Tag Obama

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.

(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

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

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: 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.”

(Above) Photo credit: dailydotcom

(Above) photo credit: US Department of Defense

Here’s an insightful piece from the New York Times (below) on a key man in the Pentagon previously featured in the Hollywood movies “Charlie Wilson’s War” and “Zero Dark Thirty”:

A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered

MAY 1, 2015
The Saturday Profile
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — ASKED what he is looking forward to, Michael G. Vickers, who retired this week as under secretary of defense for intelligence, answered without hesitation: “Sleeping.”

Having participated in virtually every significant global crisis of the past four decades, either as a supporting player or just as often cast in a starring, if uncredited, role, he has missed a lot of that. “I get kept awake by near-term things and long-term things,” he says.

Most Americans do not even know the job Mr. Vickers is leaving, just days after his 62nd birthday, even though the Pentagon commands the intelligence community’s largest share of the vast federal budget for spying, about $80 billion, and manages the most intelligence employees, about 180,000 people.

For a man who once practiced infiltrating Soviet lines with a backpack-size nuclear weapon, Mr. Vickers has a mellow, professorial demeanor. In addition to Army Special Forces training, he has studied Spanish, Czech and Russian and holds a doctorate in strategy from Johns Hopkins University. (Of his 1,000-page dissertation, he says, “It’s a good doorstop.”) His answers to policy questions are disciplined, cautious and usually organized in two parts, or three, or more.

So ask: What exactly kept you awake? First, as the military would say, are the crocodiles closest to the canoe.

“Our immediate threats are terrorism, particularly from global jihadist groups that want to attack the United States. It is a constant danger,” Mr. Vickers said. “And cyber is now in that category.”

Add the rising Russian challenge to the European order, which Mr. Vickers categorizes as “a fairly near-term problem,” along with “the things that could happen on the Korean Peninsula.”

And the over-the-horizon threats?

“When you step back a bit and look at enduring strategic problems,” he said, “then you look at the Middle East, where you have terrorism and proxy wars and the danger of religious wars and dangers of sectarian conflict.” He warns that religious and sectarian wars tend to be viciously heartfelt, and therefore bloody and protracted.

Attention must be paid to what, he predicts, will be this century’s most dynamic region: “East Asia and the rise of China — how to engage and manage that relationship and that with our allies, and keep the peace in that region.”

Each of those regions poses a difficult challenge for American policy makers, but Mr. Vickers warned of the prospect of more than one exploding simultaneously, with individual risks turning into a cascade of crises from, say, Mali to Pakistan or across East Asia.

“The challenge in the current world is that, for the first time since early in the Cold War, you have more of a risk of crises in multiple regions turning into broader conflict,” he said.

DURING the Cold War, Mr. Vickers was a member of the Green Berets assigned to infiltrate Warsaw Pact borders should World War III break out. His mission: Detonate a portable nuclear bomb to blunt an attack by the overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks.
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He was sent to Central America and the Caribbean during the era of small anticommunist wars, helping to end an airline hijacking and a hostage case involving Honduran government officials. He was also assigned to what a military biography euphemistically calls “contingency operations against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.”

Leaving the Army for the Central Intelligence Agency, he joined the invasion of Grenada. And after the Marine barracks in Beirut were bombed in 1983, killing 241 United States servicemen, he was given sensitive counterterrorism work in Lebanon.

As a rising C.I.A. officer, Mr. Vickers was the chief strategist for the largest covert action in American history, smuggling arms and money to Afghan mujahedeen battling Soviet invaders in Afghanistan.

After the collapse of communism in Europe, Mr. Vickers took a break in the policy world, writing white papers on budgets and strategy and how to restructure the military — until he was summoned to the Pentagon not long after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The grim connection was not lost on Mr. Vickers.

Al Qaeda blossomed among those same anti-Soviet “freedom fighters” in the years when Afghanistan, which had received billions of dollars in covert American assistance during the Soviet occupation, was paid scant attention by Washington after Moscow’s army marched home in disgrace.

“We made a mistake at the end of the Cold War by disengaging from that region,” Mr. Vickers said, “and I don’t think we want to do that again.”

FOR the past eight years at the Pentagon, he first managed Special Operations policy and then intelligence programs. He was former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’s handpicked liaison to the C.I.A. for the SEAL Team 6 mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Vickers’s efforts contributed to the accelerated expansion of Special Operations forces — doubling personnel numbers, tripling their budget and quadrupling the pace of deployments.

But there is another military truism — if your favorite tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail — and Mr. Vickers is aware of the dangers for the Special Operations forces.

“For all of the capabilities that S.O.F. has as a force-multiplier, as a small-footprint, big-impact force, it is not a panacea for all of your strategic problems,” he said.

Mr. Vickers’s Pentagon tour also witnessed growth in another signature weapon of the post-9/11 period: unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and attack. Early in the counterterrorism wars, the Pentagon could barely keep half a dozen drones airborne at one time; the ceiling now is 65.

“The combination of ‘armed,’ ‘precision,’ ‘reconnaissance’ has been one of the most dramatic innovations,” he said. “It has been a critical operational instrument in the successes we have had against core Al Qaeda, in particular.”

Yet the drone program has come under harsh public scrutiny, especially since President Obama revealed that a January strike by a C.I.A. drone on a Qaeda target in Pakistan killed two Western hostages, one of them an American. Mr. Vickers demurred when asked whether that portion of the lethal drone program now operated covertly by the C.I.A. should fold under the Pentagon.

But he addressed the broader issue of whether the benefits of killing terrorists with remotely piloted, pinpoint strikes by drones outweighs the risks of alienating the public.

“As precise as this instrument is, as important as this instrument is, it is one tool and it is not enough to bring stability to an area,” he said. Landing Hellfire missiles on terrorists does not end terrorism; policy has to address the underlying local grievances that lead to radicalism, he added.

To strategically defeat adversaries, he said, “you have to change the postwar governance to make the victory stick.”

With a résumé that reads like an action-movie character’s biography, Mr. Vickers has been depicted in one film, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and drawn into controversy over another, “Zero Dark Thirty.” He was absolved after a two-year inquiry into whether classified information was leaked to the filmmakers behind “Zero Dark Thirty.” Critics had argued that administration officials hoped the movie could burnish the president’s commander-in-chief credibility.

Near the conclusion of his retirement ceremony on Thursday, Mr. Vickers said he already had a glimpse of his new, quieter life.

He said that when a Pentagon work crew removed a special telephone installed in his home for after-hours secure communications, he found that his cable connection was accidentally cut at the same time — and he had lost all access to the outside world via Internet and TV.

A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2015, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Action Role of a Lifetime, Often Uncredited.

(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…

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.”

Photo (above) credit: http://www.freakingnews.com

Here’s a breaking news (below) from the CNN:

How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House

By Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN
Updated 0037 GMT (0737 HKT) April 8, 2015

Washington (CNN)Russian hackers behind the damaging cyber intrusion of the State Department in recent months used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.

While the White House has said the breach only affected an unclassified system, that description belies the seriousness of the intrusion. The hackers had access to sensitive information such as real-time non-public details of the president’s schedule. While such information is not classified, it is still highly sensitive and prized by foreign intelligence agencies, U.S. officials say.

The White House in October said it noticed suspicious activity in the unclassified network that serves the executive office of the president. The system has been shut down periodically to allow for security upgrades.

The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. intelligence agencies are all involved in investigating the breach, which they consider among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems. ​The intrusion was routed through computers around the world, as hackers often do to hide their tracks, but investigators found tell-tale codes and other markers that they believe point to hackers working for the Russian government.

National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh didn’t confirm the Russian hack, but he did say that “any such activity is something we take very seriously.”

“In this case, as we made clear at the time, we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” he said. “As has been our position, we are not going to comment on [this] article’s attribution to specific actors.”

Neither the U.S. State Department nor the Russian Embassy immediately responded to a request for comment.

Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said the White House’s use of a separate system for classified information protected sensitive national security-related items from being obtained by hackers.

“We do not believe that our classified systems were compromised,” Rhodes told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday.

“We’re constantly updating our security measures on our unclassified system, but we’re frankly told to act as if we need not put information that’s sensitive on that system,” he said. “In other words, if you’re going to do something classified, you have to do it on one email system, one phone system. Frankly, you have to act as if information could be compromised if it’s not on the classified system.”

To get to the White House, the hackers first broke into the State Department, investigators believe.

The State Department computer system has been bedeviled by signs that despite efforts to lock them out, the Russian hackers have been able to reenter the system. One official says the Russian hackers have “owned” the State Department system for months and it is not clear the hackers have been fully eradicated from the system.

As in many hacks, investigators believe the White House intrusion began with a phishing email that was launched using a State Department email account that the hackers had taken over, according to the U.S. officials.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in a speech at an FBI cyberconference in January, warned government officials and private businesses to teach employees what “spear phishing” looks like.

“So many times, the Chinese and others get access to our systems just by pretending to be someone else and then asking for access, and someone gives it to them,” Clapper said.

The ferocity of the Russian intrusions in recent months caught U.S. officials by surprise, leading to a reassessment of the cybersecurity threat as the U.S. and Russia increasingly confront each other over issues ranging from the Russian aggression in Ukraine to the U.S. military operations in Syria.

The attacks on the State and White House systems is one reason why Clapper told a Senate hearing in February that the “Russian cyberthreat is more severe than we have previously assessed.”

The revelations about the State Department hacks also come amid controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business during her time in office. Critics say her private server likely was even less safe than the State system. The Russian breach is believed to have come after Clinton departed State.

But hackers have long made Clinton and her associates targets.

The website The Smoking Gun first reported in 2013 that a hacker known as Guccifer had broken into the AOL email of Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and advisor to the Clintons, and published emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton’s private account. The emails included sensitive memos on foreign policy issues and were the first public revelation of the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private email address​ now at the center of controversy: hdr22@clintonemail.com. The address is no longer in use.

Wesley Bruer contributed to this report

Was that a brainfart?

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Wednesday that permits the US to impose economic sanctions on individuals and entities anywhere in the world for destructive cyber-crimes and online corporate espionage – see the Bloomberg article below.

Now what’s this about? An all-out effort on cyber-criminals or just plain window dressing?

For all their abilities to trace the attacks right down to the identities of the hackers, have the US authorities been able to do anything? Recall the Mandiant Report two years ago that allegedly traced Chinese hackers down to the very unit of a military base in Shanghai?

Recall also the five Chinese military hackers (above) on the FBI wanted list last year? Where has that led to (see video clip below)? And what about the alleged North Korean hacks on Sony Pictures?

With all good intent and seriousness to go on the offensive, Obama has yet to put his words into action on this front…

Hackers, Corporate Spies Targeted by Obama Sanctions Order

by Justin SinkChris Strohm

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Wednesday allowing the use of economic sanctions for the first time against perpetrators of destructive cyber-attacks and online corporate espionage.

That will let the Treasury Department freeze the assets of people, companies or other entities overseas identified as the source of cybercrimes. The federal government also will be able to bar U.S. citizens and companies from doing business with those targeted for sanctions.

“Cyberthreats pose one of the most serious economic and national security challenges to the United States,” Obama said in a statement. “As we have seen in recent months, these threats can emanate from a range of sources and target our critical infrastructure, our companies and our citizens.”

Under the order, sanctions only will be used if a cyber-attack threatens to harm U.S. national security, foreign policy or the broader economy. It’s aimed at cybercriminals who target critical infrastructure, disrupt major computer networks, or are involved in the “significant” theft of trade secrets or intellectual property for competitive advantage or private financial gain.

Data Breaches

The administration is using the threat of sanctions to help prevent large-scale data theft after breaches at major U.S. corporations, including retailer Target Corp., health-insurer Anthem Inc. and home-improvement chain Home Depot Inc. It’s also a recognition that companies are facing increasingly destructive attacks, such as the hack against Sony Pictures Entertainment that crippled thousands of computers and delayed release of a comedy movie.

Sanctions imposed under the executive order will help disrupt the operations of hackers who may be in countries outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement, John Carlin, U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, said in a phone interview.

Banks and other companies connected to the U.S. financial system will be required to prohibit sanctioned hackers and entities from using their services, cutting them off from valuable resources, Carlin said.

“It’s a new powerful tool and we intend do to use it,” Carlin said. “It has the capability to significantly raise the cost for those who steal or benefit through cybercrime.”

Transcends Borders

The unique aspect of the executive order is that it allows the U.S. to impose sanctions on individuals or entities over hacking attacks regardless of where they are located, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel told reporters on a conference call. While other sanctions are tied to a particular country or group of persons, hacking attacks transcend borders.

“What sets this executive order apart is that it is focused on malicious cyber-activity,” Daniel said. “What we’re trying to do is enable us to have a new way of both deterring and imposing costs on malicious cyber-actors wherever they may be.”

The order is a signal of the administration’s “clear intent to go on offense against the full range of very serious cyberthreats that are out there,” said Peter Harrell, the former principal deputy assistant secretary for sanctions at the State Department.

“This is a message that if folks around the world don’t cut out these activities, they’re going to find themselves cut off from the American banking system,” Harrell said in an interview.

Hidden Identities

Harrell said there are potential stumbling blocks to effective implementation. For one, hackers work hard to conceal their identity. Even though the U.S. and private companies have improved their ability to trace attacks, attribution can sometimes be difficult.

Daniel acknowledged that determining who is actually behind hacking attacks is still a challenge but said the U.S. is getting better at it.

In other cases, diplomatic considerations may be at play. The administration’s decision in 2014 to file criminal charges against five members of the Chinese military over their role in cyber-espionage strained relations with Beijing.

In January, Obama authorized economic sanctions against 10 North Korean officials and government entities in connection with the Sony attack. The North Korean government has denied any involvement in the Sony case.

Overseas Governments

Harrell said the use of sanctions can provide leverage as the U.S. registers complaints with governments overseas about cyber-attacks. Targeted use of the new sanctions powers also may help deter criminals.

“A number of these cyber-attacks are organized by fairly significant actors out there — large hacking collectives, or organized by foreign intelligence agencies,” Harrell said. “They all have real potential costs if they were put on sanctions lists.”

The Obama administration has been under pressure to take action to help companies protect their networks from cyber-attacks. In early March, Premera Blue Cross announced that hackers may have accessed 11 million records, including customer Social Security numbers, bank account data and medical information.

Home Depot in September said 56 million payment cards and 53 million e-mail addresses had been stolen by hackers. And just days earlier, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced a data breach affecting 76 million households and 7 million small businesses.

The highest-profile breach, however, may have been the hacking of Sony Pictures. The U.S. government said North Korean hackers broke into the studio’s network and then exposed e-mails and private employment and salary records. U.S. authorities said it was in retaliation for plans to release “The Interview,” a satirical film depicting the assassination of leader Kim Jong Un.

Use only end-to-end encryption programs and apps like SpiderOak, Signal, RedPhone and TextSecure, according to Snowden – see article below.

And never ever anything like Dropbox, Facebook and Google, as he has previously stressed (watch this video clip):

The apps Edward Snowden recommends to protect your privacy online

Mar 05, 2015 9:57 AM ET
Andrea Bellemare, CBC News

There are a host of free, easy-to-use apps and programs that can help protect your privacy online, and if everybody uses them it can provide a sort of “herd immunity” said Edward Snowden in a live video chat from Russia on Wednesday.

Snowden appeared via teleconference in an event hosted by Ryerson University and Canadian Journalists For Expression, to launch the CJFE’s online database that compiles all of the publicly released classified documents the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked. In response to a Twitter question,Snowden expanded on what tools he recommends for privacy.

“I hardly touch communications for anything that could be considered sensitive just because it’s extremely risky,” said Snowden.

But Snowden did go on to outline a few free programs that can help protect your privacy.

“You need to ensure your communications are protected in transit,” said Snowden. “It’s these sort of transit interceptions that are the cheapest, that are the easiest, and they scale the best.”

Snowden recommended using programs and apps that provide end-to-end encryption for users, which means the computer on each end of the transaction can access the data, but not any device in between, and the information isn’t stored unencrypted on a third-party server.

​”SpiderOak doesn’t have the encryption key to see what you’ve uploaded,” said Snowden, who recommends using it instead of a file-sharing program like Dropbox. “You don’t have to worry about them selling your information to third parties, you don’t have to worry about them providing that information to governments.”

“For the iPhone, there’s a program called Signal, by Open Whisper Systems, it’s very good,” said Snowden.

He also recommended RedPhone, which allows Android users to make encrypted phone calls, and TextSecure, a private messenging app by Open Whisper Systems.

“I wouldn’t trust your lives with any of these things, they don’t protect you from metadata association but they do strongly protect your content from precisely this type of in-transit interception,” said Snowden.

He emphasized that encryption is for everyone, not just people with extremely sensitive information.

“The more you do this, the more you get your friends, your family, your associates to adopt these free and easy-to-use technologies, the less stigma is associated with people who are using encrypted communications who really need them,” said Snowden. “We’re creating a kind of herd immunity that helps protect everybody, everywhere.”

Sending an email message is like sending a postcard. That’s the message Hillary Clinton probably now wish she heard earlier.

Andy Yen, a scientist at CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research – co-founded ProtonMail, an encrypted email startup based in Geneva, Switzerland. As he explained in this TEDTalk, it is easy to make encryption easy for all to use and keep all email private.

But curiously, it seems so much like PGP.

“Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don’t think there is any US or European firm, any international firm, that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government.”

That’s a quote from Obama reported in The Guardian (see article below).

Oh great, so Obama actually understood the consequences of government gaining backdoors into encryption? He should give the same advice to his NSA director Mike Rogers who somehow struggled when asked about the issue recently.

Building backdoors into encryption isn’t only bad for China, Mr President

Trevor Timm
@trevortimm
Wednesday 4 March 2015 16.15 GMT

Want to know why forcing tech companies to build backdoors into encryption is a terrible idea? Look no further than President Obama’s stark criticism of China’s plan to do exactly that on Tuesday. If only he would tell the FBI and NSA the same thing.

In a stunningly short-sighted move, the FBI – and more recently the NSA – have been pushing for a new US law that would force tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over the encryption keys or build backdoors into their products and tools so the government would always have access to our communications. It was only a matter of time before other governments jumped on the bandwagon, and China wasted no time in demanding the same from tech companies a few weeks ago.

As President Obama himself described to Reuters, China has proposed an expansive new “anti-terrorism” bill that “would essentially force all foreign companies, including US companies, to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services.”

Obama continued: “Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don’t think there is any US or European firm, any international firm, that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government.”

Bravo! Of course these are the exact arguments for why it would be a disaster for US government to force tech companies to do the same. (Somehow Obama left that part out.)

As Yahoo’s top security executive Alex Stamos told NSA director Mike Rogers in a public confrontation last week, building backdoors into encryption is like “drilling a hole into a windshield.” Even if it’s technically possible to produce the flaw – and we, for some reason, trust the US government never to abuse it – other countries will inevitably demand access for themselves. Companies will no longer be in a position to say no, and even if they did, intelligence services would find the backdoor unilaterally – or just steal the keys outright.

For an example on how this works, look no further than last week’s Snowden revelation that the UK’s intelligence service and the NSA stole the encryption keys for millions of Sim cards used by many of the world’s most popular cell phone providers. It’s happened many times before too. Ss security expert Bruce Schneier has documented with numerous examples, “Back-door access built for the good guys is routinely used by the bad guys.”

Stamos repeatedly (and commendably) pushed the NSA director for an answer on what happens when China or Russia also demand backdoors from tech companies, but Rogers didn’t have an answer prepared at all. He just kept repeating “I think we can work through this”. As Stamos insinuated, maybe Rogers should ask his own staff why we actually can’t work through this, because virtually every technologist agrees backdoors just cannot be secure in practice.

(If you want to further understand the details behind the encryption vs. backdoor debate and how what the NSA director is asking for is quite literally impossible, read this excellent piece by surveillance expert Julian Sanchez.)

It’s downright bizarre that the US government has been warning of the grave cybersecurity risks the country faces while, at the very same time, arguing that we should pass a law that would weaken cybersecurity and put every single citizen at more risk of having their private information stolen by criminals, foreign governments, and our own.

Forcing backdoors will also be disastrous for the US economy as it would be for China’s. US tech companies – which already have suffered billions of dollars of losses overseas because of consumer distrust over their relationships with the NSA – would lose all credibility with users around the world if the FBI and NSA succeed with their plan.

The White House is supposedly coming out with an official policy on encryption sometime this month, according to the New York Times – but the President can save himself a lot of time and just apply his comments about China to the US government. If he knows backdoors in encryption are bad for cybersecurity, privacy, and the economy, why is there even a debate?

This is bizarre (see article below) but a good sign that what Mega offers in encrypted communications is the real deal and the authorities are certainly not impressed, thus the pressures on credit card companies to force Paypal to block out Mega, as they did previously with WikiLeaks.

BUT don’t forget Kim Dotcom’s newly launched end-to-end encrypted voice calling service “MegaChat” comes in both free and paid versions – see my earlier piece on how to register for MegaChat.

Under U.S. Pressure, PayPal Nukes Mega For Encrypting Files

By Andy
on February 27, 2015

After coming under intense pressure PayPal has closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega. According to the company, SOPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy personally pressured Visa and Mastercard who in turn called on PayPal to terminate the account. Bizarrely, Mega’s encryption is being cited as a key problem.

During September 2014, the Digital Citizens Alliance and Netnames teamed up to publish a brand new report. Titled ‘Behind The Cyberlocker Door: A Report How Shadowy Cyberlockers Use Credit Card Companies to Make Millions,’ it offered insight into the finances of some of the world’s most popular cyberlocker sites.

The report had its issues, however. While many of the sites covered might at best be considered dubious, the inclusion of Mega.co.nz – the most scrutinized file-hosting startup in history – was a real head scratcher. Mega conforms with all relevant laws and responds quickly whenever content owners need something removed. By any standard the company lives up to the requirements of the DMCA.

“We consider the report grossly untrue and highly defamatory of Mega,” Mega CEO Graham Gaylard told TF at the time. But now, just five months on, Mega’s inclusion in the report has come back to bite the company in a big way.

Speaking via email with TorrentFreak this morning, Gaylard highlighted the company’s latest battle, one which has seen the company become unable to process payments from customers. It’s all connected with the NetNames report and has even seen the direct involvement of a U.S. politician.

According to Mega, following the publication of the report last September, SOPA and PIPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy (Vermont, Chair Senate Judiciary Committee) put Visa and MasterCard under pressure to stop providing payment services to the ‘rogue’ companies listed in the NetNames report.

Following Leahy’s intervention, Visa and MasterCard then pressured PayPal to cease providing payment processing services to MEGA. As a result, Mega is no longer able to process payments.

“It is very disappointing to say the least. PayPal has been under huge pressure,” Gaylard told TF.

The company did not go without a fight, however.

“MEGA provided extensive statistics and other evidence showing that MEGA’s business is legitimate and legally compliant. After discussions that appeared to satisfy PayPal’s queries, MEGA authorised PayPal to share that material with Visa and MasterCard. Eventually PayPal made a non-negotiable decision to immediately terminate services to MEGA,” the company explains.

paypalWhat makes the situation more unusual is that PayPal reportedly apologized to Mega for its withdrawal while acknowledging that company’s business is indeed legitimate.

However, PayPal also advised that Mega’s unique selling point – it’s end-to-end-encryption – was a key concern for the processor.

“MEGA has demonstrated that it is as compliant with its legal obligations as USA cloud storage services operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Spideroak etc, but PayPal has advised that MEGA’s ‘unique encryption model’ presents an insurmountable difficulty,” Mega explains.

As of now, Mega is unable to process payments but is working on finding a replacement. In the meantime the company is waiving all storage limits and will not suspend any accounts for non-payment. All accounts have had their subscriptions extended by two months, free of charge.

Mega indicates that it will ride out the storm and will not bow to pressure nor compromise the privacy of its users.

“MEGA supplies cloud storage services to more than 15 million registered customers in more than 200 countries. MEGA will not compromise its end-to-end user controlled encryption model and is proud to not be part of the USA business network that discriminates against legitimate international businesses,” the company concludes.

Photo (above) credit: US-China Perception Monitor.

The tweet from Glenn Greenwald above sums up the prevailing stance between the US and China (see video clip below) on backdoors and encryption matters – please see also article below.

It’s not like the NSA has not been warned and China may just be the first of many to come.

The United States Is Angry That China Wants Crypto Backdoors, Too

Written by
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
February 27, 2015 // 03:44 PM EST

When the US demands technology companies install backdoors for law enforcement, it’s okay. But when China demands the same, it’s a whole different story.

The Chinese government is about to pass a new counter terrorism law that would require tech companies operating in the country to turn over encryption keys and include specially crafted code in their software and hardware so that chinese authorities can defeat security measures at will.

Technologists and cryptographers have long warned that you can’t design a secure system that will enable law enforcement—and only law enforcement—to bypass the encryption. The nature of a backdoor door is that it is also a vulnerability, and if discovered, hackers or foreign governments might be able to exploit it, too.

Yet, over the past few months, several US government officials, including the FBI director James Comey, outgoing US Attorney General Eric Holder, and NSA Director Mike Rogers, have all suggested that companies such as Apple and Google should give law enforcement agencies special access to their users’ encrypted data—while somehow offering strong encryption for their users at the same time.

“If the US forces tech companies to install backdoors in encryption, then tech companies will have no choice but to go along with China when they demand the same power.”

Their fear is that cops and feds will “go dark,” an FBI term for a potential scenario where encryption makes it impossible to intercept criminals’ communications.

But in light of China’s new proposals, some think the US’ own position is a little ironic.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Trevor Timm, the co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Motherboard. “If the US forces tech companies to install backdoors in encryption, then tech companies will have no choice but to go along with China when they demand the same power.”

He’s not the only one to think the US government might end up regretting its stance.

Someday US officials will look back and realize how much global damage they’ve enabled with their silly requests for key escrow.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) February 27, 2015

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted that someday US officials will “realize how much damage they’ve enabled” with their “silly requests” for backdoors.

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted that someday US officials will “realize how much damage they’ve enabled” with their “silly requests” for backdoors.

Ironically, the US government sent a letter to China expressing concern about its new law. “The Administration is aggressively working to have China walk back from these troubling regulations,” US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Motherboard.

“It’s stunningly shortsighted for the FBI and NSA not to realize this,” Timm added. “By demanding backdoors, these US government agencies are putting everyone’s cybersecurity at risk.”

In an oft-cited examples of “if you build it, they will come,” hackers exploited a system designed to let police tap phones to spy on more than a hundred Greek cellphones, including that of the prime minister.

At the time, Steven Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University, wrote that this incident shows how “built-in wiretap facilities and the like are really dangerous, and are easily abused.”

That hasn’t stopped other from asking though. Several countries, including India, Kuwait and UAE, requested BlackBerry to include a backdoor in its devices so that authorities could access encrypted communications. And a leaked document in 2013 revealed that BlackBerry’s lawful interception system in India was “ready for use.”

NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers said at a cyber security conference in Washington DC Monday this week that the government needs to develop a “framework” so that the NSA and law enforcement agencies could read encrypted data when they need and he was immediately challenged by top security experts from the tech industry, most notably Yahoo’s chief information security officer Alex Stamos (see transcript).

Gemalto, the world’s largest SIM cards manufacturer that The Intercept reported last week to be hacked by the NSA and GCHQ, putting at risk some two billion SIM cards used in cellphones across the world, has somehow and somewhat concluded its findings after a “thorough” internal investigations in just six days, with assurance that its encryption keys are safe and admitted that the French-Dutch company believes the US and British spy agencies were behind a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its internal computer networks, back four-five years ago.

In The Intercept follow-up report (please see further below):

“Gemalto learned about this five-year-old hack by GCHQ when the The Intercept called them up for a comment last week. That doesn’t sound like they’re on top of things, and it certainly suggests they don’t have the in-house capability to detect and thwart sophisticated state-sponsored attacks,” says Christopher Soghoian, the chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Or consider this (below – Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0amvXr8BUk )

So, time to decide for yourself if you’re convinced and also think of solutions like encrypted communications – and do check out the video clips below:

Gemalto Doesn’t Know What It Doesn’t Know
By Jeremy Scahill
@jeremyscahill

Gemalto, the French-Dutch digital security giant, confirmed that it believes American and British spies were behind a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its internal computer networks, as reported by The Intercept last week.

This morning, the company tried to downplay the significance of NSA and GCHQ efforts against its mobile phone encryption keys — and, in the process, made erroneous statements about cellphone technology and sweeping claims about its own security that experts describe as highly questionable.

Gemalto, which is the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, launched an internal investigation after The Intercept six days ago revealed that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ hacked the company and cyberstalked its employees. In the secret documents, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the intelligence agencies described a successful effort to obtain secret encryption keys used to protect hundreds of millions of mobile devices across the globe.

The company was eager to address the claims that its systems and encryption keys had been massively compromised. At one point in stock trading after publication of the report, Gemalto suffered a half billion dollar hit to its market capitalization. The stock only partially recovered in the following days.

After the brief investigation, Gemalto now says that the NSA and GCHQ operations in 2010-2011 would not allow the intelligence agencies to spy on 3G and 4G networks, and that theft would have been rare after 2010, when it deployed a “secure transfer system.” The company also said the spy agency hacks only affected “the outer parts of our networks — our office networks — which are in contact with the outside world.”

Security experts and cryptography specialists immediately challenged Gemalto’s claim to have done a “thorough” investigation into the state-sponsored attack in just six days, saying the company was greatly underestimating the abilities of the NSA and GCHQ to penetrate its systems without leaving detectable traces.

“Gemalto learned about this five-year-old hack by GCHQ when the The Intercept called them up for a comment last week. That doesn’t sound like they’re on top of things, and it certainly suggests they don’t have the in-house capability to detect and thwart sophisticated state-sponsored attacks,” says Christopher Soghoian, the chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. He adds that Gemalto remains “a high-profile target for intelligence agencies.”

Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, said, “This is an investigation that seems mainly designed to produce positive statements. It is not an investigation at all.”

In its statement, Gemalto asserted:

“While the intrusions described above were serious, sophisticated attacks, nothing was detected in other parts of our network. No breaches were found in the infrastructure running our SIM activity or in other parts of the secure network which manage our other products such as banking cards, ID cards or electronic passports. Each of these networks is isolated from one another and they are not connected to external networks.

It is extremely difficult to remotely attack a large number of SIM cards on an individual basis. This fact, combined with the complex architecture of our networks explains why the intelligence services instead, chose to target the data as it was transmitted between suppliers and mobile operators as explained in the documents.”

But security and encryption experts told The Intercept that Gemalto’s statements about its investigation contained a significant error about cellphone technology. The company also made sweeping, overly-optimistic statements about the security and stability of Gemalto’s networks, and dramatically underplayed the significance of the NSA-GCHQ targeting of the company and its employees. “Their ‘investigation’ seem to have consisted of asking their security team which attacks they detected over the past few years. That isn’t much of an investigation, and it certainly won’t reveal successful nation-state attacks,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian.

Security expert Ronald Prins, co-founder of the Dutch firm Fox IT, told The Intercept, “A true forensic investigation in such a complex environment is not possible in this time frame.”

“A damage assessment is more what this looks like,” he added.

In a written presentation of its findings, Gemalto claims that “in the case of an eventual key theft, the intelligence services would only be able to spy on communications on second generation 2G mobile networks. 3G and 4G networks are not vulnerable.” Gemalto also referred to its own “custom algorithms” and other, unspecified additional security mechanisms on top of the 3G and 4G standards.

Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptography specialist, said Gemalto’s claims are flatly incorrect.

“No encryption mechanism stands up to key theft,” Green says, “which means Gemalto is either convinced that the additional keys could not also have been stolen or they’re saying that their mechanisms have some proprietary ‘secret sauce’ and that GCHQ, backed by the resources of NSA, could not have reverse engineered them. That’s a deeply worrying statement.”

“I think you could make that statement against some gang of Internet hackers,” Green adds. “But you don’t get to make it against nation state adversaries. It simply doesn’t have a place in the conversation. They are saying that NSA/GCHQ could not have breached those technologies due to ‘additional encryption’ mechanisms that they don’t specify, and yet here we have evidence that GCHQ and NSA were actively compromising encryption keys.”

In a press conference today in Paris, Gemalto’s CEO, Olivier Piou, said his company will not take legal action against the NSA and GCHQ. “It’s difficult to prove our conclusions legally, so we’re not going to take legal action,” he said. “The history of going after a state shows it is costly, lengthy and rather arbitrary.”

There has been significant commercial pressure and political attention placed on Gemalto since The Intercept’s report. Wireless network providers on multiple continents demanded answers and some, like Deutsche Telekom, took immediate action to change their encryption algorithms on Gemalto-supplied SIM cards. The Australian Privacy Commissioner has launched an investigation and several members of the European Union parliament and Dutch parliament have asked individual governments to launch investigations. German opposition lawmakers say they are initiating a probe into the hack as well.

On Wednesday, Gerard Schouw, a member of the Dutch parliament, submitted formal questions about the Gemalto hack and the findings of the company’s internal investigation to the interior minister. “Will the Minister address this matter with the Ambassadors of the United States and the United Kingdom? If not, why is the Minister not prepared to do so? If so, when will the Minister do this?” Schouw asked. “How does the Minister assess the claim by Gemalto that the attack could only lead to wiretapping 2G-network connections, and that 3G and 4G-type networks are not susceptible to this kind of hacks?”

China Mobile, which uses Gemalto SIM cards, has more wireless network customers than any company in the world. This week it announced it was investigating the breach and the Chinese government said it was “concerned” about the Gemalto hack. “We are opposed to any country attempting to use information technology products to conduct cyber surveillance,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. “This not only harms the interests of consumers but also undermines users’ confidence.” He did not mention that China itself engages in widespread, state-sponsored hacking.

While Gemalto is clearly trying to calm its investors and customers, security experts say the company’s statements appear intended to reassure the public about the company’s security rather than to demonstrate that it is taking the breach seriously.

The documents published by The Intercept relate to hacks done in 2010 and 2011. The idea that spy agencies are no longer targeting the company — and its competitors — with more sophisticated intrusions, according to Soghoian, is ridiculous. “Gemalto is as much of an interesting target in 2015 as they were in 2010. Gemalto’s security team may want to keep looking, not just for GCHQ and NSA, but also, for the Chinese, Russians and Israelis too,” he said.

Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptographer, says this hack should be “a wake-up call that manufacturers are considered valuable targets by intelligence agencies. There’s a lot of effort in here to minimize and deny the impact of some old attacks, but who cares about old attacks? What I would like to see is some indication that they’re taking this seriously going forward, that they’re hardening their systems and closing any loopholes — because loopholes clearly existed. That would make me enormously more confident than this response.”

Green says that the Gemalto hack evidences a disturbing trend that is on the rise: the targeting of innocent employees of tech firms and the companies themselves. (The same tactic was used by GCHQ in its attack on Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom.)

“Once upon a time we might have believed that corporations like this were not considered valid targets for intelligence agencies, that GCHQ would not go after system administrators and corporations in allied nations. All of those assumptions are out the window, so now we’re in this new environment, where everyone is a valid target,” he says. “In computer security, we talk about ‘threat models,’ which is a way to determine who your adversary is, and what their capabilities are. This news means everyone has to change their threat model.”

Additional reporting by Ryan Gallagher. Josh Begley contributed to this report.

This news originally from The Intercept, based on leaked files from Edward Snowden, shouldn’t come as a surprise as the NSA had been on a mission to Collect It All (Chapter 3) according to Glenn Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide” (see above).

High time to seriously (re)consider encrypted communications like encrypted calls and messaging apps (despite efforts to ban encryption by Obama and Cameron)?

Here’s the video clip of Edward Snowden’s latest public appearance (via video conference) on 14 February 2015 at the The Davis Levin First Amendment Conference, to a sold-out audience at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.

Previous speakers at this event include Daniel Ellsberg, Kenneth Starr, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Ralph Reed, Nadine Strossen and Jay Sekulow.

If you’re amongst those wary of (eavesdropping with) Skype and Google Hangouts, this will be great news.

New Zealand-based internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, best known for his legendary Megaupload and Mega file sharing services, announced last week the launch of his new and highly anticipated encrypted communication software MegaChat for video calling, messaging and chat. Dubbed a “Skype Killer”, the New Zealand-based service is available in both free and paid version – see video below.

And this is going to be interesting. The Snowden revelations have revealed how Microsoft, which bought Skype, has handed the NSA access to encrypted messages.

Earlier this month, following the Paris attacks, British Prime Minister announced his push to ban encryption altogether and US President Barack Obama has openly voiced support despite warnings of irreversible damages.

Meantime, Kim Dotcom said encrypted video conferencing, email and text chat would also be available later. In any case, here’s a video on how to register and start using MegaChat.

In the aftermath of the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks, it came as no surprise politicians were quick to up the antenna (again) on surveillance and stifle the right to privacy – whilst, in the same breath, they drape themselves publicly in Paris to embrace free speech and press freedom.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, stole the headlines this week saying that, if re-elected in May, he would ban encrypted online messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat if the British intelligence agencies were not given backdoors to access the communications.

“We must not allow terrorists safe space to communicate with each other,” said Cameron as he spoke about a “comprehensive piece of legislation” to close the “safe spaces” used by suspected terrorists – and also planned to encourage US President Barack Obama (who should be reminded that he has promised to pursue NSA reforms) to make internet companies like Facebook and Twitter cooperate with British intelligence agencies to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.

Backdoors are by and large security holes and what Cameron is proposing would set a dangerous precedence with irreversible consequences far beyond the loss of free speech – this is best summed up in the following open letter to David Cameron (below – and here):

Photo (above) credit: CIA

I like to share this POLITICO MAGAZINE exclusive interview with former CIA Director (May 30, 2006 – February 12, 2009) Michael Hayden on the release of the US Senate’s report.

Michael Hayden Is Not Sorry
The Senate report rakes Bush’s former CIA director over the coals. He fires back in an exclusive interview.

By MICHAEL HIRSH
December 09, 2014

Though the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program long predated his takeover of the agency in 2006, former Director Michael Hayden has found himself at the center of the explosive controversy surrounding the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its still-classified report on torture. In a long, impassioned speech on the floor Tuesday, Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein cited Hayden’s testimony repeatedly as evidence that the CIA had not been forthright about a program that the committee majority report called brutal, ineffective, often unauthorized “and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.” She publicly accused Hayden of falsely describing the CIA’s interrogation techniques “as minimally harmful and applied in a highly clinical and professional manner.” In an interview with Politico Magazine National Editor Michael Hirsh, Hayden angrily rebuts many of the report’s findings.

Michael Hirsh: The report concludes, rather shockingly, that Pres. George W. Bush and other senior officials—including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a time and Secretary of State Colin Powell—were not aware of many details of the interrogation programs for a long period. According to CIA records, it concludes, no CIA officer including Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss briefed the president on the specific enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006. Is that true?

Michael Hayden: It is not. The president personally approved the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah [in 2002]. It’s in his book! What happened here is that the White House refused to give them [the Senate Intelligence Committee] White House documents based upon the separation of powers and executive privilege. That’s not in their report, but all of that proves that there was dialogue was going on with the White House. What I can say is that the president never knew where the [black] sites were. That’s the only fact I’m aware that he didn’t know.

Hirsh: The report directly challenges your truthfulness, repeatedly stating that your testimony on the details of the programs –for example on whether the interrogations could be stopped at any time by any CIA participant who wanted them halted— is “not congruent with CIA records.” Does that mean you weren’t telling the truth?

Hayden: I would never lie to the committee. I did not lie.

Hirsh: Does it mean that you, along with others at senior levels, were misled about what was actually going on in the program?

Hayden: My testimony is consistent with what I was told and what I had read in CIA records. I said what the agency told me, but I didn’t just accept it at face value. I did what research I could on my own, but I had a 10-day window in which to look at this thing [the committee’s request for information]. I was actually in Virginia for about 30 hours and studied the program for about three before I went up to testify. I was trying to describe a program I didn’t run. The points being made against my testimony in many instances appear to be selective reading of isolated incidents designed to prove a point where I was trying to describe the overall tenor of the program. I think the conclusions they drew were analytically offensive and almost street-like in their simplistic language and conclusions. The agency has pushed back rather robustly in its own response.

Hirsh: You seem upset.

Hayden: Yeah, I’m emotional about it. Everything here happened before I got there [to the CIA], and I’m the one she [Sen. Feinstein] condemns on the floor of the Senate? Gee, how’d that happen? I’m the dumb son of a bitch who went down and tried to lay out this program in great detail to them. I’m mentioned twice as much in there as George Tenet—but George and Porter Goss had 97 detainees during their tenure, while I had two.

Hirsh: Is there anything you think the report gets right?

Hayden: All of us are really upset because we could have used a fair and balanced review of what we did. … The agency clearly admits it was fly-by-wire in the beginning. They were making it up as they went along and it should have been more well-prepared. They’ve freely admitted that. They said that early on they lacked the core competencies required to undertake an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists around the world. But then what the committee does is to take what I said out of context. They take statements I made about the later days of the program, for example when I said it was well-regulated and there were medical personnel available, etc., and then apply it to the early days of the program, when there were not. It misrepresents what I said.

Hirsh: One of the most stunning and cited conclusions of the report is that interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.

Hayden: That is untrue. And let me give you a data point. John Durham, a special independent prosecutor, over a three-year period investigated every known CIA interaction with every CIA detainee. At the end of that the Obama administration declined any prosecution. [In 2012, the Justice Department announced that its investigation into two interrogation deaths that Durham concluded were suspicious out of the 101 he examined—those of Afghan detainee Gul Rahman and Iraqi detainee Manadel al-Jamadi—would be closed with no charges.] So if A is true how does B get to be true? If the CIA routinely did things they weren’t authorized to do, then why is there no follow-up? I have copies of the DOJ reports they’re using today. The question is, is the DoJ going to open any investigation and the DoJ answer is no. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have all this supposed documentary evidence saying the agency mistreated these prisoners and then Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice saying no, you’ve got bupkis here.

Hirsh: What about the report’s overarching conclusion that these enhanced techniques simply were not effective at getting intelligence?

Hayden: My very best argument is that I went to [then-Deputy CIA Director] Mike Morell and I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me. If this story [about the usefulness of intelligence gained from enhanced techniques] isn’t airtight then I’m not saying it to Congress.’ They came back and said our version of the story is correct. Because of this program Zubaydah begat [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], who begat [others]. We learned a great deal from the detainees.

Hirsh: The report says that even the CIA’s inspector general was not fully informed about the programs—that in fact the CIA impeded oversight by the IG.

Hayden: The IG never told me that. The IG never reported that to Congress. Look, I’m relying on people below me. If they tell you an untruth, you get rid of them. But I never felt I was being misled, certainly not on the important contours of this program. What they [the committee] are doing is grabbing emails out of the ether in a massive fishing expedition. This is a partisan report, as you can see from the minority report out of the committee.

Hirsh: Can you sort out the discrepancy between your testimony that there were only 97 detainees in the history of the program when the report says there 119?

Hayden: We knew there were more. The high-value-target program—they don’t show up on my list if they’re at the [black] sites. And committee knew all about that. They have chapter and verse from [former CIA IG John] Helgerson about it. It’s a question of what criteria you use. When I met with my team about these discrepancies, I said, ‘You tell [incoming CIA director] Leon Panetta he’s got to change the numbers that have been briefed to Congress.’

Hirsh: The report suggests that you misrepresented what you told Congress in the briefings, telling a meeting of foreign ambassadors to the United States in 2006 that every committee member was “fully briefed.”

Hayden: I mean what are they doing—trying to score my public speeches? What’s that about? You want me to go out and score Ron Wyden’s speeches?

Hirsh: You don’t believe you’re in legal jeopardy?

Hayden: No, not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. How could I be in legal jeopardy?

Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

The government of Niger has given the Pentagon the greenlight to set up a new and second drone base in the West African nation – in one of the most remote places along an ancient caravan crossroads in the middle of the Sahara, at the mud-walled desert city of Agadez.

This base, its third in the region, will allow the US military to fly unarmed drones along a desert corridor that connects northern Mali and southern Libya which allows the drones to zero on a key route for arms traffickers, drug smugglers and Islamist fighters migrating across the Sahara, according to a report by online news portal Stuff in New Zealand based on sources from Nigerian and US officials.

This move allows the Pentagon “track Islamist fighters who have destabilized parts of North and West Africa. It also advances a little-publicized US strategy to tackle counter-terrorism threats alongside France, the former colonial power in that part of the continent,” according to Stuff.

A document from the US Department of Justice dated July 16, 2010 was released to justify US drone killings.

The picture above reveals the American and French military presence in the Sahara region, courtesy of The Washington Post.

Bad news for those who say ‘If only the walls could talk’. They can.

Hotel rooms are never safe havens as spies know only too well, but warnings of the risk often fall on deaf ears, to the sorrow or sometimes embarrassment of the tenants. Two recent news stories and the episode that I describe below hopefully change the public perceptions.

The stories describe how the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has traced and wiretapped top diplomats in their hotel suites over the past three years through its secret “Royal Concierge” program, which tracked some 350 hotels across the world, according to documents exposed by the former US intelligence contractor turned fugitive Edward Snowden.

Separately, it emerged in media reports last week that US President Barack Obama takes extreme measures to ward off any threats of secret video or audio surveillance by setting up an anti-spy portable tent in his hotel suite when traveling abroad, including in allied countries that the US allegedly targeted in conducting massive surveillance against foreign leaders and citizens. That amplifies the deep US concerns about being spied upon as much as spying on its friends and risks inviting potential hypocritical labeling of the White House.

I have written previously about the risk but there is much more than meets the eye, including an interesting exchange I once had with a foreign agent about the spy trade and hotel room risks.

Please find the entire column here and there.

Security officials leave an easily tapped device in closed-door conferences of European leaders

In photos made public of several closed-door bilateral meetings between various European leaders last week, there were two common denominators. One was the presence of the French President Francois Hollande. The other was the VoIP phone on the desk. The question is: What is that phone doing there?

In the middle of a major brouhaha over charges that the US National Security Agency had allegedly monitored the phone conversations of foreign diplomats, the officials in those photos were speaking to each other in the presence of this easily-tapped device.

What these these photos highlight is a security lapse, thus generating many questions: What else have European countries missed and not done to better protect their leaders from American or any eavesdropping?

You can find the entire column here and there.