Reuters reports: The National Security Agency spied on the communications of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, a Brazilian news program reported, a revelation that could strain US relations with the two biggest countries in Latin America.

The report late Sunday by Globo’s news program Fantastico, was based on documents that journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, was listed as a co-contributor to the report.

Fantastico showed what it said was an NSA document dated June 2012 displaying passages of written messages sent by Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, who was still a candidate at that time. In the messages, Pena Nieto discussed who he was considering naming as his ministers once elected.

A separate document displayed communication patterns between Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her top advisers, Fantastico said, although no specific written passages were included in the report.

Both documents were part of an NSA case study showing how data could be “intelligently” filtered, Fantastico said. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera was spied on by the National Security Agency, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL. The US intelligence agency hacked into protected communication, a feat that was considered a particular success.

It makes sense that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) would be interested in the Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera. The Qatar-based channel has been broadcasting audio and video messages from al-Qaida leaders for more than a decade.

The United States intelligence agency was so interested, in fact, that it hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal communications system, according to documents from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden that have been seen by SPIEGEL.

One such document, dated March 23, 2006, reveals that the NSA’s Network Analysis Center managed to access and read communication by “interesting targets” that was specially protected by the news organization. The information also shows that the NSA officials were not satisfied with Al Jazeera’s language analysis.

In addition to cracking the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot, accessing “Al Jazeera broadcasting internal communication” was listed as a “notable success,” the document shows. The NSA said these selected targets had “high potential as sources of intelligence.”

The encrypted information was forwarded to the responsible NSA departments for further analysis, according to the document, which did not reveal to what extent the intelligence agency spied on journalists or managers of the media company, or whether the surveillance is ongoing. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Washington Post.

That disclosure, in a classified intelligence budget provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, provides new evidence that the Obama administration’s growing ranks of cyberwarriors infiltrate and disrupt foreign computer networks.

Additionally, under an extensive effort code-named GENIE, U.S. computer specialists break into foreign networks so that they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control. Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed “covert implants,” sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.

The documents provided by Snowden and interviews with former U.S. officials describe a campaign of computer intrusions that is far broader and more aggressive than previously understood. The Obama administration treats all such cyber-operations as clandestine and declines to acknowledge them.

The scope and scale of offensive operations represent an evolution in policy, which in the past sought to preserve an international norm against acts of aggression in cyberspace, in part because U.S. economic and military power depend so heavily on computers. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), people familiar with the matter said.

The British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times, but never did, one of the sources said.

On Friday, in a public statement, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said his newspaper, which had faced threats of possible legal action from British authorities, on July 20 had destroyed copies of leaked documents which it had received from Snowden.

Rusbridger said that two days later, on July 22, the Guardian informed British authorities that materials related to GCHQ had made their way to the New York Times and the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica.

Rusbridger said in his statement that it then took British authorities “more than three weeks before anyone from the British government contacted the New York Times.

The Washington Post reports: U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.
[…]
Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:

● Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

● The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

● Long before Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about “anomalous behavior” by employees and contractors with access to classified material. The NSA planned to ward off a “potential insider compromise of sensitive information” by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.

● U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes. Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.” The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States. [Continue reading…]

Jennifer I. Hoelzer writes: Edward Snowden went over the president’s head, and the president thinks it was totally not cool of him. At a news conference earlier this month, he said: “There were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred.” Furthermore, “[w]ell before Mr. Snowden leaked this information,” the president reminds us, he signed an order that “for the first time … provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community.”

The president even says he “called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks.”

In other words, according to President Obama, Edward Snowden didn’t have to go over the commander-in-chief’s head to get his concerns addressed, because not only does the president support whistle-blowers — and thus would have taken Snowden’s concerns seriously — he was already in the process of addressing the issues Snowden went above him to get addressed.

I see a few problems with this.

First of all, it’s unclear exactly what avenues the president believes Snowden should have taken to raise concerns about the NSA’s secret surveillance programs. Last week, he told Jay Leno: “If you think that the government is abusing a program … you can come … to the appropriate individuals and say, ‘Look, I’ve got a problem with what’s going on here. I’m not sure whether it’s being done properly.’ ”

He has a point. If Edward Snowden had concerns that one of his co-workers was abusing the NSA’s surveillance authority to — for example — collect data on a former girlfriend or blackmail a member of Congress, he could have reported his concerns to a supervisor, and it’s highly likely that person would have done something about it.

But, contrary to what the president seems to think, Edward Snowden wasn’t concerned that the NSA was “improperly” collecting information on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was concerned that the government was collecting information on hundreds of millions of Americans. And how exactly does the president think Snowden should have raised that concern?

Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen, which requires employees to report “all suspected violations of the law” and cautions them to “take care to not report a violation to someone that [they] believe is involved in the matter.”

Well, nearly everyone Edward Snowden worked for — up to and including the president of the United States — was involved in the matter. So, again, whom exactly should he have gone to with his concerns? [Continue reading…]

Charles Stross writes: The public perception of America as being a democratic republic that values freedom and fairness under the rule of law is diametrically opposed to the secretive practices of the surveillance state. Nationalist loyalty is highly elastic, but can be strained to breaking point. And when that happens, we see public servants who remain loyal to the abstract ideals conclude that the institution itself is committing treason. And an organization that provides no outlet for the concerns of loyal whistle-blowers like Thomas Drake is creating a rod for its own back by convincing the likes of leaker Edward Snowden that it is incapable of reform from within and disloyal to the national ideals it purports to serve.

Snowden is 30; he was born in 1983. Chelsea Manning is 25. Generation Y started around 1980 to 1982. But the signs of disobedience among Generation Y are merely a harbinger of things to come. Next up is Generation Z — the cohort born since the millennium.

Members of Generation Z are going to come of age in the 2020s, in a world racked by extreme climate events. Many of them will be sibling-less only children, for the demographic transition to a low birthrate/low death rate equilibrium lies generations in their past. They may not be able to travel internationally — energy costs combined with relative income decline is slowly stripping the middle classes of that capability — but they’ll be products of a third-generation Internet culture.

To the Z cohort, the Internet isn’t a separate thing; it has been an integrated part of their lives since infancy. They do not remember a time before the Internet or a life without smartphones. All of them will have had Facebook pages, even though they had to lie about their age to sign up (and even though having a social network presence is officially a no-no for spooks). All of them have acquired long histories visible on the Internet, even if only through the tagged photographs of their schoolmates. Mostly they photograph everything (even though taking photographs or being photographed is officially a no-no for spooks). Many of them even use lifeloggers (which has got to be a career-killer if your career lies in the shadows). They grew up in a surveillance state; they might want privacy, but they are under no illusions that the centers of authority will permit them to have it. Steeply climbing university fees and student-debt loading have turned a traditional degree into their version of Generation X’s unattainable job for life; their education will be vocational or acquired piecemeal from MOOCs (massive open online courses), and their careers will be haphazard, casual, and dominated by multiple part-time contracts.

They saw their grandparents’ and parents’ generations screwed by the great intergenerational transfer of wealth to the baby boomers — their great-grandparents, many of whom are lingering on into their twilight 80s. To Generation Z’s eyes, the boomers and their institutions look like parasitic aliens with incomprehensible values who make irrational demands for absolute loyalty without reciprocity. Worse, the foundational mythology and ideals of the United States will look like a bitter joke, a fun house mirror’s distorted reflection of the reality they live with from day to day.

Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents’ post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the security state may well find them unemployable, their values too alien to assimilate into a model still rooted in the early 20th century. But if you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers? And how do you ensure their loyalty?

If I were in charge of long-term planning for human resources in any government department, I’d be panicking. Even though it’s already too late.

Evgeny Morozov writes: Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable. But superb proprietary algorithms and extremely talented employees only partially explain why both fields are dominated by just one firm. The real reason is that both Google and Facebook got into their fields early on, accumulated troves of data about their users, and are now aggressively exploiting that data to offer unique services that their data-poor contenders simply cannot match, no matter how innovative their business models.

Take Google’s personalized search or Facebook’s Graph Search feature. Both features are trivial to replicate; it’s the user data that makes them stand out. Thus, Google will indicate which links have been endorsed by our “friends” right in the search results; Facebook, via Graph Search, allows us to tap the wisdom of our friends and their friends.

Both companies have successfully approximated and then monetized our “social graph”—the once-trendy term to describe our many overlapping connections to other people. It’s small things like the social graph that explain why even a better, more innovative search engine or a social network with more respect for user privacy would have a hard time competing with Google and Facebook: As long as the dominance of these firms is powered by vast troves of user data, competitors are doomed.

Were we to rebuild our information infrastructure from scratch, we would surely notice that the current system is awful for competition. How could we run things differently? One option might be to run the social graph as a public institution of sorts, with state regulators making sure that all companies get equal access to such crucial information. Many of our social connections predate—and might even outlive—both Google and Facebook. These companies have mapped them well, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking of alternative ways of mapping them and making them available. Thus, instead of pouring public money into building better search engines—a mission attempted and quickly aborted by some European politicians—governments can focus on ensuring that the data playing field remains as level as possible. Better search engines and social networking sites might then emerge on their own, without any need for extra public backing.

The scheme could have many other benefits. For example, the regulators would be able to exercise far greater control over how user data is collected and accessed by third parties. It should be possible to anonymize this data so that better personalized services can be built without compromising user privacy. The fears of “the filter bubble” are greatly exaggerated; personalization is not evil per se—it’s the data trails that it leaves in its wake that should trouble us.

A few months ago, this might have seemed a reasonable but ultimately quixotic proposal. For a start, there seems dangerously little interest or desire in rebuilding—or even reimagining—our global information infrastructure. Just imagine the kind of effort that would be needed to gather all this information and organize it in an easy-to-use manner. Who would possibly fund such an endeavor?

Now that Edward Snowden has blown the whistle on the extensive spying operations of the National Security Agency, this question seems obsolete. Take the NSA’s much-discussed collection of metadata—the seemingly benign (or so they claim) information about who calls whom and when. It’s precisely this kind of metadata that is needed to build a better publicly run social graph. In fact, the NSA has probably already built it—and not just for America but probably for users in many other countries as well—often with tacit cooperation from intelligence services and telecommunication providers of those countries.

We can debate the ethics and legality of such initiatives until we all turn blue—and I suggest that we do, for, based on Snowden’s revelations, the NSA’s system is mired in secrecy, lacks proper congressional oversight, and enjoys unlimited rhetorical and lobbying support from the military-industrial complex. So, yes: The NSA’s data-collection practices must be reformed with accountability in mind.

These, however, are all questions about the future. But there’s a far more pragmatic question about the present: The NSA has all this data, and it’s not going away. (If anything, the much-discussed data storage center that the NSA is building in Utah suggests otherwise.) It would be a colossal mistake not to come up with a global institutional arrangement that would make at least chunks of that data available for public use. [Continue reading…]

Charles Falconer, former UK lord chancellor and first secretary of state for justice, writes: The 2000 Terrorism Act, which I helped introduce, was not passed with people like David Miranda in mind. The issue then was how to secure lasting peace in Northern Ireland, and the act was designed to make it difficult for Irish dissident terrorists to come to the mainland. Schedule 7 of the act, which has come to public attention this week following Miranda’s detention at Heathrow, was retained from earlier legislation on the advice of Lord Lloyd of Berwick. Reviewing the evidence, he had found that the ability of officers to randomly stop and search people who were entering or leaving the country had disrupted terrorist operations.

So it was right in 2000 – and it is still right today – that police or immigration authorities should have powers to detain and question people in order to determine whether they are terrorists.

However, it is also right that schedule 7 powers can only be used “for the purpose of determining” whether the detained person is a terrorist. The use of the power to detain and question someone who the examining officer knows is not a terrorist is plainly not for this purpose, so it would neither be within the spirit nor the letter of the law.

There is no suggestion that Miranda is a terrorist, or that his detention and questioning at Heathrow was for any other reason than his involvement in his partner Glenn Greenwald’s reporting of the Edward Snowden story. The state has not even hinted there is a justification beyond that involvement. While there may be relevant facts of which I know nothing, it is reasonable to proceed on the basis that was the reason for the powers being used.

The Terrorism Act defines a terrorist as someone “involved in committing preparing or instigating acts of terrorism”. Miranda is plainly not committing or preparing acts of terrorism. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. government’s efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden’s sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.

The government’s forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden’s apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.

The disclosure undermines the Obama administration’s assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can’t be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA’s own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same? [Continue reading…]

The growth of power always brings with it a parallel growth in incompetence.

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration has created a surveillance state on a scale not seen since senator Joe McCarthy’s infamous 1950s crackdown on suspected communists, according to the tech executive caught up in crossfire between the NSA and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“We are entering a time of state-sponsored intrusion into our privacy that we haven’t seen since the McCarthy era. And it’s on a much broader scale,” Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, told the Guardian. The email service was used by Snowden and is now at the center of a potentially historic legal battle over privacy rights in the digital age.

Levison closed down his service this month, posting a message about a government investigation that would force him to “become complicit in crimes against the American people” were he to stay in business. The 32-year-old is now stuck in a Kafkaesque universe where he is not allowed to talk about what is going on, nor is he allowed to talk about what he’s not allowed to talk about without facing charges of contempt of court.

It appears that Levison – who would not confirm this – has received a national security letter (NSL), a legal attempt to force him to hand over any and all data his company has so that the US authorities can track Snowden and anyone he communicated with. The fact that he closed the service rather than comply may well have opened him up to other legal challenges – about which he also can not comment.

What he will say is that he is locked in a legal battle he hopes one day will finally make it clear what the US government can and can not legally demand from companies. “The information technology sector of our country deserves a legislative mandate that will allow us to provide private and secure services so our customers, both here and abroad, don’t feel they are being used as listening posts for an American surveillance network,” he says. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.

The “LOVEINT” examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said.

The Associated Press reports: An independent oversight board reviewing secret government surveillance programs warned the Obama administration that national security agencies’ rules governing surveillance are outdated and need to be revised to reflect rapid advances in technology.

The chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, David Medine, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, urging that rules governing collection and retention of data about U.S. citizens be updated to “appropriately capture both the evolution of technology and the roles and capabilities of the intelligence community since 9/11.”

Medine said Friday that his letter, sent Thursday, was an attempt to prod national security officials into taking “a fresh look” at surveillance protocols. The National Security Agency and other departments have based their surveillance activities on a 1981 executive order that still governs much of the nation’s intelligence collections.

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA’s inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

The intelligence agency requires the Fisa court to sign annual “certifications” that provide the legal framework for surveillance operations. But in the wake of the court judgment these were only being renewed on a temporary basis while the agency worked on a solution to the processes that had been ruled illegal. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Nick Clegg has endorsed the government’s decision to ask the Guardian to destroy leaked secret NSA documents on the grounds that Britain would face a “serious threat to national security” if they reached the “wrong hands”.

In a statement, a spokesman for the deputy prime minister gave the first official confirmation that the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, made the request to the Guardian.

The intervention by Clegg came after Yvette Cooper said that parliament’s intelligence watchdog should investigate David Cameron’s role in asking the Guardian to surrender or destroy the NSA documents. The shadow home secretary made her call after the Daily Mail and the Independent reported that Heywood made the request to the Guardian on the instructions of the prime minister.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said that the prime minister must make a statement to MPs when parliament returns next month.

In a statement issued after the official confirmation that Heywood asked the Guardian to delete its hard drives, Vaz said: “The actions of the cabinet secretary are unprecedented and show that this issue has reached the highest levels of government. Although I am very surprised at this revelation it explains why Downing Street, the White House and the home secretary were briefed in advance about David Miranda’s detention.

“Up until now the UK government has downplayed its interest in these matters but it’s clear that they have taken a proactive stance not just in terms of the destruction of the information held by the Guardian but also the involvement of those journalists who have written about Edward Snowden. The prime minister must make a full statement to parliament on the day it returns. We need to know the full facts nothing less will do.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The review of US surveillance programs which Barack Obama promised would be conducted by an “independent” and “outside” panel of experts looks set to consist of four Washington insiders with close ties to the security establishment.

The president announced the creation of the group of experts two weeks ago, in an attempt to stem the rising tide of anger over National Security Agency surveillance techniques disclosed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Obama trumpeted what he said would be a “high-level group of outside experts” tasked with assessing all of the government’s “intelligence and communication technologies”.

However a report by ABC News, which has not been denied by the administration, said the panel would consist of Michael Morell, a recent acting head of the CIA, and three former White House advisers.

The list of apparent panel members prompted criticism among privacy and civil liberty advocates, who said the review would lack credibility and was unlikely to end the controversy over US surveillance capabilities.

If Obama thinks that Morell along with former White House officials Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire, all qualify as “independent” “outside experts”, who else is he going to pick for this panel? Michael Hayden, George Tenet, and Dick Cheney?

Wired reports: U.S. intelligence officials have declassified a secret court opinion that both chastises the National Security Agency for misleading the court and highlights an eavesdropping program in which authorities have direct access to “upstream” internet communications.

The document (.pdf) released today confirms for the first time unofficial leaks and speculation that the federal intelligence community has direct access to telecom companies’ backbones and it scoops up email communications as they go past. Millions are collected each year. WIRED first reported on such an eavesdropping installation in 2007 when a former AT&T technician provided documents outlining eavesdropping technology used by AT&T. Both the government and AT&T have declined to confirm the documents’ authenticity.

Today’s startling revelation was outlined in a 2011 opinion by Judge John D. Bates, then the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal that often rubber-stamps government surveillance requests in classified rulings. [Continue reading…]