Following revelations that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies, the NSA and GCHQ, are tapping directly into the Internet’s backbone, The Atlantic asks: how does one tap into an underwater cable?

The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line — the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.

More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world’s emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.

In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points — spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. “At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually,” Deutsche Welle reported.

But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it’s easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the “Five Eyes” — the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians — that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.

The tapping process apparently involves using so-called “intercept probes.” According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries or operating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications.

An internal memo from DHS headquarters told workers on Friday that viewing the document from an “unclassified government workstation” could lead to administrative or legal action. “You may be violating your non-disclosure agreement in which you sign that you will protect classified national security information,” the communication said.

The memo said workers who view the article through an unclassified workstation should report the incident as a “classified data spillage.” [Continue reading…]

The sooner that flaws in computer code can be found, the sooner they can be fixed — these are the fixes required to reduce the vulnerability that all networks face from cyberattacks. The problem is that government agencies such as the NSA are now outbidding software manufacturers when such vulnerabilities get discovered, meaning that the flaws remain unfixed and the attacks continue. In order to advance their own cyberwarfare capabilities, the NSA and other intelligence agencies now have a vested interest in perpetuating network insecurity. America’s research universities are now suffering the fallout.

The New York Times reports: America’s research universities, among the most open and robust centers of information exchange in the world, are increasingly coming under cyberattack, most of it thought to be from China, with millions of hacking attempts weekly. Campuses are being forced to tighten security, constrict their culture of openness and try to determine what has been stolen.

University officials concede that some of the hacking attempts have succeeded. But they have declined to reveal specifics, other than those involving the theft of personal data like Social Security numbers. They acknowledge that they often do not learn of break-ins until much later, if ever, and that even after discovering the breaches they may not be able to tell what was taken.

Universities and their professors are awarded thousands of patents each year, some with vast potential value, in fields as disparate as prescription drugs, computer chips, fuel cells, aircraft and medical devices.

“The attacks are increasing exponentially, and so is the sophistication, and I think it’s outpaced our ability to respond,” said Rodney J. Petersen, who heads the cybersecurity program at Educause, a nonprofit alliance of schools and technology companies. “So everyone’s investing a lot more resources in detecting this, so we learn of even more incidents we wouldn’t have known about before.”

Tracy B. Mitrano, the director of information technology policy at Cornell University, said that detection was “probably our greatest area of concern, that the hackers’ ability to detect vulnerabilities and penetrate them without being detected has increased sharply.” [Continue reading…]

James Robertson, a former federal district judge who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, addressing the new Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, on July 9, explained why FISA cannot perform the function which is assigned to judges: that they choose between adversaries. Dan Froomkin quotes Robertson from the transcript:

I read the other day that one of my former FISA Court colleagues resisted the suggestion that the FISA approval process accommodated the executive, or maybe the word was cooperated. Not so, the judge replied. The judge said the process was adjudicating.

I very respectfully take issue with that use of the word adjudicating. The ex parte FISA process hears only one side and what the FISA process does is not adjudication, it is approval.

Which brings me to my second and I think closely related point. The FISA approval process works just fine when it deals with individual applications for surveillance warrants because approving search warrants and wiretap orders and trap and trace orders and foreign intelligence surveillance warrants one at a time is familiar ground for judges.

And not only that, but at some point a search warrant or wiretap order, if it leads on to a prosecution or some other consequence is usually reviewable by another court.

But what happened about the revelations in late 2005 about NSA circumventing the FISA process was that Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and introduced a new role for the FISC, which was to approve surveillance programs.

That change, in my view, turned the FISA Court into something like an administrative agency which makes and approves rules for others to follow.

Again, that’s not the bailiwick of judges. Judges don’t make policy. They review policy determinations for compliance with statutory law but they do so in the context once again of adversary process.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Nineteen organizations including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) today for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group with years of experience fighting illegal government surveillance in the courts.

“The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA’s mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation. Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.”

At the heart of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA is the bulk telephone records collection program that was confirmed by last month’s publication of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) further confirmed that this formerly secret document was legitimate, and part of a broader program to collect all major telecommunications customers’ call histories. The order demands wholesale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months. Government officials further confirmed that this was just one of series of orders issued on a rolling basis since at least 2006. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The recent disclosure of U.S. surveillance methods is providing opponents of classified programs with new openings to challenge their constitutionality, according to civil libertarians and some legal experts.

At least five cases have been filed in federal courts since the government’s widespread collection of telephone and Internet records was revealed last month. The lawsuits primarily target a program that scoops up the telephone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies.

Such cases face formidable obstacles. The government tends to fiercely resist them on national security grounds, and the surveillance is so secret that it’s hard to prove who was targeted. Nearly all of the roughly 70 suits filed after the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping was disclosed in 2005 have been dismissed.

But the legal landscape may be shifting, lawyers say, because the revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and the principal source of the leaks, forced the government to acknowledge the programs and discuss them. That, they say, could help plaintiffs overcome government arguments that they lack the legal standing to sue or that cases should be thrown out because the programs are state secrets. A federal judge in California last week rejected the government’s argument that an earlier lawsuit over NSA surveillance should be dismissed on secrecy grounds.

“There is one critical difference from the Bush era. We now have indisputable physical evidence that the conduct being challenged is actually taking place,’’ said Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security law at American University law school. He said Snowden’s disclosures make it “more likely” that cases will at least be allowed to go forward in court, leading to a years-long legal battle over surveillance and privacy. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: The little-known watchdog responsible for ensuring that Britain’s spy agencies act within the law over communication interceptions has been condemned as “ineffective” by civil liberties campaigners – amid concerns that it failed to scrutinise the systems revealed by Edward Snowden.

The Independent has established that the watchdog’s annual report had to be delayed and revised because the first draft made no mention of the hi-tech GCHQ spying programmes exposed by the US whistleblower.

The updated 2012 report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office (ICCO) will now be published later this month, after hastily organised revisions were ordered by Whitehall officials.

In documents disclosed by Mr Snowden, it was revealed that Britain’s spy centre in Cheltenham has for at least two years been using advanced technology to access hundreds of trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables which daily carry hundreds of millions of private telecommunications messages. The programme goes by the codename Operation Tempora.

Gathered legally because digital traffic “leaves” the UK as fibre-optic traffic, the interceptions include phone calls, emails and records of internet usage. This step-change in access technology has exposed the inadequate oversight regimes under which the spy agencies operate, privacy activists say.

According to senior Home Office sources, the ICCO’s revised 2012 report will now make passing references to GCHQ’s latest interception technology. But the report will nevertheless gloss over its own oversight inadequacies and offer a clean bill of health to the UK’s surveillance regime by praising, as it has in past years, the co-operation and diligence shown by intelligence and police agencies in complying with the law.

Around 10,000 staff across the UK’s three main spy agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ in Cheltenham, have access to Tempora’s gathered data, as do 850,000 employees and private contractors of the NSA in the United States.

By comparison, the small ICCO office based in Whitehall’s Queen Anne’s Gate headed by the retired appeal court judge Sir Anthony May, currently has less than 10 full-time staff to carry out its statutory duty of reviewing the interception activity of the UK spy agencies, the Metropolitan Police, HM Revenue and Customs, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and Ministry of Defence. [Continue reading…]

The Local reports: A German man who called on Facebook friends concerned about American secret service operations to join him in a walk around a US army spy centre near his home, found secret service men at his door checking his political leanings.

Daniel Bangert, 28, told The Local he had joked about US spies reading what he had written – and had even told his friends he was waiting for a knock on the door – when it actually came.

“I was still very sleepy when the phone rang – it was 7.17 in the morning – and a police officer started asking questions about what I was planning,” he said.

“Then the doorbell rang and I saw out the window that a police van was parked outside. The officer on the phone said I should open the door to the others.”

He put on a “Team Edward” T-shirt with a picture of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and answered scores of questions about his plans.

Bangert, a veteran of the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt, had set up a group calling itself “NSA spy protection league” (NSA Spion Schutzbund), as if the US spies were an endangered species of birds.

He wanted, he said, to take a walk with some friends to “observe them in their natural habitat” – the Dagger Complex in Griesheim near Darmstadt. This is one base where the NSA (US National Security Agency) is said to operate from. The authority stands accused of monitoring much of Germany’s internet traffic. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post has a profile of NSA Director Keith Alexander: To some of Alexander’s most vociferous critics, Snowden’s disclosures confirm their image of an agency and a director so enamored of technological prowess that they have sacrificed privacy rights.

“He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander’s policies, Drake said, would result in the “complete evisceration of our civil liberties.”

Alexander frequently points out that collection programs are subject to oversight by Congress as well as the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, although the proceedings of both bodies are shrouded in secrecy. But even his defenders say Alexander’s aggressiveness has sometimes taken him to the outer edge of his legal authority.

Some in Congress complain that Alexander’s NSA is sometimes slow to inform the oversight committees of problems, particularly when the agency’s eavesdroppers inadvertently pick up communications that fall outside the NSA’s legal mandates. Others are uncomfortable with the extraordinarily broad powers vested in the NSA chief. In 2010, he became the first head of U.S. Cyber Command, set up to defend Defense Department networks against hackers and, when authorized, conduct attacks on adversaries. Pentagon officials and Alexander say the command’s mission is also to defend the nation against cyberattacks.

“He is the only man in the land that can promote a problem by virtue of his intelligence hat and then promote a solution by virtue of his military hat,” said one former Pentagon official, voicing a concern that the lines governing the two authorities are not clearly demarcated and that Alexander can evade effective public oversight as a result. The former official spoke on the condition of anonymity to be able to talk freely.

Alexander himself has expressed unease about secrecy constraints that he says prohibit him from fully explaining what the NSA does. But just as in Iraq, he remains fiercely committed to the belief that “we need to get it all,” said Timothy Edgar, a former privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and at the White House.

“He certainly believes you need to collect everything you can under the law,” Edgar said, “and that includes pushing for pretty aggressive interpretations of the law.”

Alexander maintained in a speech last month that he is mindful to “do everything you can to protect civil liberties and privacy.”

He then added a warning: “Everyone also understands,” he said, “that if we give up a capability that is critical to the defense of this nation, people will die.” [Continue reading…]

The Daily Dot reports: According to Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and spying in 2006, a previously unknown NSA surveillance program known as FAIRVIEW aims to “own the Internet.”

Last month, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of PowerPoint slides to the Washington Post and the Guardian revealing that the agency was engaged in a large-scale Internet surveillance program, dubbed PRISM, that collects Americans’ chats, emails, photos, and videos. One of the slides, only later released by the two papers, made reference to a group of additional “upstream” collection programs, including two named FAIRVIEW and BLARNEY, but gave no further details about their function.

Drake, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for his whistleblowing, explained the upstream programs to the Daily Dot.

“Upstream means you get inside the system before it’s in the Internet. In its pure form,” he said.

About the slide, Drake said, “you’ve got programs and umbrella programs.” FAIRVIEW is one such umbrella. Drake referred to it as a “highly classified program” for tapping into the world’s intercontinental fiber optic cables.

“It’s just a name,” Drake said, “that at the highest level means to own the Internet.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: On the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs — not the island’s many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.

The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the National Security Agency — which seeks the flaws for America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons — and American adversaries like the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.

Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000.

But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.”

The flaws get their name from the fact that once discovered, “zero days” exist for the user of the computer system to fix them before hackers can take advantage of the vulnerability. A “zero-day exploit” occurs when hackers or governments strike by using the flaw before anyone else knows it exists, like a burglar who finds, after months of probing, that there is a previously undiscovered way to break into a house without sounding an alarm.

“Governments are starting to say, ‘In order to best protect my country, I need to find vulnerabilities in other countries,’ ” said Howard Schmidt, a former White House cybersecurity coordinator. “The problem is that we all fundamentally become less secure.” [Continue reading…]

Salon: There was a Quinnipiac poll that came out two days ago reporting that over half of Americans regarded Edward Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a traitor, despite the fact that we’ve heard tons of calls for him to be arrested and tried for leaking state secrets. What do you think? How do you reconcile these? Do you think something substantial has changed in terms of Americans’ opinions about the state’s tracking?

Glenn Greenwald: I do. What was most amazing to me about that poll was the idea that he’s more of a traitor rather than a whistleblower has become pretty much the consensus of the United States government, both political parties, the leadership of these parties and the D.C. press corps. So the message that has just been continuously churned out from those large institutions is that what he did was bad and wrong, that he shouldn’t be treated as a whistleblower and that he’s really a criminal. So to watch a large majority of Americans reject that consensus and reach their own conclusion, which is that what he has revealed is a good amount of wrongdoing, which is the definition of a whistleblower, is both surprising and gratifying. I think it’s really a testament to how powerful these revelations are that they have disturbed Americans so much that they have just disregarded the message they’ve been bombarded with for six straight weeks now.

Salon: It feels like the message coming from Congress is pretty much the same: This is a legal program; there was nothing unethical about it; we need to do this to fight the terrorists. What do you think? Is there a space to challenge Congress on this?

Greenwald: Well, Washington has proven, over and over, that they’re not bothered by the fact that what they’re doing and thinking is completely at odds with mass sentiments of the public that they pretend to represent. So the mere gap between public opinion and what they’re doing isn’t, in and of itself, enough to change their behavior. But what they do start to respond to is serious pressure on the part of the American public over some of the things that they’re doing, and you do see some movement in Congress already to start to institute reforms, to put checks on these surveillance abuses. But I think that ultimately the real issue is the top levels of the Obama administration repeatedly went to Congress and lied to the faces of Congress, which is a felony, over what these NSA programs were and weren’t. And ultimately, I think the first step is going to have to be, are we willing to tolerate having top-level Obama officials blatantly lie to our representatives in Congress and prevent them from exercising oversight about these spying programs? And that, I think, has to be the first scandal to show that there are actually consequences for this behavior. [Continue reading…]

Jeff Jarvis asks: Who is a journalist? For that matter, what is journalism? Those questions underpinned not only [Yochai] Benkler’s testimony [in the defense of Bradley Manning], but also the debate buzzing around the head of the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, as some colleagues in the field have amazingly questioned his role (his permission), and thus whether he should be arrested for aiding and abetting a criminal suspect.

They do that because Greenwald is an advocate and a journalist; while journalists – in the US, at least – have long believed that one must be a journalist or an advocate. Benkler told the court that one can be both. I argue that all journalism is advocacy even if it is simply advocating for openness and transparency, or standing up for the downtrodden, or believing that the public must be better informed.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan tried recently (and for what must be the millionth time) to define a journalist. Senator Dick Durbin has proposed that the government should define who is a journalist.

But that would be tantamount to licensing the journalist. That is a permission government should not grant, for that gives government the power to rescind it.

Here’s the problem – the problem Benkler presents in his testimony: in a network, anyone can perform an act of journalism. Thus, I argue, there are no journalists. There is only the service of journalism. [Continue reading…]

I love private eye, hilarious!! Obama visits Mandela cell on Roben Island pic.twitter.com/4BJP0MhGfS

— Deen Sharp (@deensharp) July 13, 2013

Those unfamiliar with Britain’s best political magazine can find it here.

Salon reports: John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program and is now in prison, sent an open letter to Edward Snowden last week warning him not to trust the FBI.

“DO NOT,” Kiriakou wrote, “under any circumstances, cooperate with the FBI. FBI agents will lie, trick, and deceive you. They will twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not – supporters, well-wishers, and friends – all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy; it’s part of the problem, not the solution.”

These are the words of a registered Republican who voted for Gary Johnson, whom the Rosenberg Fund for Children denied a grant, informing him that he wasn’t “liberal enough,” Kiriakou says, for the award — and who last year received a birthday card from Jerry Falwell Jr.

Kiriakou is the first CIA veteran to be imprisoned. It was after he blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program that the CIA, FBI and Justice Department came down on him, at first charging him with aiding the enemy and later convicting him of disclosing the identities of undercover colleagues at the CIA. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The American whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the US of waging a campaign of “historically disproportionate aggression” against him during an extraordinary meeting with human rights activists and Russian officials at the Moscow airport where he has been trapped since 23 June.

In his first appearance since disclosing his identity in the Guardian last month, Snowden insisted he had no regrets and had made a “moral decision” to leak dozens of secret documents outlining US surveillance programmes. He also announced that he would apply for political asylum from the Kremlin and appealed to those present for help in leaving the airport.

The US has lobbied governments around the world to refuse entry to Snowden and has invalidated his US passport.

Last week, a plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, was grounded in Vienna after several European countries blocked their airspace amid suspicions that Snowden was on board.

“The government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have,” Snowden said. “I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: As the director of national intelligence, James Clapper has told Congress that the regime of Moammar Gadhafi would likely prevail in Libya, that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party was “largely secular” and that the National Security Agency doesn’t collect data on millions of Americans.

Not quite.

Gadhafi ended up killed by Libyan rebel forces, and the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi quickly moved to install conservative Islamists into top positions when he became Egypt’s president. And Clapper’s latest misstep may have dented trust in the chief intelligence officer despite public assurances of support from the White House and key members of Congress.

Clapper acknowledged he misspoke when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that U.S. spies do not gather data on Americans – something NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed as false by releasing documents showing the NSA collects millions of Americans’ phone records showing who they called and for how long, as well as some Internet traffic.

“Clapper is probably job secure for now because (Capitol) Hill is not calling for his removal,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser to the Obama White House who heads the Brookings Intelligence Project research group. “But he now has an unfortunate record. Another misstatement, and he will be a liability.” [Continue reading…]

At Wikileaks, Edward Snowden writes: A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.

It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice. [Continue reading…]