The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.” [Continue reading…]
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Berlin and Washington are still “far apart” in their views on the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
The Guardian reports: GCHQ’s mass surveillance spying programmes are probably illegal and have been signed off by ministers in breach of human rights and surveillance laws, according to a hard-hitting legal opinion that has been provided to MPs.
The advice warns that Britain’s principal surveillance law is too vague and is almost certainly being interpreted to allow the agency to conduct surveillance that flouts privacy safeguards set out in the European convention on human rights (ECHR).
The inadequacies, it says, have created a situation where GCHQ staff are potentially able to rely “on the gaps in the current statutory framework to commit serious crime with impunity”.
At its most extreme, the advice raises issues about the possible vulnerability of staff at GCHQ if it could be proved that intelligence used for US drone strikes against “non-combatants” had been passed on or supplied by the British before being used in a missile attack.
“An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder. It is well arguable, on a variety of different bases, that the government is obliged to take reasonable steps to investigate that possibility,” the advice says. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Rovio, the Finnish software company behind the Angry Birds game, has announced it will “re-evaluate” its relationship with advertising networks following revelations that the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have the capability to “piggyback” on the private user data they collect.
On Monday, the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica revealed that the US and UK spy agencies had built systems that could collect data from “leaky” smartphone apps, ranging from basic technical information to gender and location. Some apps mentioned in the documents collected more sensitive information, including sexual orientation of the user.
In a statement released in the wake of the story, Rovio’s chief executive said the company would examine its business relationships, but also called for the wider industry to respond to spy agencies’ use of commercial data traversing the web.
GCHQ documents used the Angry Birds app, which has been downloaded globally more than 1.7bn times, as an extended case study, setting out examples of the sorts of data that could be collected through advertising networks associated with the app.
Many apps are funded by advertising, which is typically delivered by third-party networks. To target and track these adverts, some data must be transmitted across the internet – making it available to intelligence agencies’ mass-interception efforts.
In its release, Rovio noted that if spy agencies are indeed targeting advertising networks, then “it would appear that no internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled web sites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance”.
Targeting advertising is at the core of many if not most online business models that avoid subscription charges, whether apps or websites. Rovio’s CEO referred to the need to balance the ability of websites to make money with user privacy amid the NSA revelations as “the most important conversation to be had”. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said on Tuesday she has seen no evidence that Russian spies helped former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden steal U.S. eavesdropping secrets.
The Democrat’s comments on the MSNBC TV channel contrast with statements by her Republican counterpart in the House of Representative Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers.
Rogers suggested earlier this month that Russia had acquired influence over Snowden before he left his job as an NSA contractor and traveled to Hong Kong, where he leaked tens of thousands of classified documents describing U.S. and British eavesdropping operations.
“I have no information to that effect. I’ve never seen anything to that effect. I’ve asked some questions since and nothing has been forthcoming,” Feinstein said.
A senior U.S. official familiar with the matter said that he had seen no evidence Snowden had been recruited or influenced by Russia to acquire and leak U.S. eavesdropping secrets. Other U.S. security officials have privately offered similar assessments in recent weeks.
Rogers said on television 10 days ago that Snowden had likely been collaborating with Russia before he fled there last year. [Continue reading…]
The Hill: The Republican National Committee has formally renounced the “dragnet” surveillance program at the National Security Agency (NSA).
During its winter meeting in Washington, the committee on Friday overwhelmingly approved a measure calling for lawmakers to end the program and create a special committee to investigate domestic surveillance efforts.
The resolution, which declared that “unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights,” among other condemnations, passed the committee on a voice vote with near-unanimous support. Only a small minority of the 168 RNC members dissented.
Politico: A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”
“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.
Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”
In an editorial, the New York Times says: Once again, a thorough and independent analysis of the government’s dragnet surveillance of Americans’ phone records has found the bulk data collection to be illegal and probably unconstitutional. Just as troubling, the program was found to be virtually useless at stopping terrorism, raising the obvious question: Why does President Obama insist on continuing a costly, legally dubious program when his own appointees repeatedly find that it doesn’t work?
In a 238-page report issued Thursday afternoon, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a five-member independent agency, called on the White House to end the phone-data collection program, for both constitutional and practical reasons. The board’s report follows a Dec. 16 ruling by Federal District Judge Richard Leon that the program was “almost certainly” unconstitutional and that the government had not identified “a single instance” in which it “actually stopped an imminent attack.”
Two days later, a panel of legal and intelligence experts convened by Mr. Obama after the disclosures by Edward Snowden echoed those conclusions in its own comprehensive report, which said the data sweep “was not essential to preventing attacks” and called for its end.
The growing agreement among those who have studied the program closely makes it imperative that the administration, along with the program’s defenders in Congress, explain why such intrusive mass surveillance is necessary at all. If Mr. Obama knows something that contradicts what he has now been told by two panels, a federal judge and multiple members of Congress, he should tell the American people now. Otherwise, he is in essence asking for their blind faith, which is precisely what he warned against during his speech last week on the future of government surveillance.
“Given the unique power of the state,” Mr. Obama said, “it is not enough for leaders to say: trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached.”
The more likely reality is that the multiple analyses of recent weeks are correct, and that the phone-data sweeps have simply been ineffective. If they had assisted in the prevention of any terrorist attacks, it is safe to assume that we would know by now. Instead, despite repeated claims that the bulk-data collection programs had a hand in thwarting 54 terrorist plots, the privacy board members write, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
That reiterates the findings of Judge Leon — who noted that even behind closed doors, the government provided “no proof” of the program’s efficacy — as well as the conclusion of a report released this month by the New America Foundation that the metadata program “had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity.”
No one disputes that the threat of terrorism is real and unrelenting, or that our intelligence techniques must adapt to a rapidly changing world. It is equally clear that the dragnet collection of Americans’ phone calls is not the answer.
Free Snowden:@mrbass21 Recently several threats have been made on your life by the intelligence community. Are you afraid for your life? Thoughts? #AskSnowden
It’s concerning, to me, but primarily for reasons you might not expect.
That current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts. These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.
The fact that it’s also a direct threat to my life is something I am aware of, but I’m not going to be intimidated. Doing the right thing means having no regrets. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.
The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.
The report is likely to inject a significant new voice into the debate over surveillance, underscoring that the issue was not settled by a high-profile speech President Obama gave last week. Mr. Obama consulted with the board, along with a separate review group that last month delivered its own report about surveillance policies. But while he said in his speech that he was tightening access to the data and declared his intention to find a way to end government collection of the bulk records, he said the program’s capabilities should be preserved. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: A major independent commission headed by the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, was launched on Wednesday to investigate the future of the internet in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.
The two-year inquiry, announced at the World Economic Forum at Davos, will be wide-ranging but focus primarily on state censorship of the internet as well as the issues of privacy and surveillance raised by the Snowden leaks about America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ spy agencies.
The investigation, which will be conducted by a 25-member panel of politicians, academics, former intelligence officials and others from around the world, is an acknowledgement of the concerns about freedom raised by the debate.
Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, said: “The rapid evolution of the net has been made possible by the open and flexible model by which it has evolved and been governed. But increasingly this is coming under attack.
“And this is happening as issues of net freedom, net security and net surveillance are increasingly debated. Net freedom is as fundamental as freedom of information and freedom of speech in our societies.” [Continue reading…]
National Journal reports: When President Obama announced his long-awaited reforms to the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program, it was met by a collective yawn. It was the Friday before a holiday weekend, and not many Americans were listening. Those who were were finding it difficult.
Fifty percent of Americans have heard nothing about the president’s proposals, and 41 percent said they’d heard just a little, according to a new Pew Research Center/USA Today poll. Taken together the numbers mean that nine out of 10 citizens had little interest in what Obama had to say following six months of heated policy debate in Washington.
It’s not that the issue isn’t important (the poll also found 53 percent of respondents disapprove of the government’s bulk collection practices around Internet and telephone metadata), but that something was missing—an element that would capture the imagination of Americans and allow them to pay attention to an important (wonky!) area of policy.
In his speech, Obama stuck to policy, avoiding nearly all talk of controversial leaker Edward Snowden. “I am not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden’s actions or his motivations,” Obama said. That, perhaps, is where he lost much of America. The question of whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a villian has been a favorite debate topic of Americans since news of the survellaince program first broke in June. [Continue reading…]
Jane Mayer reports: Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower, strongly denies allegations made by members of Congress that he was acting as a spy, perhaps for a foreign power, when he took hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents. Speaking from Moscow, where he is a fugitive from American justice, Snowden told The New Yorker, “This ‘Russian spy’ push is absurd.”
On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Michigan who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described Snowden as a “thief, who we believe had some help.” The show’s host, David Gregory, interjected, “You think the Russians helped Ed Snowden?” Rogers replied that he believed it was neither “coincidence” nor “a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the F.S.B.”
Snowden, in a rare interview that he conducted by encrypted means from Moscow, denied the allegations outright, stressing that he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone, much less a government.” He added, “It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.”
If he was a Russian spy, Snowden asked, “Why Hong Kong?” And why, then, was he “stuck in the airport forever” when he reached Moscow? (He spent forty days in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo International Airport.) “Spies get treated better than that.” [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Battling a perfect storm of government suspicion and pricing probes in China, U.S. technology companies are having to re-think how they sell hardware and services in the world’s second-biggest economy.
U.S. multinationals, including IBM, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm, are looking to settle price-gouging investigations and restore trust with Chinese regulators in the wake of reports that U.S. government agencies directly collect data and tap networks of the biggest domestic technology companies.
All U.S. IT firms are “on the defensive” in China, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University. “They are all under suspicion as either witting or unwitting collaborators in the U.S. government’s surveillance and intelligence gathering activities.” [Continue reading…]
NBC reports: Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former CIA official, said Friday that one key question now in the Snowden affair is “Is it really Edward Snowden who is doing this, or is there a larger apparatus? I know that many people in the intelligence community… now no longer regard Edward Snowden as a thief or a traitor…. They regard him as a defector” who has gone over to a foreign intelligence agency.
It’s possible that Riedel, along with Rep. Mike Rogers and Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the members of the intelligence community they talk to are all complete idiots.
That’s definitely possible.
What’s more likely though, is that an assumption being made by the heads of the intelligence agencies is that the average American is an idiot. They imagine that if the word “defector” gets repeated often enough, the idea will catch on and through the power of muddled thinking — or no thinking at all — an increasing number of people will start to believe that we’re back in the Cold War and Snowden switched sides.
Here’s the syllogism:
Defectors go to Russia. Edward Snowden went to Russia. Therefore Snowden must be a defector.
Here’s the problem with this “logic”: If Snowden really was a defector, he wouldn’t have gone via Hong Kong and met Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras on the way. He wouldn’t have communicated with anyone other than his Russian handlers. All the intelligence in his possession would have remained secret, thus retaining its maximum value to its recipients.
The current debate would not be taking place because hardly anyone in the world would have heard of Snowden. His name would have been placed on missing persons’ lists and his disappearance would attracted little attention beyond his family. The NSA, given Snowden’s lowly position as an employee and subsequent contractor, would most likely still remain blissfully ignorant about his breach of its security.
Edward Snowden, happy to be enjoying his anonymity and the rewards for his services would now be enjoying his new life in Russia with far more freedom than he currently has.
Meanwhile, the only defection that has actually taken place is that of common sense departing from the minds of a large number of Snowden’s critics.
The New York Times reports: Google, which briefly considered moving all of its computer servers out of the United States last year after learning how they had been penetrated by the National Security Agency, was looking for a public assurance from President Obama that the government would no longer secretly suck data from the company’s corner of the Internet cloud.
Microsoft was listening to see if Mr. Obama would adopt a recommendation from his advisers that the government stop routinely stockpiling flaws in its Windows operating system, then using them to penetrate some foreign computer systems and, in rare cases, launch cyberattacks.
Intel and computer security companies were eager to hear Mr. Obama embrace a commitment that the United States would never knowingly move to weaken encryption systems.
Huffington Post reports: The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
