress in recent days, intelligence officials have described what appears to be a systematic Chinese effort to build databases that explain the inner workings of the United States government. The information includes friends and relatives, around the world, of diplomats, of White House officials and of officials from government agencies, like nuclear experts and trade negotiators.

“They are pumping this through their databases just as the N.S.A. pumps telephone data through their databases,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It gives the Chinese the ability to exploit who is listed as a foreign contact. And if you are a Chinese person who didn’t report your contacts or relationships with an American, you may have a problem.”

Officials have conceded in the briefings that most of the compromised data was not encrypted, though they have argued that the attacks were so sophisticated and well hidden that encryption might have done little good.

The first attack, which began at the end of 2013 and was disclosed in the middle of last year, was aimed at the databases used by investigators who conduct security reviews. The investigators worked for a contracting firm on behalf of the Office of Personnel Management, and the firm was fired in August.

The broader attack on the personnel office’s main databases followed in December. That attack, announced last week, involved the records of more than four million current and former federal employees, most of whom have no security clearances.

White House and personnel office officials have provided few details about the latest breach. But the Department of Homeland Security has been telling outside experts and members of Congress that it regards the detection of the attack as a success, because it made use of new “signatures” of foreign hackers, based on characteristics of computer code, to find the attack.

In a statement, the personnel office said Wednesday that “it was because of these new enhancements to our IT systems that O.P.M. was able to identify these intrusions.” But the detection happened in April, five months after the attack began.

The list of relatives and “close or continuous contacts” is a standard part of the forms and interviews required of American officials every five years for top-secret and other high-level clearances, and government officials consider the lists to be especially delicate.

In 2010, when The New York Times was preparing to publish articles based on 250,000 secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks, the newspaper complied with a request by the department to redact the names of any Chinese citizens who were described in the cables as providing information to American Embassy officials. Officials cited fear of retaliation by the Chinese authorities.

Officials say they do not know how much of the compromised data was exposed to the Chinese hackers. While State Department employees, especially new ones, are required to list all their foreign friends, diplomats have so many foreign contacts that they are not expected to list them all.

But other government officials are frequently asked to do so, especially in interviews with investigators. The notes from those interviews, conducted by a spinoff of the personnel office called the United States Investigative Service, were obtained by hackers in the earlier episode last year.

Intelligence agencies use a different system, so the contacts of operatives like those in the C.I.A. were not in the databases.

But the standard form that anyone with a national security job fills out includes information about spouses, divorces and even distant foreign relatives, as well as the names of current or past foreign girlfriends and boyfriends, bankruptcies, debts and other financial information. And it appears that the hackers reached, and presumably downloaded, images of those forms.

“I can’t say whether this was more damaging than WikiLeaks; it’s different in nature,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which was briefed by intelligence officials, the Department of Homeland Security and the personnel office on Tuesday. Mr. Schiff, who declined to speak about the specifics of the briefing, added, “But it is certainly one of the most damaging losses I can think of.”

Investigators were surprised to find that the personnel office, which had already been so heavily criticized for lax security that its inspector general wanted parts of the system shut down, did not encrypt any of the most sensitive data.

The damage was not limited to information about China, though that presumably would have been of most interest to the hackers. They are likely to be particularly interested in the contacts of Energy Department officials who work on nuclear weapons or nuclear intelligence, Commerce Department or trade officials working on delicate issues like the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and, of course, White House officials.

In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine on both the Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee, called for the United States to retaliate for these kinds of losses. “Nation-states need to know that if they attack us this way, something bad is going to happen to their cyberinfrastructure,” he said.

But Mr. King said he could not say if the attacks on the personnel office were state-sponsored, adding, “I have to be careful; I can’t confirm the identity of the entity behind the attack.” The Obama administration has not formally named China, but there has been no effort to hide the attribution in the classified hearings.

The scope of the breach is remarkable, experts say, because the personnel office apparently learned little from earlier government data breaches like the WikiLeaks case and the surveillance revelations by Edward J. Snowden, both of which involved unencrypted data.

President Obama has said he regards the threat of cyberintrusions as a persistent challenge in a world in which both state and nonstate actors “are sending everything they’ve got at trying to breach these systems.”

The problem “is going to accelerate, and that means that we have to be as nimble, as aggressive and as well resourced as those who are trying to break into these systems,” he said at a news conference this week.

The White House has stopped short of blaming Katherine Archuleta, the director of the personnel office, for the breach, emphasizing that securing government computer systems is a challenging task.

Correction: June 10, 2015

An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misstated the name of the federal office building where employees handle national security information are required to list their foreign contacts. It is the Office of Personnel Management building, not Office of Personal Management.

Matt Apuzzo contributed reporting.

The legendary former NSA crypto-mathematician and whistleblower William Binney:

You may have read and heard about the latest cyberattacks on the US government (see video above) over the weekend? Reckon you can’t help wondering how coincidental this “incident” was, judging by the following Guardian article. Nice strategy, Congress??

Please refer to the New York Times and recently leaked Snowden documents for more details.

Now the question is: how long has this been going on and is this a “Plan B” in the aftermath of the recent NSA Surveillance stand-down?

Find out more from the Guardian.

(Above) Photo credit: http://glenngreenwald.net/

Check out the following Guardian article:

Charges against Edward Snowden stand, despite telephone surveillance ban

The former NSA contractor revealed the banned surveillance programme, but an Obama administration spokesman says they will not review his charges

The White House refused to reconsider its legal pursuit of Edward Snowden on Monday, while it sought to take credit for outlawing the bulk telephone surveillance programme he revealed.

Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest rejected the argument that the imminent passage of legislation banning the practice meant it was time to take a fresh look at the charges against the former National Security Agency contractor.

“The fact is that Mr Snowden committed very serious crimes, and the US government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them,” Earnest told the Guardian at the daily White House press briefing.

“That’s why we believe that Mr Snowden should return to the United States, where he will face due process and have the opportunity to make that case in a court of law.”

Earnest refused to comment on whether Snowden could be allowed to employ a whistleblower defence if he choose to return voluntarily, something his supporters have argued is impossible under current Espionage Act charges.

“Obviously this is something that the Department of Justice would handle if they are having [those conversations],” said Earnest. “The thing I would put out is that there exists mechanisms for whistleblowers to raise concerns about sensitive national security programmes.”

“Releasing details of sensitive national security programmes on the internet for everyone, including our adversaries to see, is inconsistent with those protocols that are established for protecting whistleblowers,” he added.

But the White House placed itself firmly on the side of NSA reform, when asked if the president was “taking ownership” of the USA Freedom Act, which is expected to pass Congress later this week.

“To the extent that we’re talking about the president’s legacy, I would suspect [it] would be a logical conclusion from some historians that the president ended some of these programmes,” replied Earnest.

“This is consistent with the reforms that the president advocated a year and a half ago. And these are reforms that required the president and his team to expend significant amounts of political capital to achieve over the objection of Republicans.”

The administration also avoided four separate opportunities to warn that the temporary loss of separate Patriot Act surveillance provisions that expired alongside bulk collection on Sunday night had put the safety of Americans at risk, as some have claimed.

“All I can do is I can illustrate to you very clearly that there are tools that had previously been available to our national security professionals that are not available today because the Senate didn’t do their job,” said Earnest.

“As a result, there are programmes and tools that our national security professionals themselves say are important to their work that are not available to them right now, as we speak.”

Asked four times by reporters whether that meant Americans were markedly less safe as a result of the standoff in the Senate, the White House spokesman repeatedly said it was up to these national security staff, not him, to say.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=4268521323001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

See also recent coverage on this topic.

And check out the following Guardian article below:

USA Freedom Act fails as senators reject bill to scrap NSA bulk collection

Ben Jacobs and Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York
Saturday 23 May 2015 05.46 BST

Bill fails for the second time after vote in the small hours of Saturday morning, but Rand Paul thwarts Republican leaders’ attempts to extend Patriot Act

For the second time in less than a year, US senators rejected a bill to abolish the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of American phone records.

By a vote of 57-42, the USA Freedom Act failed on Friday to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to advance in the Senate after hours of procedural manoeuvering lasted into the small hours Saturday morning.

The result left the Senate due to reconvene on May 31, just hours before a wellspring of broad NSA and FBI domestic spying powers will expire at midnight.

Architects of the USA Freedom Act had hoped that the expiration at the end of May of the Patriot Act authorities, known as Section 215, provided them sufficient leverage to undo the defeat of 2014 and push their bill over the line.

The bill was a compromise to limit the scope of government surveillance. It traded the end of NSA bulk surveillance for the retention through 2019 of Section 215, which permits the collection of “business records” outside normal warrant and subpoena channels – as well as a massive amount of US communications metadata, according to a justice department report.

Although the bill passed the House of Representatives by a massive 338-88 margin last week, it was unable to overcome concerns from Republicans about the process of letting telecom companies take responsibility about the collection data from the NSA.

Republican leadership was hoping for a short-term extension of the Patriot Act which would push debate into early June, once the Senate returns from its Memorial Day recess.

This was considered far more likely than a two-month extension of the legislation, which was considered a forlorn hope and failed by a 45-54 vote shortly after the USA Freedom Act failed to reach cloture on Saturday morning.

Nevada Republican Dean Heller, a co-sponsor of the bill, told reporters early on Friday: “We’re losing the ‘politics of going home’ argument with our conference.”

He added that proponents of a short term extension were able to argue that supporting the bill meant staying on Capitol Hill all week. “So how do you win that argument?” Heller said.

The answer was by making senators stay regardless of how they voted as Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, a virulent opponent of NSA surveillance, torpedoed any attempt to kick the can down the road.

On Saturday morning, after both cloture votes failed, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell asked for unanimous consent to extend the Patriot Act for a week. Paul objected. Objections were then heard from Paul, as well as from Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and New Mexico Democrat Martin Heinrich on four-day, two-day and one-day extensions. Eventually McConnell gave up and announced that the Senate would adjourn until 31 May, the day before the key provisions of the Patriot Act expire.

The failure of the USA Freedom Act leaves the Senate in an impasse.

Republican whip John Cornyn, a strident supporter of extending the Patriot Act, divided the Senate into three groups on Friday.

As he put it, there are those who want a “straight extension, those who like USA Freedom and those who like nothing”.

Those who want a straight extension of the Patriot Act are in a distinct minority and supporters of the USA Freedom Act still cannot muster the necessary super majority to advance the bill. The result means those who are more than happy to simply let Section 215 expire on May 31 are in the driver’s seat.

When reporters asked Paul on Saturday morning whether he was concerned about the provisions of the Patriot Act expiring at the end of the month, the Kentucky Republican seemed unworried “We were liking the constitution for about 200 years and I think we could rely on the constitution.”

There still is some room for compromise. Arizona Republican John McCain, when asked if the USA Freedom Act was better than a lapse, said: “There are some programs that are affected by ‘Freedom USA’ that I would be very concerned about shutting down.” He added “but obviously anything is better than shutting down the whole operation.”

McCain also noted that “you can argue whether we should be doing the mega data thing but you can’t argue that it’s a good idea to shut down the whole thing.”

However, that shouldn’t be seen as any sort of endorsement of the NSA reform bill by hawks in Senate GOP caucus. Representative Tom Massie, a Kentucky Republican who came to the Senate floor to witness the vote Saturday morning, told reporters he was surprised at how strongly many of his fellow Republicans felt about the compromise reform bill. “They really don’t like the Freedom Act,” he said.

In the meantime, barring a breakthrough in the coming days, “the whole operation may be shutdown regardless” as the May 31 deadline looms closer.

Mitch McConnell may still be majority leader but for now, it’s Rand Paul’s Senate.

Find out more from the two video clips below and the following related articles:

(Above) photo credit: Jeff Nenarella/The Epoch Times

See also other related reports.

The House overwhelmingly approved Wednesday legislation to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records. Are you counting on it? I’m not as it’s highly likely secret “alternatives” have already been paved to have the NSA continue business as usual…

(Above) Photo credit: CBS 60 Minutes

http://www.cbsnews.com/common/video/cbsnews_video.swf

http://www.cbsnews.com/common/video/cbsnews_video.swf

http://www.cbsnews.com/common/video/cbsnews_video.swf

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(Above) photo credit: RT (Image from twitter.com @Manuel_Rapalo)

No matter what the judge thinks, one can’t help feeling sorry for Jeffrey Sterling (see the New York Times story below) considering how David Petraeus got away so lightly.

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Sentenced in Leak Case Tied to Times Reporter

By MATT APUZZOMAY 11, 2015

LEXANDRIA, Va. — A former Central Intelligence Agency officer on Monday was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on espionage charges for telling a journalist for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. The sentence was far less than the Justice Department had wanted.

The former officer, Jeffrey A. Sterling, argued that the Espionage Act, which was passed during World War I, was intended to prosecute spies, not officials who talked to journalists. He asked for the kind of leniency that prosecutors showed to David H. Petraeus, the retired general who last month received probation for providing his highly classified journals to his biographer.

The case revolves around an operation in which a former Russian scientist provided Iran with intentionally flawed nuclear component schematics. Mr. Sterling was convicted in January of disclosing the operation to James Risen, a reporter for The Times, who had revealed it in his 2006 book, “State of War.” Mr. Risen described it as a botched mission that may have inadvertently advanced Iran’s nuclear program.

The Justice Department said that Mr. Sterling’s disclosures compromised an important C.I.A. operation and jeopardized the life of a spy. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he faced more than 20 years in prison, a calculation with which the Justice Department agreed. Prosecutors sought a “severe” sentence in that range.

Prosecutors maintain that the program was successful, and said Mr. Sterling’s disclosure “was borne not of patriotism but of pure spite.” The Justice Department argued that Mr. Sterling, who is black, had a vendetta against the C.I.A., which he had sued for racial discrimination.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema gave no indication that she was swayed by the government’s argument that the book had disrupted a crucial operation, or harmed national security. She said she was most bothered that the information revealed in “State of War” had jeopardized the safety of the Russian scientist, who was a C.I.A. informant. Of all the types of secrets kept by American intelligence officers, she said, “This is the most critical secret.”

She said Mr. Sterling had to be punished to send a message to other officials. “If you knowingly reveal these secrets, there’s going to be a price to be paid,” she said.

Mr. Sterling, 47, spoke only briefly to thank the judge and court staff for treating him kindly as the case dragged on for years. Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Mr. Sterling, said jurors got the verdict wrong when they voted to convict. “That said, the judge today got it right,” he said.

Under federal rules, Mr. Sterling will be eligible for release from prison in just under three years.

The sentence caps a leak investigation that began under President George W. Bush and became a defining case in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government leaks. Under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the Justice Department prosecuted more people for having unauthorized discussions with reporters than all prior administrations combined.

For years, Mr. Sterling’s case was known most for the Justice Department’s efforts to force Mr. Risen to reveal his source. At the last minute, under pressure from journalist groups and liberal advocates, Mr. Holder relented and did not force Mr. Risen to choose between revealing his source or going to jail. Prosecutors won the case without Mr. Risen’s testimony.

Since the conviction, the case has been notable because of the stark differences in sentences handed down to leakers. Midlevel people like Mr. Sterling have been charged most aggressively. John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer, served about two years in prison. Two former government contractors, Donald J. Sachtleben and Stephen J. Kim, are serving prison time. Thomas A. Drake, a former National Security Agency official, faced the prospect of years in prison but received a plea deal on a minor charge and avoided serving time after his lawyers won critical rulings before the trial.

By comparison, the F.B.I. investigated a decorated military leader, retired Gen. James E. Cartwright, after public reports described a highly classified wave of American cyberattacks against Iran. But that investigation has stalled because investigators considered the operation too sensitive to discuss at a public trial.

Mr. Petraeus, meanwhile, retains his status as an adviser to the Obama administration despite giving Paula Broadwell, his biographer, who was also his lover, notebooks containing handwritten classified notes about official meetings, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and the names of covert officers. Ms. Broadwell had a security clearance but was not authorized to receive the information.

Mr. Petraeus also admitted lying to the F.B.I., and the leniency of his plea deal infuriated many prosecutors and agents.

In court documents filed in Mr. Sterling’s case, the Justice Department argued that Mr. Petraeus’s crimes were not comparable. “None of this classified information was included in his biography, made public in any other way, or disclosed by his biographer to any third parties.”

Some thoughts for the weekend… listen especially to the first six and a half minutes of this clip below about the conspiracy theories surrounding the recent mysterious death of Dave Goldberg, the husband of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg – the “Facebook-NSA Queen”.

(Above) Photo credit: dailydotcom

Are you wondering why this “problem” (data overload – see article below) did not happen earlier…?

NSA is so overwhelmed with data, it’s no longer effective, says whistleblower

Summary:One of the agency’s first whistleblowers says the NSA is taking in too much data for it to handle, which can have disastrous — if not deadly — consequences.

By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | April 30, 2015 — 14:29 GMT (22:29 GMT+08:00)

NEW YORK — A former National Security Agency official turned whistleblower has spent almost a decade and a half in civilian life. And he says he’s still “pissed” by what he’s seen leak in the past two years.

In a lunch meeting hosted by Contrast Security founder Jeff Williams on Wednesday, William Binney, a former NSA official who spent more than three decades at the agency, said the US government’s mass surveillance programs have become so engorged with data that they are no longer effective, losing vital intelligence in the fray.

That, he said, can — and has — led to terrorist attacks succeeding.

Binney said that an analyst today can run one simple query across the NSA’s various databases, only to become immediately overloaded with information. With about four billion people — around two-thirds of the world’s population — under the NSA and partner agencies’ watchful eyes, according to his estimates, there is too much data being collected.

“That’s why they couldn’t stop the Boston bombing, or the Paris shootings, because the data was all there,” said Binney. Because the agency isn’t carefully and methodically setting its tools up for smart data collection, that leaves analysts to search for a needle in a haystack.

“The data was all there… the NSA is great at going back over it forensically for years to see what they were doing before that,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop it.”

Binney called this a “bulk data failure” — in that the NSA programs, leaked by Edward Snowden, are collecting too much for the agency to process. He said the problem runs deeper across law enforcement and other federal agencies, like the FBI, the CIA, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which all have access to NSA intelligence.

Binney left the NSA a month after the September 11 attacks in New York City in 2001, days after controversial counter-terrorism legislation was enacted — the Patriot Act — in the wake of the attacks. Binney stands jaded by his experience leaving the shadowy eavesdropping agency, but impassioned for the job he once had. He left after a program he helped develop was scrapped three weeks prior to September 11, replaced by a system he said was more expensive and more intrusive. Snowden said he was inspired by Binney’s case, which in part inspired him to leak thousands of classified documents to journalists.

Since then, the NSA has ramped up its intelligence gathering mission to indiscriminately “collect it all.”

Binney said the NSA is today not as interested in phone records — such as who calls whom, when, and for how long. Although the Obama administration calls the program a “critical national security tool,” the agency is increasingly looking at the content of communications, as the Snowden disclosures have shown.

Binney said he estimated that a “maximum” of 72 companies were participating in the bulk records collection program — including Verizon, but said it was a drop in the ocean. He also called PRISM, the clandestine surveillance program that grabs data from nine named Silicon Valley giants, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, just a “minor part” of the data collection process.

“The Upstream program is where the vast bulk of the information was being collected,” said Binney, talking about how the NSA tapped undersea fiber optic cables. With help from its British counterparts at GCHQ, the NSA is able to “buffer” more than 21 petabytes a day.

Binney said the “collect it all” mantra now may be the norm, but it’s expensive and ineffective.

“If you have to collect everything, there’s an ever increasing need for more and more budget,” he said. “That means you can build your empire.”

They say you never leave the intelligence community. Once you’re a spy, you’re always a spy — it’s a job for life, with few exceptions. One of those is blowing the whistle, which he did. Since then, he has spent his retirement lobbying for change and reform in industry and in Congress.

“They’re taking away half of the constitution in secret,” said Binney. “If they want to change the constitution, there’s a way to do that — and it’s in the constitution.”

An NSA spokesperson did not immediately comment.

(Above) Photo Credit: APA/EPA/GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO

It shouldn’t be any surprise if one has been following related news, including an earlier post this week on how the German foreign intelligence agency BND has been supporting NSA spying activities in Europe via a former US espionage base in Bad Aibling. Expect other similar actions against the NSA following the lead by Airbus (see video clip below).

And expect not just a tirade of questions on the German authorities but also the NSA and Obama administration. The NSA massive eavesdropping program was designed solely to protect America against terrorist threats? And nothing to do with industrial corporate espionage? Look who’s talking…

Or better late than never? Check out the article below:

Too little too late? NSA starting to implement ‘Snowden-proof’ cloud storage

Published time: April 14, 2015 10:28
Edited time: April 14, 2015 18:04

The NSA is implementing a huge migration to custom-designed cloud architecture it says will revolutionize internal security and protect against further leaks by data analysts with unfettered access to classified information.

Put simply, the NSA hopes to keep future Edward Snowdens out by employing a cloud file storage system it built from scratch. A major part of the system is that all the data an analyst will have access to will be tagged with new bits of information, including that relating to who can see it. Data won’t even show up on an analyst’s screen if they aren’t authorized to access it, NSA Chief Information Officer Lonny Anderson told NextGov.

The process has been slowly taking place over the last two years following the Snowden leaks. This means any information stored after the fact now comes meta-tagged with the new security privileges, among other things.

The agency has Snowden to thank for expediting a process that was actually started in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001. The idea for storing all information on cloud servers had been in the making, but hadn’t come to fruition until it was too late.

Now it’s moving at an expanded pace to implement something called GovCloud, which is a scaled version of the NSA’s entire universe of mined data. It is set to become pre-installed on the computers of all 16 US intelligence agencies, a move that started with the NSA.

At first glance, the idea appears counter-intuitive. Edward Snowden pretty much used the fact that all the information was in one place to find what he needed and access it.

However, as Anderson explains, “While putting data to the cloud environment potentially gives insiders the opportunity to steal more, by focusing on securing data down at cell level and tagging all the data and the individual, we can actually see what data an individual accesses, what they do with it, and we can see that in real time.”

The agency’s cloud strategist Dave Hurry explained the strategy further: “We don’t let people just see everything; they’re only seeing the data they are authorized to see.”

And if a situation arises where an employee needs access to information that’s off-limits, the program tells them who to ask to get it sorted out.

A further advantage to this is accelerating the analysis of the log data generated when an analyst wants to access particular information. Edward Snowden’s computer history, for some reason, did not set off any alarms until it was too late. That’s because the security logs had to be manually reviewed at a later time, NSA officials told NextGov.

They say this could have been averted with GovCloud, which would immediately raise a red flag if an analyst attempted to “exceed limits of authority.” The agency would have the former analyst in handcuffs before he managed to pack his bags for the airport.

GovCloud isn’t marketing itself as just a security feature that rescues the intelligence agencies from outdated practices and hardware. It is also touted as the answer to privacy advocates, who had a field day with the NSA when it turned out it was indiscriminately mining citizens’ communications.

“We think from a compliance standpoint, moving from a whole mess of stovepipes into a central cloud that has a lot more functionality gives us more capability,” Tom Ardisana, technology directorate compliance officer at NSA, said.

It’s not clear whether the general public will know if the NSA is ‘complying’, but its officials claim that GovCloud is a step in the right direction. Outdated hardware and an over-reliance on data centers built before the shifts in privacy and security policies meant the process of compliance had to be manual and tedious.

“Whenever you bolt on compliance to address a particular issue, there is always a second- and third-order effect for doing that,” Anderson continued. “It’s an extremely manual process. There is risk built in all over that we try to address. The cloud architecture allows us to build those issues in right from the start and in automated fashion address them,” he explained.

In broader terms, the new trend toward automation will also ensure analysts can drastically cut the time they spend on doing a whole plethora of tasks like cross-checking information between databases manually.

“It’s a huge step forward,” Anderson believes, adding how entire agencies – starting with the NSA and the Defense Department – were being transitioned into the new operating environment starting three weeks ago, meaning all their work tools and applications will now also have to be accessed from there.

Other agencies will follow, but for now it’s all about trial periods and seeing how smoothly the system works.

The agency hopes the move toward cloud computing will herald the end of data centers, although whether the system is hacker-proof remains to be seen.

Despite recent reports that Snowden is edging closer to securing Icelandic citizenship, his pal Julian Assange argues that the former NSA contractor is better off staying put in Russia:

Check out the original New York Times story.

(Above) Photo credit: Reuters.

The former US espionage base, Bad Aibling, was supposedly returned to the German foreign intelligence agency BND back in 2004. But that’s what “happened” only on surface. Check out the Spiegel special report below:

Spying Close to Home: German Intelligence Under Fire for NSA Cooperation

US intelligence spent years spying on European targets from a secretive base. Now, it seems that German intelligence was aware of the espionage — and did nothing to stop it.

April 24, 2015 – 07:20 PM

It was obvious from its construction speed just how important the new site in Bavaria was to the Americans. Only four-and-a-half months after it was begun, the new, surveillance-proof building at the Mangfall Kaserne in Bad Aibling was finished. The structure had a metal exterior and no windows, which led to its derogatory nickname among members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence agency: The “tin can.”

The construction project was an expression of an especially close and trusting cooperation between the American National Security Agency (NSA) and the BND. Bad Aibling had formerly been a base for US espionage before it was officially turned over to the BND in 2004. But the “tin can” was built after the handover took place.

The heads of the two intelligence agencies had agreed to continue cooperating there in secret. Together, they established joint working groups, one for the acquisition of data, called Joint Sigint Activity, and one for the analysis of that data, known as the Joint Analysis Center.

But the Germans were apparently not supposed to know everything their partners in the “tin can” were doing. The Americans weren’t just interested in terrorism; they also used their technical abilities to spy on companies and agencies in Western Europe. They didn’t even shy away from pursuing German targets.

The Germans noticed — in 2008, if not sooner. But nothing was done about it until 2013, when an analysis triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks showed that the US was using the facility to spy on German and Western European targets.

On Thursday, though, SPIEGEL ONLINE revealed that the US spying was vastly more extensive than first thought. The revelations have been met with extreme concern in the German capital — partly because they mark the return of a scandal that two successive Merkel administrations have never truly sought to clear up.

It remains unclear how much the BND knew, and to what extent German intelligence was involved, either intentionally or not. More crucially, it demonstrates the gap in trust that exists between two close allies.

Humiliating Efforts

The German government will have to quickly come up with answers. It will also have to decide how it will confront Washington about these new accusations. In the past two years, Berlin has made little to no progress in its largely humiliating efforts to get information from Washington.

The issue that could have been cleared up, at least internally, shortly after the NSA scandal began in the summer of 2013. But BND decision-makers chose not to go public with what they knew.

When media reports began emerging that the NSA had scooped up massive amounts of data in Germany and Europe, and that this data surveillance was not being performed exclusively for the global fight against terrorism, BND agents became suspicious. In previous years, BND agents had noticed on several occasions that the so-called “Selector Lists,” that the Germans received from their American partners and which were regularly updated, contained some oddities.

Selectors are targets like IP addresses, mobile phone numbers or email accounts. The BND surveillance system contains hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, such targets. Analysts are automatically notified of hits.

In 2008, at the latest, it became apparent that NSA selectors were not only limited to terrorist and weapons smugglers. Their searches also included the European defense company EADS, the helicopter manufacturer Eurocopter and French agencies. But it was only after the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden that the BND decided to investigate the issue. In October 2013, an investigation came to the conclusion that at least 2,000 of these selectors were aimed at Western European or even German interests.

That would have been a clear violation of the Memorandum of Agreement that the US and Germany signed in 2002 in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The agreement pertained to joint, global surveillance operations undertaken from Bad Aibling.

Cease and Desist

Washington and Berlin agreed at the time that neither Germans nor Americans — neither people nor companies or organizations — would be among the surveillance targets. But in October 2013, not even the BND leadership was apparently informed of the violations that had been made. The Chancellery, which is charged with monitoring the BND, was also left in the dark. Instead, the agents turned to the Americans and asked them to cease and desist.

In spring 2014, the NSA investigative committee in German parliament, the Bundestag, began its work. When reports emerged that EADS and Eurocopter had been surveillance targets, the Left Party and the Greens filed an official request to obtain evidence of the violations.

At the BND, the project group charged with supporting the parliamentary investigative committee once again looked at the NSA selectors. In the end, they discovered fully 40,000 suspicious search parameters, including espionage targets in Western European governments and numerous companies. It was this number that SPIEGEL ONLINE reported on Thursday. The BND project group was also able to confirm suspicions that the NSA had systematically violated German interests. They concluded that the Americans could have perpetrated economic espionage directly under the Germans’ noses.

Only on March 12 of this year did the information end up in the Chancellery. Merkel administration officials immediately recognized its political explosiveness and decided to go on the offensive. On Wednesday, the Parliamentary Control Panel met, a body that is in charge of monitoring Germany’s three intelligence agencies. The heads of the agencies normally deliver their reports in the surveillance-proof meeting room U1.214.

Panel members suspected something was different at this week’s meeting when Chancellery head Peter Altmaier, a cabinet-level position in Germany, indicated that he would be attending. The heads of the parliamentary NSA investigative committee were also invited to attend. BND President Gerhard Schindler, however, was asked to stay away. The day after the meeting, the government announced bluntly that Schindler’s office had displayed “technical and organizational deficits.”

Recast in a Different Light

With that, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has some explaining to do. The BND, after all, doesn’t just report to the Chancellery. It has also provided testimony on its activities at Bad Aibling several times to the Parliamentary Control Panel and to the NSA investigative committee. That testimony now appears in a different light.

According to a classified memo, the agency told parliamentarians in 2013 that the cooperation with the US in Bad Aibling was consistent with the law and with the strict guidelines that had been established.

The memo notes: “The value for the BND (lies) in know-how benefits and in a closer partnership with the NSA relative to other partners.” The data provided by the US, the memo continued, “is checked for its conformance with the agreed guidelines before it is inputted” into the BND system.

Now, we know better. It remains to be determined whether the BND really was unaware at the time, or whether it simply did not want to be aware.

The NSA investigative committee has also questioned former and active BND agents regarding “selectors” and “search criteria” on several occasions. Prior to the beginning of each session, the agents were informed that providing false testimony to the body was unlawful. The BND agents repeatedly insisted that the selectors provided by the US were precisely checked.

A senior analyst from the department responsible, known as “Signals Intelligence,” testified in March that BND lawyers would check “each individual search term” and “each individual selector” to ensure that it conformed with the Memorandum of Agreement. That didn’t just apply to government officials and German companies, he said, but to Europeans more broadly.

‘Prosecutors Must Investigate’

“Sneaking in” such search terms would “become apparent” in such a long-term operation, the witness said. “To try, over all these years, to sneak selectors by us to perpetrate economic espionage, I don’t think that is possible,” the witness said. He added: “We never noticed such a thing.”

Members of the NSA investigative committee now feel that they have been lied to, and the reactions have been harsh. “At least since the Snowden revelations in 2013, all those involved at all levels, including the Chancellery, should have been suspicious of the cooperation with the NSA,” says Konstantin von Notz, the senior Green Party member on the investigative committee.

“The spying scandal shows that the intelligence agencies have a life of their own and are uncontrollable,” says the senior Left Party representative Martina Renner. “There have to be personnel consequences and German public prosecutors must investigate.”

But as of late Thursday, the German government hadn’t even informed the public prosecutor’s office of the incident.

By Maik Baumgärtner, Nikolaus Blome, Hubert Gude, Marcel Rosenbach, Jörg Schindler and Fidelius Schmid

The article below sums it up nicely: the Protecting Cyber Networks Act passed by the Congress this week was a surveillance bill in disguise.

Check out this video by the Anonymous:

House of Representatives Passes Cybersecurity Bills Without Fixing Core Problems

April 22, 2015 | By Mark Jaycox

The House passed two cybersecurity “information sharing” bills today: the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s Protecting Cyber Networks Act, and the House Homeland Security Committee’s National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act. Both bills will be “conferenced” to create one bill and then sent to the Senate for advancement. EFF opposed both bills and has been urging users to tell Congress to vote against them.

The bills are not cybersecurity “information sharing” bills, but surveillance bills in disguise. Like other bills we’ve opposed during the last five years, they authorize more private sector spying under new legal immunity provisions and use vague definitions that aren’t carefully limited to protect privacy. The bills further facilitate companies’ sharing even more of our personal information with the NSA and some even allow companies to “hack back” against potentially innocent users.

As we’ve noted before, information sharing is not a silver bullet to stopping security failures. Companies can already share the necessary technical information to stop threats via Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), public reports, private communications, and the DHS’s Enhanced Cybersecurity Services.

While we are disappointed in the House, we look forward to the fight in the Senate where equally dangerous bills, like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, have failed to pass every year since 2010.

Contact your Senator now to oppose the Senate bills.

Time to brace up for further loss of privacy as the PCNA would amount to voluntary wholesale transfer of data to the NSA (see story below).

And the Congress actually believe it’s in the name of stopping hackers and cyber attacks?

House Passes Cybersecurity Bill Despite Privacy Protests

Andy Greenberg
04.22.15

Congress is hellbent on passing a cybersecurity bill that can stop the wave of hacker breaches hitting American corporations. And they’re not letting the protests of a few dozen privacy and civil liberties organizations get in their way.

On Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 307-116 to pass the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill designed to allow more fluid sharing of cybersecurity threat data between corporations and government agencies. That new system for sharing information is designed to act as a real-time immune system against hacker attacks, allowing companies to warn one another via government intermediaries about the tools and techniques of advanced hackers. But privacy critics say it also threatens to open up a new backchannel for surveillance of American citizens, in some cases granting the same companies legal immunity to share their users’ private data with government agencies that include the NSA.

“PCNA would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cybersecurity,” reads a letter signed earlier this week by 55 civil liberties groups and security experts that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch and many others.

“The revelations of the past two years concerning the intelligence community’s abuses of surveillance authorities and the scope of its collection and use of individuals’ information demonstrates the potential for government overreach, particularly when statutory language is broad or ambiguous,” the letter continues. “[PCNA] fails to provide strong privacy protections or adequate clarity about what actions can be taken, what information can be shared, and how that information may be used by the government.”

Specifically, PCNA’s data-sharing privileges let companies give data to government agencies—including the NSA—that might otherwise have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Wiretap Act, both of which restrict the sharing of users’ private data with the government. And PCNA doesn’t even restrict the use of that shared information to cybersecurity purposes; its text also allows the information to be used for investigating any potential threat of “bodily harm or death,” opening its application to the surveillance of run-of-the-mill violent crimes like robbery and carjacking.

Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the advocacy for the bill on the House floor, argued in a statement to reporters that PCNA in fact supports privacy by protecting Americans from future hacker breaches. “We do this while recognizing the huge and growing threat cyber hacking and cyber espionage poses to our privacy, as well as to our financial wellbeing and our jobs,” he writes.

“In the process of drafting this bill, protecting privacy was at the forefront throughout, and we consulted extensively with privacy and civil liberties groups, incorporating their suggestions in many cases. This is a strong bill that protects privacy, and one that I expect will get even better as the process goes forward—we expect to see large bipartisan support on the Floor.”

Here’s a video [above] of Schiff’s statement on the House floor.

PCNA does include some significant privacy safeguards, such as a requirement that companies scrub “unrelated” data of personally identifying information before sending it to the government, and that the government agencies pass it through another filter to delete such data after receiving it.

But those protections still don’t go far enough, says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute. Any information considered a “threat indicator” could still legally be sent to the government—even, for instance, IP address innocent victims of botnets used in distributed denial of service attacks against corporate websites. No further amendments that might have added new privacy restrictions to the bill were considered before the House’s vote Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed that the house has passed an information sharing bill that does so much to threaten Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and no real effort was made to address the problems the bill still had,” says Greene. “The rules committee has excluded amendments that would have resolved privacy concerns…This is little more than a backdoor for general purpose surveillance.”

In a surprise move yesterday, the White House also publicly backed PCNA and its Senate counterpart, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act in a statement to press. That’s a reversal of its threat to veto a similar Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Ac in 2013 over privacy concerns, a decision that all but killed the earlier attempt at cybersecurity data sharing legislation. Since then, however, a string of high-profile breaches seems to have swayed President Obama’s thinking, from the cybercriminal breaches of Target and health insurer Anthem that spilled millions of users’ data, to the devastating hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the FBI has claimed was perpetrated as an intimidation tactic by the North Korean government to prevent the release of its Kim Jong-un assassination comedy the Interview.

If the White House’s support stands, it now leaves only an upcoming Senate vote sometime later this month on the Senate’s CISA as the deciding factor as to whether it and PCNA are combined to become law.

But privacy advocates haven’t given up on a presidential veto. A new website called StopCyberspying.com launched by the internet freedom group Access, along with the EFF, the ACLU and others, includes a petition to the President to reconsider a veto for PCNA, CISA and any other bill that threatens to widen internet surveillance.

OTI’s Greene says she’s still banking on a change of heart from Obama, too. “We’re hopeful that the administration would veto any bill that doesn’t address these issues,” she says. “To sign a bill that resembles CISA or PCNA would represent the administration doing a complete 180 on its commitment to protect Americans’ privacy.”

This story (below) gives a whole new meaning to the phrase No News is Good News:

The most popular news sites can be used to spy on you, research shows

Cale Guthrie Weissman

Over a year ago it was discovered that government surveillance programs can use digital ad tracking software to keep tabs on Internet users. Now it appears more widespread than most thought.

In fact, 100 popular news sites were found to be susceptible to security issues that could help spies learn about what websites you browse and the data you share.

The fact that the government uses ad tracking software to surveil citizens isn’t necessarily new, but recently published research shows just how widespread the issue is.

This is in the wake of the one the top ad organisations publically saying that the majority of its ad tracking programs are safe and secure. The truth is that almost half of the software used by the most popular global news websites are unsecure and provide an easy way for governments to snoop, according to the new research.

A Toronto-based researcher named Andrew Hilts performed his own audit of the 100 top media sites to see how secure data exchange really was. Hilt is a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, as well as the executive director of the nonprofit Open Effect.

Hilt decided to check out if ad trackers — third-party ad software that sends and receives data — were encrypted. If the trackers were found to be unencrypted, it meant that personal data was in plain sight and easy to hack. (In essence, ad trackers leave cookies on users’ browsers, which are used to remember information such as personal preferences and previous logins. If this data is not protected it’s ripe for the taking.)

Of the pages Hilt loaded, he discovered 47 different third parties that were transmitting data to and from the sites. Of those third parties, 19 of them left what’s called a “unique identifier.” Hilt explained to me that unique identifiers are basically used to compile “a profile of who you are and what you’re interested in.”

Now this is the important, albeit slightly complicated, part of Hilt’s analysis:

An average of 53% of the third party hosts transmitting data on top news websites support HTTPS. News websites, on average, initiated communications with 10 different third parties that led to transmissions of uniquely identifying cookies that could not be secured with HTTPS. An average of 9 unique ID transmissions were to servers that support HTTPS. In other words, network snoops can take advantage of many insecurely-transmitted unique identifiers to help them identify just who is reading what news.

In laymen terms this means that on average nearly half of all third-party data transfers happening on the most popular news websites are unencrypted. Hilt explained to me the ramifications: “If an ad tracking system is being done unencrypted, other actors like your ISP or the NSA can collected this data,” he said.

Looking at the analysis, you can see that websites like the New York Post and the Economist transmit myriad data through third parties. Both of which, according to his chart, transmit well over 20 unencrypted identifiers that could be used by hackers.

The discoveries began in 2013. One of the many Snowden documents described a program that “piggybacked” on internet advertising technologies, using ad tracking technology to keep tabs on people of interest. The NSA discovered a handy loophole; many trackers are unencrypted. Thus, the NSA could easily tap into a website’s data exchange and also collect the traffic data of users.

More than a year after this initial revelation the Internet Advertising Bureau wrote a blog post calling for more widespread ad tracker encryption. This organisation called for all ad companies to support the encrypted HTTPS protocol — even the ad trackers. A website that uses the HTTPS protocol communicates encrypted data, which makes external snooping much harder to do.

The problem is that all parts of the website need to use HTTPS, not just the website itself. So if a news organisation uses third-party ad software that doesn’t use HTTPS, the website could very easily be tapped by spies. That’s why the IAB called for more data security.

“Once a website decides to support HTTPS,” the IAB wrote, “they need to make sure that their primary ad server supports encryption.” This way a user can be sure that all information exchanged on the page is secure and invisible to any unwanted eyes. The IAB added in its post that “nearly 80% of [its] members ad delivery systems supported HTTPS.”

Hilt’s findings show that this may not be the case.

Privacy advocates freaked out yesterday over Hilt’s findings. “A dubious congratulations to the St Louis Post-Dispatch, topping the news charts with 168 tracking URLs per page load,” tweeted Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins.

While the IAB’s message to advertisers is a step in the right direction, the fact that it doesn’t seem aware of how prevalent unencrypted tracking is means there’s a huge problem. In order for a website to truly ensure that its users aren’t being tracked by unknown third parties, it must ensure that both it and all of its third parties are communicating using HTTPS.

Hilt said the he’s happy the IAB is working to correct this issue, but it also needs to be aware of the work that needs to be done.

“The findings show they still have a ways to go,” he said.