Category Archives: News

Obama administration seems ‘almost helpless’ in face of NSA scandal

Der Spiegel reports: German diplomats have traveled to Washington to express anger over surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone — but they have yet to make headway. The Obama administration seems “almost helpless” in the face of continued leaks, says one diplomat.

Both groups sit together in a White House conference room for about 90 minutes. On one side are a half a dozen members of the European Parliament. Facing them is an equally-sized American delegation, including Karen Donfried, senior director for European affairs in the National Security Council (NSC) and a fluent German speaker.

The agenda is full of issues that have become day-to-day business in trans-Atlantic relations: the scandal surrounding US monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, NSA espionage and accusations of spying. They’re all uncomfortable topics that diplomats of allied nations usually prefer to keep quiet about. But shortly before the meeting’s end, the Americans appear to look inward. How should we proceed, they ask contemplatively.

“They seemed almost helpless, as if they’d become obsessed,” says Jan Philipp Albrecht, a Green Party MEP and one of the participants in the meeting. “The US government representatives honestly looked like they didn’t know what to do. And they left no room for doubt that more spying revelations are to be expected.” The odd exchange is an accurate reflection of the mood in Washington. [Continue reading…]

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Angry over U.S. surveillance, tech giants bolster defenses

The New York Times reports: Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops.

It is all reaction to reports of how far the government has gone in spying on Internet users, sneaking around tech companies to tap into their systems without their knowledge or cooperation.

What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives.

So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies.

Yet even as they take measures against government collection of personal information, their business models rely on collecting that same data, largely to sell personalized ads. So no matter the steps they take, as long as they remain ad companies, they will be gathering a trove of information that will prove tempting to law enforcement and spies. [Continue reading…]

Dan Gillmor writes: It is dawning, at long last, on the major American technology companies that they are under attack – from their own government, not just from foreign powers and criminals. They’d already been co-opted by spies and law enforcement, forced to obey secret orders targeting their customers and users. Or, in some cases, they’d willingly collaborated with the government’s mass surveillance schemes.

Now they are realizing that their own government considers them outright adversaries. They understand, especially in the wake of the Washington Post’s report about western spy services hacking into the intra-corporate networks of internet giants Google and Yahoo, that no amount of cooperation will ever satisfy the people who wage a relentless campaign to spy on anything and everything that moves. (The NSA, of course, has issued a denial of sorts, but it’s more of a non-denial denial of the Washington Post report).

For the users of cloud services and computing/communications technologies, the evidence mounts that we have to be skeptical (I would go as far as to say highly skeptical) of what the tech companies are telling us. We can appreciate their avowed good intentions, but they have created an architecture that obliges us to believe they may be selling us out at just about every opportunity, even if they are not. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. surveillance has gone too far, John Kerry admits

The Guardian reports: John Kerry, the US secretary of state, conceded on Thursday that some of the country’s surveillance activities had gone too far, saying that certain practices had occurred “on autopilot” without the knowledge of senior officials in the Obama administration.

In the most stark comments yet by a senior administration official, Kerry promised that a previously announced review of surveillance practices would be thorough and that some activities would end altogether.

“The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there,” he told a conference in London via video link.

“In some cases, some of these actions have reached too far and we are going to try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.” [Continue reading…]

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Japan secrecy act stirs fears about press freedom, right to know

Reuters reports: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is planning a state secrets act that critics say could curtail public access to information on a wide range of issues, including tensions with China and the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The new law would dramatically expand the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years.

Japan’s harsh state secrecy regime before and during World War Two has long made such legislation taboo, but the new law looks certain to be enacted since Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party-led bloc has a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and the opposition has been in disarray since he came to power last December.

Critics see parallels between the new law and Abe’s drive to revise Japan’s U.S.-drafted, post-war constitution to stress citizen’s duties over civil rights, part of a conservative agenda that includes a stronger military and recasting Japan’s wartime history with a less apologetic tone.

“There is a demand by the established political forces for greater control over the people,” said Lawrence Repeta, a law professor at Meiji University. “This fits with the notion that the state should have broad authority to act in secret.”

Abe says the new law, a draft of which is expected to be approved by his cabinet on Friday, is vital to his plan to set up a U.S.-style National Security Council to oversee security policies and coordinate among ministries.

Legal and media experts say the law, which would impose harsh penalties on those who leak secrets or try to obtain them, is too broad and vague, making it impossible to predict what would come under its umbrella. The lack of an independent review process leaves wide latitude for abuse, they say. [Continue reading…]

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Edward Snowden’s shadowy life in Russia

The New York Times reports: On very rare occasions, almost always at night, Edward J. Snowden leaves his secret, guarded residence here, somewhere, in Russia. He is always under close protection. He spends his days learning the language and reading. He recently finished “Crime and Punishment.”

Accompanying him is Sarah Harrison, a British activist working with WikiLeaks. With far less attention, she appears to have found herself trapped in the same furtive limbo of temporary asylum that the Russian government granted Mr. Snowden three months ago: safe from prosecution, perhaps, but far from living freely, or at least openly.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has written extensively about the security services, said that the F.S.B., the domestic successor to the Soviet-era intelligence service, clearly controlled the circumstances of Mr. Snowden’s life now, protecting him and also circumscribing his activities, even if not directly controlling him.

“He’s actually surrounded by these people,” said Mr. Soldatov, who, with Irina Borogan, wrote a history of the new Russian security services, “The New Nobility.”

Hints of his life nonetheless flitter in and out of the public eye. On Thursday, his lawyer, Anatoly G. Kucherena, said that Mr. Snowden had agreed to take a job with one of the country’s major Internet companies, beginning Friday. Mr. Kucherena would not disclose the company or any other details, and he declined to discuss Mr. Snowden’s life in exile “because the level of threat from the U.S. government structures is still very high,” he said in a telephone interview. [Continue reading…]

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Israel vows to deny Hezbollah weapons as details of Syria raid emerge

Reuters reports: Israel said it would not allow advanced weapons to fall into the hands of Hezbollah, after a raid on Syria that opposition sources said had hit an air force garrison believed to be holding Russian-made missiles destined for the militant group.

Israel has a clear policy on Syria and will continue to enforce it, officials said on Friday, after U.S. sources said Israel had launched a new attack on its warring neighbor.

Israel declined to comment on leaks to U.S. media that its planes had hit a Syrian base near the port of Latakia, targeting missiles that it thought were destined for its Lebanese enemy, Hezbollah.

“We have said many times that we will not allow the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah,” said Home Front Defence Minister Gilad Erdan, a member of the inner security cabinet which met hours before the alleged Israeli attack.

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Syrian forces capture town near chemical weapons site

Reuters reports: Syrian government forces have captured a northern town located near a chemical weapons site after days of heavy fighting, state media and a monitoring group said on Friday.

The town, Safira, is also located on a road that could be used to relieve government-controlled areas of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub.

Syrian state television said government forces had taken full control of the town, which had been occupied by rebels, including some from units linked to al Qaeda.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the government had seized the town on Friday morning after more than three weeks of fighting.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which has teams in Syria to eliminate the country’s chemical weapons arsenal, has said its teams were unable to reach two sites for inspection because they were too dangerous.

A source briefed on their operations said one of those sites was at Safira, which is southeast of Aleppo.

The chemical weapons site itself has been under government control but emptied of equipment because of fighting nearby, according to the OPCW.

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NSA’s MUSCULAR secretly breaks into the cloud of U.S. tech companies, siphons off data, fouls up revenues overseas

Wolf Richter writes: The cloud is where the NSA goes to pick through everyone’s data. Under the PRISM program, revealed by Snowden some time ago, the NSA has enjoyed easy access to user accounts and their data. Companies cooperate. It’s permitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We just didn’t know about it.

MUSCULAR is darker. It secretly targets American companies. Google and Yahoo have been named in top-secret documents that Snowden had pilfered and that landed at the Washington Post. To get around legality issues in the US, the NSA broke into Google’s and Yahoo’s overseas data centers. If you have anything in the cloud – and you do, whether you want to or not – it’s stored in numerous locations, including overseas.

In March last year, when David Petraeus was still CIA Director, before emails, ironically, about an extramarital affair unraveled his career, he spoke at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit. He was accompanied by NSA specialists. He raved about how startups that had been funded by In-Q-Tel – the CIA’s venture capital branch – were “providing enormous support to us as we execute various critical intelligence missions.” He talked about “innovative technologies developed by the firms represented in this room.”

It was just a speech, and no one really paid attention. But he was disclosing the true nature of our perfect surveillance society, on the eve of the Snowden revelations.

“We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. In the digital world, data is everywhere,” he said. “Data is created constantly, often unknowingly and without permission” – emphasis mine. “Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent, and probable behavior.” The data “that can be collected is virtually limitless,” he said, which presented “enormous intelligence opportunities.” And in closing he thanked the executives and tech gurus for “helping to keep America’s Intelligence Community at the forefront of global innovation.”

So far, the Snowden revelations have shown exactly that: an intense, hand-in-glove cooperation between the Intelligence Community and American tech companies, from scrappy startups to corporate mastodons, at every level, whether adding backdoors to Windows operating systems or compromising the keys to encryption.

But the revelations about the MUSCULAR program show that, in parallel, the NSA also worked against these tech companies – Google and Yahoo so far, but more documents are likely to trickle out, as they have done in the past, like Chinese water torture, to reveal that other American companies got hit as well. [Continue reading…]

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NSA’s Mideast spying ‘intense’ amid regional upheaval, say experts

Al Arabiya reports: Leaked documents disclosed earlier this week revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted 125 billion phone calls and SMS messages in January 2013, many of them originating in the Middle East.

The NSA’s attention on the Middle East and the surrounding region is far more “intense than anything comparable in Europe,” according to Matthew Aid, a Washington, DC-based intelligence historian and expert.

Strained relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia over resolving the Syrian conflict could be a possible reason for the NSA’s particularly large targeting of Saudi Arabia – over 7.8 billion times in one month – said Aid.

Saudi-U.S. tension may have also resulted in Obama’s administration being “quite curious” over the kingdom’s thoughts on Syria, as the countries have consistently disagreed on the issue.

Aid, who in 2009 published a history on the NSA entitled “The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency,” said that most of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have not focused on the agency’s surveillance in the Middle East.

“We’re waiting for that shoe to drop, but it hasn’t,” Aid told Al Arabiya News, stating that leaks by Snowden’s associates have been largely focused “on those countries which will generate immediate reaction in the press and from the governments in question.”

Saudi Arabia and Iraq witnessed 7.8 billion wiretapping incidents from the NSA each, while Egypt and Jordan saw 1.8 billion and 1.6 billion respectively, according to Cryptome, a digital library that publishes leaked documents.

Additionally, over 1.7 billion wiretapping incidents were recorded in Iran. [Continue reading…]

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NSA issues non-denial denial of infiltrating Google and Yahoo’s networks

TechDirt: While NSA boss Keith Alexander issued a misleading denial of this morning’s report of how the NSA has infiltrated Yahoo and Google’s networks by hacking into their private network connections between datacenters, the NSA has now come out with its official statement which is yet another typical non-denial denial. They deny things that weren’t quite said while refusing to address the actual point:

NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation. The Washington Post’s assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true.

The assertion that we collect vast quantities of US persons’ data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies attorney general-approved processes to protect the privacy of US persons – minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination.

NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we’re focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.

Note what is missing from all of this. They do not deny hacking into the data center connection lines outside of the US. They do not deny getting access to all that data, especially on non-US persons. As for the claim that they’re protecting the privacy of US persons, previous statements from Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have already made it clear that if they collect info on Americans, they’re going to use this loophole to search them:

“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

So, for all the claims that this kind of information will be “minimized,” it certainly looks like they’ve already admitted they don’t do that. [Continue reading…]

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Congressional inaction prompts states to take up issue of privacy law

The New York Times reports: State legislatures around the country, facing growing public concern about the collection and trade of personal data, have rushed to propose a series of privacy laws, from limiting how schools can collect student data to deciding whether the police need a warrant to track cellphone locations.

Over two dozen privacy laws have passed this year in more than 10 states, in places as different as Oklahoma and California. Many lawmakers say that news reports of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency have led to more support for the bills among constituents. And in some cases, the state lawmakers say, they have felt compelled to act because of the stalemate in Washington on legislation to strengthen privacy laws.

“Congress is obviously not interested in updating those things or protecting privacy,” said Jonathan Stickland, a Republican state representative in Texas. “If they’re not going to do it, states have to do it.”

For Internet companies, the patchwork of rules across the country means keeping a close eye on evolving laws to avoid overstepping. Many companies have an internal team to deal with state legislation. And the flurry of legislation has led some companies, particularly technology companies, to exert their lobbying muscles — with some success — when proposed measures stand to harm their bottom lines.

“It can be counterproductive to have multiple states addressing the same issue, especially with online privacy, which can be national or an international issue,” said Michael D. Hintze, chief privacy counsel at Microsoft, who added that at times it can create “burdensome compliance.” For companies, it helps that state measures are limited in their scope by a federal law that prevents states from interfering with interstate commerce.

This year, Texas passed a bill introduced by Mr. Stickland that requires warrants for email searches, while Oklahoma enacted a law meant to protect the privacy of student data. At least three states proposed measures to regulate who inherits digital data, including Facebook passwords, when a user dies. [Continue reading…]

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Chemical arms inspectors say Syria has destroyed all declared sites

The New York Times reports: The international chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday that Syria had met an important deadline for the “functional destruction” of all the chemical weapons production and mixing facilities it declared to inspectors, rendering them inoperable, under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States.

While some experts depicted the announcement as a milestone, the measures left President Bashar al-Assad in control of a declared 1,290 tons of chemical weapons that are supposed to be destroyed by mid-2014, and an array of conventional weapons used in the country’s bloody civil war, in which over 100,000 people have died.

“The Assad regime continues to use artillery, air power and siege tactics against civilians, with thousands killed every month,” the British Foreign Office said in a statement. While the destruction of facilities is “an important first milestone, it brings no relief to the Syrian people.” [Continue reading…]

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Rogue intelligence agency: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. government puts hacktivism on trial

Aarti Shahani reports: With online relationships, it’s complicated.

The billionaire founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, is bankrolling a new media company with reporters who have used WikiLeaks to break giant stories.

But the eBay-owned subsidiary PayPal is working with the Justice Department to prosecute a handful of WikiLeaks supporters. The defendants could serve decades in prison, and their convictions could decide if “hacktivism” is free speech or a felony offense.

On Oct. 31, 14 defendants are scheduled to walk into a federal court in San Jose, Calif. They are known as the PayPal 14, and prosecutors will ask them to plead guilty to attacking PayPal, the online payment service based in that city.

In December 2010, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and major banks became targets of a spate of cyberattacks, but not by criminals who wanted to steal credit card numbers.

When the companies stopped processing online donations for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, supporters — some associated with the hacker group Anonymous — responded with a novel form of protest.

In the case of PayPal, they sent thousands of packets of data to the company’s servers at such a speed, its system nearly crashed.

“It was serious,” said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar, who recalled that deflecting the traffic felt like a chess game.

PayPal estimates the attacks cost $3.5 million in technology upgrades. The company gave prosecutors a list of the top 1,000 attackers. From that list, the Department of Justice indicted a handful as part of its ongoing crackdown against Anonymous.

The DOJ cannot comment on pending cases but relies on prosecution guidelines that consider how likely a person is to repeat an alleged offense. Attorney Peter Leeming, who represents one of the defendants, says the selection “seemed arbitrary to me.”

Leeming, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., has represented political protesters for decades and is developing a boutique practice around hacktivism, or online attacks that are politically or socially motivated and not driven by financial gain.

“They’re a relatively new creature,” he said. “Is demonstrating and shutting down a street any different from shutting down a line of commerce on the Internet?” [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s once ousted General Tohamy is now more powerful than ever

The New York Times reports: A year after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the man responsible for rooting out government corruption, Gen. Mohamed Farid el-Tohamy, faced a very public barrage of allegations that he had deliberately covered up years of cronyism and self-dealing.

President Mohamed Morsi promptly fired the general, prosecutors opened an investigation, the news filled the papers and his career appeared to end in disgrace.

But now the general is back, and more powerful than ever. His protégé and friend, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, ousted Mr. Morsi about four months ago, and virtually the first move by the new government was to rehabilitate General Tohamy and place him in charge of the general intelligence service, one of the most powerful positions in Egypt.

Western diplomats and Egyptians close to the government say General Tohamy has emerged as the leading advocate of the lethal crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a drive to eviscerate the movement.

Any public trace of the corruption charges — leveled by one of the general’s own investigators — has disappeared.

“What happened to the prosecutors’ claim of evidence of his corruption and obstruction of justice?” asked Hossam Bahgat, one of the few Egyptian human rights advocates willing to publicly criticize General Tohamy. “Why was he ousted in that humiliating fashion? Why was he brought back from retirement the morning after the military takeover?” he continued. “There is zero public discussion of these very serious questions.” [Continue reading…]

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High-ranking Muslim Brotherhood leader seized in Egypt

The New York Times reports: Egyptian security forces on Wednesday captured Essam el-Erian, one of the last few prominent leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood still at large after a crackdown on the group that began with the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, its ally.

The seizure of Mr. Erian, a senior leader in the Brotherhood’s political arm and an adviser to the president, appears to complete the incarceration of the organization’s top leaders less than 18 months after they stood on the brink of consolidating power over the presidency and Parliament. He was among the most visible and outspoken leaders of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist movement, and his arrest caps a career that has traced the group’s evolution through years of repression, internal reforms, electoral victories and political failure.

The charges against Mr. Erian were not immediately clear, although many of his fellow Brotherhood leaders have been arrested on allegations of incitement to violence. [Continue reading…]

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Syria fires official who tried to broker peace

The New York Times reports: The Syrian government on Tuesday fired a deputy prime minister who has lately been its most outspoken voice in favor of reform and who recently held meetings with American and Russian officials about peace talks that world leaders are trying to arrange to end Syria’s civil war.

The official, Qadri Jamil, was dismissed for spending too much time outside Syria, neglecting his duties and holding meetings “without coordinating with the government,” state television said. Mr. Jamil was fired shortly after he told the Russian news media that he had met with United States officials. Meetings between Syrian and American officials have been rare since the Syrian uprising began in 2011.

A State Department spokeswoman confirmed on Tuesday that the United States ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, met with Mr. Jamil on Saturday in Geneva, calling the encounter one in “a long list” of meetings with people directly or indirectly connected to the Syrian government to discuss the potential peace talks.

Mr. Jamil, a Soviet-educated economist, was one of two members of tolerated opposition parties appointed to the government last year in a move billed as broadening its base. In an interview last month in Damascus, the Syrian capital, he blamed corrupt people on both sides for prolonging the war, and he said that despite his post, he was part of the “patriotic opposition,” which has not supported the armed uprising.

Behind the scenes, American and Russian officials have been meeting with Syrians inside and outside government to set up the planned talks. But there is little sign of movement, with the main exile opposition group demanding the departure of President Bashar al-Assad as a precondition and Mr. Assad saying he will not talk with those bearing arms against him. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: International powers are unlikely to meet their goal of convening peace talks on Syria in Geneva next month as differences emerge between Washington and Moscow over opposition representation, Arab and Western officials said.

Failure of the main Syrian National Coalition to take a clear stance over the talks, which aim to find a political solution to Syria’s 2-1/2 year civil war, are also expected to contribute to a delay of up to one month, the officials told Reuters.

“A clearer picture will emerge when the United States and Russia meet next week, but all indications show that the November 23 goal will be difficult to meet,” said one of the officials involved in preparing for the talks.

U.S., Russian and U.N envoys are due to meet in Geneva next Tuesday as part of the preparation for the long-delayed peace conference, which was first proposed back in May.

A main point of contention, the official said, is the role of the Western-backed opposition coalition – an issue which has flared up since a meeting in London last week of Western and Gulf Arab countries opposed to Assad.

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