Video: NSA whistleblowers point to Obama’s omissions in NSA speech
Category Archives: Five Eyes
Tepid global reaction to Obama’s NSA vow
The Washington Post reports: After months of revelations that strained U.S. relations with allies and cast a harsh light on the National Security Agency’s global surveillance reach, President Obama’s speech Friday was aimed at least in part at reassuring the world of American intentions.
But the initial reaction overseas suggested he still has a significant way to go to heal the rifts, with many wondering why he didn’t offer more specific protections.
In Germany, where revelations that the NSA had been eavesdropping on the calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel stirred deep anger and unusually tough criticism of Washington, Obama’s promises to rein in the excesses of U.S. spying were met with a tepid welcome from the German government — and scorn from some analysts.
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert tweeted that the government would appreciate better safeguards of the rights of non-U.S. citizens but would need more time to review Obama’s words in detail. [Continue reading…]
Video: Obama NSA reforms are ‘a bouquet of roses’ to the intelligence agencies
Obama’s restrictions on NSA surveillance rely on narrow definition of ‘spying’
Barton Gellman reports: President Obama said Friday, in his first major speech on electronic surveillance, that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.”
Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by the National Security Agency, but the changes he announced will allow it to continue — or expand — the collection of personal data from billions of people around the world, Americans and foreign citizens alike.
Obama squares that circle with an unusually narrow definition of “spying.” It does not include the ingestion of tens of trillions of records about the telephone calls, e-mails, locations and relationships of people for whom there is no suspicion of relevance to any threat.
In his speech, and an accompanying policy directive, Obama described principles for “restricting the use of this information” — but not for gathering less of it.
Alongside the invocation of privacy and restraint, Obama gave his plainest endorsement yet of “bulk collection,” a term he used more than once and authorized explicitly in Presidential Policy Directive 28. In a footnote, the directive defined the term to mean high-volume collection “without the use of discriminants.” [Continue reading…]
Obama’s (still) unanswered question on phone spying
National Journal reports: Ending bulk data collection, which the NSA claims is authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, has been the top priority for civil liberties groups.
Obama announced on Friday that he will end the program “as it currently exists.”
Starting immediately, NSA analysts will need approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court every time they want to access the phone database. Obama also said he plans to eventually move the database out of the government’s hands. The president directed Attorney General Eric Holder and top intelligence officials to come up with a plan by March 28 for turning over control of the database.
But no matter who stores the data, the NSA will want to ensure that its analysts can still access it when they want to map the connections of a potential terrorist group. That could mean the administration will ask Congress to enact a mandate requiring phone companies to store their customers’ data on behalf of the NSA.
Privacy advocates warn that a data retention mandate would turn phone companies into agents of the NSA.
“To the contrary, companies should be working on ways to store less user data for less time—decreasing the risks from data breaches and intrusions like the one that just happened to Target,” wrote Cindy Cohn and Rainey Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Data retention heads in the wrong direction for our security regardless of whether the government or private parties store the information.”
Kevin Bankston, a policy director for the New American Foundation, said that if the alternative to government storage is mandatory data retention or a requirement for phone companies to turn the data over to some other third party, “the President should be prepared for a major legislative battle with key members of Congress, the technology industry and the privacy community arrayed against him.” [Continue reading…]
Video: Julian Assange responds to Obama’s NSA reforms speech
A transcript of Obama’s full speech can be read here.
U.S. officials dream of murdering Edward Snowden
Buzzfeed reports: Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.” [Continue reading…]
NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep
The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.
The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.
The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.
The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity. [Continue reading…]
If you want Obama to rein in the NSA, you’re about to be disappointed
James Oliphant writes: President Obama has a rare opportunity this week to reshape the nation’s counterterrorism strategy. He won’t take it.
The White House has been trying to lower expectations for the president’s planned Friday speech for days now. He’ll outline a series of reforms to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs in an address at the Justice Department, but Obama will do nothing to diminish the government’s capacity to root out terror networks, aides say.
Ever since the flood of disclosures regarding the NSA from former contractor Edward Snowden, Obama and his team have tried to walk a careful public line: appearing to cherish Americans’ privacy while defending the agency’s actions, particularly the bulk collection of telephone records, the so-called “metadata.”
But it’s been evident all along that the White House has more or less been dragged into the reform debate. At a press conference back in August, for example, the president maintained, amid heavy criticism, that the programs are valuable and that a public skeptical about their reach simply needs reassurance that they won’t be abused.
That’s still Obama’s view. And in the days leading to Friday’s speech, Jay Carney and others in the White House have referred to the issue as one of transparency and disclosure, not of reining in government power. “The president has been clear throughout this review process that we will not harm our national security or our ability to face global threats,” Obama’s press secretary said last week. “And our intelligence-gathering activities are directly related to our ability to face those global threats and protect our national security.”
To lay the groundwork for that position, aides to the president told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that the NSA’s metadata collection scheme could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. What’s more, Obama has adopted that “9/11 justification” for the NSA program, the paper reported.
That’s a blinking-red signal that the administration is not about to be accused of making the country more vulnerable by tampering with such a preventive weapon. [Continue reading…]
Edward Snowden isn’t the only truth teller who deserves clemency
Michael Ratner, the U.S. attorney for Julian Assange, writes: Last week, both the New York Times and the Guardian released editorials supporting clemency for NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Considering the important nature of Snowden’s revelations, clemency is definitely in order – and it’s about time that majorww outlets recognize that.
However, the focus on Snowden’s singular case seriously deflects from the fact that the Obama administration has been a nightmare for whistleblowers and truth tellers, and that several others currently in prison or in exile deserve the same clemency or clear assurances they will not be prosecuted.
So why is the media now calling for mercy for Edward Snowden, while other truth tellers including Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, continue to face persecution (and prosecution)?
If you apply the criteria established by both the New York Times and the Guardian to Manning and Assange – as well as other truth tellers including Jeremy Hammond, currently in prison serving a 10-year sentence after exposing corporate spy networks – a clear double standard emerges. [Continue reading…]
NSA devises radio pathway into computers
The New York Times reports: The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.
The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level. [Continue reading…]
Mozilla calls on world to protect Firefox browser from the NSA
Wired reports: Brendan Eich is the chief technology officer of the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit behind the Firefox web browser. Among many other things, he oversees the Firefox security team — the software engineers who work to steel the browser against online attacks from hackers, phishers, and other miscreants — and that team is about to get bigger. Much, much bigger.
In a recent blog post, Eich calls for security researchers across the globe to regularly audit the Firefox source code and create automated systems that can ensure the same code is used to update 18 million machines that run the browser. That’s not an option for other browsers, but it is for Firefox. The code behind the browser is completely open source, meaning anyone can look at it, at any time.
The move is one more way that the giants of the web are responding to revelations that the National Security Agency is snooping on web traffic via popular services and software. After NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government is tapping into data collected by private companies like Google and Facebook and then private email outfit Lavabit revealed a gag order that forbade the company from the telling customers the government was requesting information about them, Eich is worried that the feds could force Mozilla into adding a backdoor into its browser. [Continue reading…]
Phone firms balk at proposal that would force them to store surveillance data
The Associated Press reports: Telephone companies are quietly balking at the idea of changing how they collect and store Americans’ phone records to help the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. They’re worried about their exposure to lawsuits and the price tag if the U.S. government asks them to hold information about customers for longer than they already do.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday what changes he is willing to make to satisfy privacy, legal and civil liberties concerns over the NSA’s surveillance practices. One of the most important questions is whether the government will continue to collect millions of Americans’ phone records every day so that the government can identify anyone it believes might be communicating with known terrorists.
The president’s hand-picked review committee has recommended ending the phone records program as it exists. It suggested shifting the storage of the phone records from the NSA to phone companies or an unspecified third party, and it recommended new legal requirements before the government could search anyone’s phone records.
The phone companies don’t want the job. Executives and their lawyers have complained about the plan in confidential meetings with administration officials and key congressional intelligence and other committees, according to interviews by The Associated Press. Two phone executives familiar with the discussions said the cellular industry told the government that it prefers the NSA keep control over the surveillance program and would only accept changes if they were legally required. The executives spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the private discussions. But there have been public complaints, too. [Continue reading…]
NSA phone record collection does little to prevent terrorist attacks, group says
The Washington Post reports: An analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”
In the majority of cases, traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case, according to the study by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit group.
The study, to be released Monday, corroborates the findings of a White House-appointed review group, which said last month that the NSA counterterrorism program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that much of the evidence it did turn up “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.” [Continue reading…]
NSA and GCHQ activities appear illegal, says EU parliamentary inquiry
The Guardian reports: Mass surveillance programmes used by the US and Britain to spy on people in Europe have been condemned in the “strongest possible terms” by the first parliamentary inquiry into the disclosures, which has demanded an end to the vast, systematic and indiscriminate collection of personal data by intelligence agencies.
The inquiry by the European parliament’s civil liberties committee says the activities of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, GCHQ, appear to be illegal and that their operations have “profoundly shaken” the trust between countries that considered themselves allies.
The 51-page draft report, obtained by the Guardian, was discussed by the committee on Thursday. Claude Moraes, the rapporteur asked to assess the impact of revelations made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, also condemns the “chilling” way journalists working on the stories have been intimidated by state authorities.
Though Snowden is still in Russia, MEPs are expected to take evidence from him via video-link in the coming weeks, as the European parliament continues to assess the damage from the disclosures. Committee MEPs voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to have Snowden testify, defying warnings from key US congressmen that giving the “felon” a public platform would wreck the European parliament’s reputation and hamper co-operation with Washington. [Continue reading…]
How the NSA almost killed the Internet
Wired reports: On June 6, 2013, Washington Post reporters called the communications departments of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. The day before, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian had shocked Americans with evidence that the telecommunications giant Verizon had voluntarily handed a database of every call made on its network to the National Security Agency. The piece was by reporter Glenn Greenwald, and the information came from Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT consultant who had left the US with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the NSA’s secret procedures.
Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.
It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and controversial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet. [Continue reading…]
Greenwald says Israel is ‘absolutely right’ to link NSA spying to Pollard case
On Monday evening Glenn Greenwald was interviewed on Israel’s Channel 10 television. The interview was conducted in English. (It is preceded by a commercial and then interrupted half-way through with another commercial.)
The NSA intercepts communications by Israeli politicians, so why should the U.S. take issue with Israel gaining access to U.S. intelligence provided to them by Jonathan Pollard?
That appears to be Greenwald’s line of reasoning.
The fact that Pollard was a U.S. citizen employed by the government; that in return for the intelligence he was providing the Israelis he expected to get paid half a million dollars; that it is widely believed that Israel used this intelligence as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Soviet Union — are these just pesky little details that have little bearing on the principles?
What Greenwald calls ‘hypocrisy’ — for the U.S. to spy on its ‘close ally’ Israel — is in the eyes of many others, good judgement.
Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information.
That doesn’t come from a report on the Snowden revelations. It comes from Seymour Hersh’s report on Pollard written for the New Yorker in 1999.
If Israel was about to launch a unilateral attack on Iran without consulting the U.S., would it be desirable for the U.S. to gain advance warning of such a plan? You bet!
And how would such intelligence be gathered? By trying to recruit Israelis willing to spy on their own government? Fat chance.
Even if they are limited, this is in fact one of the useful services of the NSA: spying on America’s most dangerous ally.
What Pollard did was provide Israel with the means to launch an attack without tipping off the NSA in advance.
Hersh reported:
Israel made dramatic use of the Pollard material on October 1, 1985, seven weeks before his arrest, when its Air Force bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunisia, killing at least sixty-seven people. The United States, which was surprised by the operation, eventually concluded that the Israeli planners had synergistically combined the day-to-day insights of the SIGINT Requirements List with the strategic intelligence of the FOSIF reports and other data that Pollard provided to completely outwit our government’s huge collection apparatus in the Middle East. Even Pollard himself, the senior official told me, “had no idea what he gave away.”
The NSA quantum computer ‘revelation’
Wired: The internet is abuzz over revelations that the NSA is building its own quantum computer, a machine that could crack the computer encryption codes exponentially faster than any machine available today. But this should come as no surprise.
“It’s an interesting topic,” says Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT who has followed quantum computing efforts for a good eight years. “But as far as I can see, there is no big new revelation here.”
The NSA has openly sponsored quantum computing research for close to a decade, helping to create something called the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. And nearly five years ago, the head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, predicted that the era of quantum computing was on the way — and that it would take the spy agency into new territory.
“I think we can see clearly out three to five years. Beyond that, things like a quantum computer start to bump up there,” Alexander told attendees at an Omaha Nebraska Cyberspace Symposium, saying that true quantum computing could be anywhere from three to 25 years away. “And when that hits, that’s a game changer. So things like that are there that we’re going to have to look at.”
The NSA documents leaked to the Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm the agency’s interest in quantum computing, though the Post reports that the agency is funding classified work at a University of Maryland laboratory called the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. We don’t know if the agency is any closer to actually completing a quantum computer than anyone else. In fact, the Post speculates that it’s probably not.
Christopher Monroe, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute, agrees there’s “nothing very interesting” in the Posts‘s documents. “I saw this story and was amused that somebody at the Post was trying a little too hard to make a story out of nothing, probably because everybody is intrigued by this fellow Snowden,” he said in an email interview. The NSA’s involvement in quantum information science, he adds, “is well known.” [Continue reading…]
If the current climate of libertarian paranoia had prevailed when the internet was in its early stages of development, no doubt there would have been much louder warnings about the dangers of networked computing and the Pentagon’s nefarious interest in its control.
Given that the interest in quantum computing extends far beyond the NSA, the NSA’s interest should be taken as a given. And as in most fields of basic research, the breakthroughs invariable require government investment. The free market pays for things that make money and the money-making potential of new technology often takes years or decades to materialize.